Canada: the Empire of the North

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

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[Illustration: GENERAL HALDIMAND]

General Haldimand, a Swiss who has served in the Seven Years' War,
succeeds Carleton as governor in 1778. The times are troublous. There
is still a party in favor of Congress. The great unrest, which ends in
the French Revolution, disturbs habitants' life. Then that provision
of the Quebec Act, by which legislative councilors were to be nominated
by the crown, works badly. Councilors, judges, crown attorneys, even
bailiffs are appointed by the colonial office of London, and find it
more to their interests to stay currying favor in London than to attend
to their duties in Canada. The country is cursed by the evil of absent
officeholders, who draw salaries and appoint incompetent deputies to do
the work. As for the social unrest that fills the air, Haldimand claps
the malcontents in jail till the storm blows over; but the tricks of
speculators, who have flocked to Canada, give trouble of another sort.
Naturally the ring of English speculators, rather than the impoverished
French, became ascendant in foreign trade, and during the American war
the ring got such complete control of the wheat supply that bread
jumped to famine price. Just as he had dealt with the malcontents
soldier fashion, so Haldimand now had a law passed forbidding tricks
with the price of wheat. Like Carleton, {312} Haldimand too came down
hard on the land-jobbers, who tried to jockey poor French peasants out
of their farms for bailiff's fees. It may be guessed that Haldimand
was not a popular governor with the English clique. Nevertheless, he
kept sumptuous bachelor quarters at his mansion near Montmorency Falls,
was a prime favorite with the poor and with the soldiers, and sometimes
deigned to take lessons in pickle making and home keeping from the
grand dames of Quebec. In 1786 Carleton comes back as Lord Dorchester.

Congress had promised to protect the property of those Royalists who
had fought on the losing side in the American Revolution, but for
reasons beyond the control of Congress, that promise could not be
carried out. It was not Congress but the local governments of each
individual state that controlled property rights. In vain Congress
recommended the States Governments to restore the property confiscated
from the Royalists. The States Governments were in a condition of
chaos, packed by jobbers and land-grabbers and the riffraff that always
infest the beginnings of a nation. Instead of protecting the
Royalists, the States Governments passed laws confiscating more
property and depriving those who had fought for England of even holding
office. It was easy for the tricksters who had got possession of the
loyalists' lands to create a social ostracism that endangered the very
lives of the beaten Royalists, and there set towards Canada the great
emigration of the United Empire Loyalists. To Nova Scotia, to New
Brunswick, to Prince Edward Island, to Ontario, they came from Virginia
and Pennsylvania and New York and Massachusetts and Vermont, in
thousands upon thousands. The story of their sufferings and far
wanderings has never been told and probably never will, for there is
little official record of it; but it can be likened only to the
expulsion of the Acadians multiplied a hundredfold. To the Maritime
Provinces alone came more than thirty thousand people. To the eastern
townships of Quebec, to the regions of Kingston and Niagara and Toronto
in Ontario came some twenty thousand more. It needs no {313} trick of
fancy to call up the scene, and one marvels that neither poet nor
novelist has yet made use of it. Here were fine old Royalist officers
of New York reduced from opulence to penury, from wealth to such
absolute destitution they had neither clothing nor food, nor money to
pay ship's passage away, now crowded with their families, and such
wrecks of household goods as had escaped raid and fire, on some cheap
government transport or fishing schooner bound from New York Harbor to
Halifax or Fundy Bay. Of the thirteen thousand people bound for
Halifax there can scarcely be a family that has not lost brothers or
sons in the war. Family plate, old laces, heirlooms, even the father's
sword in some cases, have long ago been pawned for food. If one finds,
as one does find all through Nova Scotia, fine old mahogany and walnut
furniture brought across by the Loyalists, it is only because walnut
and mahogany were not valued at the time of the Revolution as they are
to-day. And instead of welcome at Halifax, the refugees met with
absolute consternation! What is a town of five thousand people to do
with so many hungry visitants? They are quartered about in churches,
in barracks, in halls knocked up, till they can be sent to farms. And
these are not common immigrants coming fresh from toil in the fields of
Europe; they are gently nurtured men and women, representing the
aristocracy and wealth and conservatism of New York. This explains why
one finds among the prominent families of Nova Scotia the same names as
among the most prominent families of Massachusetts and New York. To
the officers and heads of families the English government granted from
two thousand to five thousand acres each, and to sons and daughters of
Loyalists two hundred acres each, besides 3,000,000 pounds in cash, as
necessity for it arose.

On the north side of Fundy Bay hardships were even greater, for the
Loyalists landed from their ships on the homeless shores of the
wildwood wilderness. Rude log cabins of thatch roof and plaster walls
were knocked up, and there began round the log cabin that tiny clearing
which was to expand into the farm. The coming of the Loyalists really
peopled both New Brunswick {314} and Prince Edward Island: the former
becoming a separate province in 1784, named after the ruling house of
England; the latter named after the Duke of Kent, who was in command of
the garrison at Charlottetown.

More strenuous still was the migration of the United Empire Loyalists
from the south. Rich old planters of Virginia and Maryland, who had
had their colored servants by the score, now came with their families
in rude tented wagons, fine chippendales jumbled with heavy mahogany
furnishings, up the old Cumberland army road to the Ohio, and across
from the Ohio to the southern townships of Quebec, to the backwoods of
Niagara and Kingston and Toronto and modern Hamilton, and west as far
as what is now known as London. I have heard descendants of these old
southern Loyalists tell how hopelessly helpless were these planters'
families, used to hundreds of negro servants and now bereft of help in
a backwoods wilderness. It took but a year or so to wear out the fine
laces and pompous ruffles of their aristocratic clothing, and men and
women alike were reduced to the backwoods costume of coon cap, homespun
garments, and Indian moccasins. Often one could witness such anomalies
in their log cabins as gilt mirrors and spindly glass cabinets ranged
in the same apartment as stove and cooking utensils. If the health of
the father failed or the war had left him crippled, there was nothing
for it but for the mother to take the helm; and many a Canadian can
trace lineage back to a United Empire Loyalist woman who planted the
first crop by hand with a hoe and reaped the first crop by hand with a
sickle. Sometimes the jovial habits of the planter life came with the
Loyalists to Canada, and winter witnessed a furbishing up of old
flounces and laces to celebrate all-night dance in log houses where
partitions were carpets and tapestries hung up as walls. Sometimes,
too,--at least I have heard descendants of the eastern township people
tell the story,--the jovial habits kept the father tippling and card
playing at the village inn while the lonely mother kept watch and ward
in the cabin of the snow-padded forests. Of necessity the Loyalists
banded together to {315} help one another. There were "sugarings off"
in the maple woods every spring for the year's supply of homemade
sugar,--glorious nights and days in the spring forests with the sap
trickling from the trees to the scooped-out troughs; with the grown-ups
working over the huge kettle where the molasses was being boiled to
sugar; with the young of heart, big and little, gathering round the
huge bonfires at night in the woods for the sport of a taffy pull, with
molasses dripping on sticks and huge wooden spoons taken from the pot.
There were threshings when the neighbors gathered together to help one
another beat out their grain from the straw with a flail. There were
"harvest homes" and "quilting bees" and "loggings" and "barn raisings."
Clothes were homemade. Sugar was homemade. Soap was homemade. And
for years and years the only tea known was made from steeping dry
leaves gathered in the woods; the only coffee made from burnt peas
ground up. Such were the United Empire Loyalists, whose lives some
unheralded poet will yet sing,--not an unfit stock for a nation's
empire builders.

At the same time that the Loyalists came to Canada, came Joseph
Brant,--Thayendanegea, the Mohawk,--with the remnant of his tribe, who
had fought for the English. To them the government granted some
700,000 acres in Ontario.

[Illustration: JOSEPH BRANT]

{316} It is not surprising that the United Empire Loyalists objected to
living under the French laws of the Quebec Act. They had fought for
England against Congress, but they wanted representative government,
and the Constitutional Act was passed in 1791 dividing the country into
Upper and Lower Canada, each to have its own parliament consisting of a
governor, a legislative council appointed by the crown, and an assembly
elected by the people. There was to be no religious test. Naturally
old French laws would prevail in Quebec, English laws in Ontario or
Upper Canada. By this act, too, land known as the Clergy Reserves was
set apart for the Protestant Church. The first parliament in Quebec
met in the bishop's palace in December of 1792; the first parliament of
Ontario in Newark or Niagara in September of the same year, the most of
the newly elected members coming by canoe and dugout, and, as the
Indian summer of that autumn proved hot, holding many of the sessions
in shirt sleeves out under the trees, Lieutenant Governor Simcoe
reporting that the electors seem to have favored "men of the lower
order, who kept but one table and ate with their servants." The
earliest sessions of the Ontario House were marked by acts to remove
the capital from the boundary across to Toronto, and to legalize
marriages by Protestant clergymen other than of the English church. It
is amusing to read how Governor Simcoe regarded the marriage bill as an
opening of the flood gates to {317} republicanism; but for all their
shirt sleeves, the legislators enjoyed themselves and danced till
morning in Navy Hall, the Governor's residence, "Mad Tom Talbot," the
Governor's aid-de-camp, losing his heart to the fine eyes of Brant's
Indian niece, daughter of Sir William Johnson of the old Lake George
battle.

[Illustration: LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR SIMCOE]

Down at Quebec things were managed with more pomp, and no social event
was complete without the presence of the Duke of Kent, military
commandant, now living in Haldimand's old house at Montmorency. Nova
Scotia had held parliaments since 1758, when Halifax elected her first
members.

Besides the United Empire Loyalists, other settlers were coming to
Canada. The Earl of Selkirk, a patriotic young Scotch nobleman, had
arranged for the removal of evicted Highlanders to Prince Edward Island
in 1803 and to Baldoon on Lake St. Clair. Then "Mad Tom Talbot,"
Governor Simcoe's aid, descendant of the Talbots of Castle Malahide and
boon comrade of the young soldier who became the Duke of Wellington,
becomes so enamored of wilderness life that he gives up his career in
Europe, gains grant of lands between London and Port Dover, and lays
foundations of settlements in western Ontario, spite of the fact he
remains a bachelor. The man who had danced at royalty's balls and
drunk deep of pleasure at the beck of princes now lived in a log house
of three rooms, laughed at difficulties, "baked his own bread, milked
his own cows, made his own butter, washed his own clothes, ironed his
own linen," and taught colonists who bought his lands "how to do
without the rotten refuse of Manchester warehouses,"--the term he
applied to the broadcloth of the newcomer.

Under the French regime, Canada had consisted of a string of fur posts
isolated in a wilderness. It will be noticed that it now consisted of
five distinct provinces of nation builders.

{318}

CHAPTER XIV

FROM 1812 TO 1820

Hearne surrenders--Cook on the west coast--Vancouver on
Pacific--Discovery of Mackenzie River--Across to the Pacific--A smash
in bad rapids--Down Fraser River--Cause of war--The Chesapeake
outrage--War declared--Hull surrenders at Detroit--The fight round
Niagara--Soldiers exchange jokes across gorge--The traverse at
Queenston--The surrender at Queenston--1813 A dark year--Raid on
Ogdensburg--Attack on Toronto--Toronto burned--Vincent's soldiers at
Burlington Bay--Ill hap of all the generals--Laura Secord's
heroism--Campaign in the west--Moraviantown Disaster--Chrysler's
farm--De Salaberry's buglers--The charge at Chippewa--Final action at
Lundy's Lane--Great heroism on both sides--Assault at Fort Erie--End of
futile war

While Canada waged war for her national existence against her border
neighbors to the south, as in the days of the bushrovers' raids of old,
afar in the west, in the burnt-wood, iron-rock region of Lake Superior,
on the lonely wind-swept prairies, at the foothills where each night's
sunset etched the long shadows of the mountain peaks in somber replica
across the plains, in the forested solitude of the tumultuous Rockies
was the ragged vanguard of empire blazing a path through the
wilderness, voyageur and burnt-wood runner, trapper, and explorer,
pushing across the hinterlands of earth's ends from prairie to
mountains, and mountains to sea.

It was but as a side clap of the great American Revolution that the
last French cannon were pointed against the English forts on Hudson
Bay. When France sided with the American colonies a fleet of French
frigates was dispatched under the great Admiral La Perouse against the
fur posts of the English Company. One sleepy August afternoon in 1782,
when Samuel Hearne, governor of Fort Churchill, was sorting furs in the
courtyard, gates wide open, cannon unloaded, guards dispersed, the fort
was electrified by the sudden apparition of three men-of-war, sails
full blown, sides bristling with cannon, plowing over the waves
straight for the harbor gate. French colors fluttered from the
masthead. Sails rattled down. Anchors were cast, and in a few minutes
small boats were out sounding the channel for position to attack the
fort. Hearne had barely forty men, and the most of them were
decrepits, unfit for the hunting field. As sunset merged into the long
white light of northern midnight, four hundred French mariners landed
on the sands outside Churchill. {319} Hearne had no alternative. He
surrendered without a blow. The fort was looted of furs, the Indians
driven out, and a futile attempt made to blow up the massive walls.
Hearne and the other officers were carried off captives. Matonabbee,
the famous Indian guide, came back from the hunt to find the wooden
structures of Churchill in flame. He had thought the English were
invulnerable, and his pagan pride could not brook the shame of such
ignominious defeat. Withdrawing outside the shattered walls,
Matonabbee blew his brains out. A few days later Port Nelson, to the
south, had suffered like fate. The English officers were released by
La Perouse on reaching Europe. As for the fur company servants, they
waited only till the French sails had disappeared over the sea. Then
they came from hiding and rebuilt the burnt forts. Such was the last
act in the great drama of contest between France and England for
supremacy in the north.

For two hundred years explorers had been trying to find a northern
passage between Europe and Asia by way of America, from east to west.
Now that Canada has fallen into English hands; now, too, that the
Russian sea-otter hunters are coasting down the west side of America
towards that region which Drake discovered long ago in California,
England suddenly awakens to a passion for discovery of that mythical
Northwest Passage. Instead of seeking from east to west she sought
from west to east, and sent her navigator round the world to search for
opening along the west coast of America. To carry out the exploration
there was selected as commander that young officer, James Cook, who
helped to sound the St. Lawrence for Wolfe, and had since been cruising
the South Seas. On his ships, the _Resolution_ and the _Discovery_,
was a young man whose name was to become a household word in America,
Vancouver, a midshipman.

March of 1778 the _Resolution_ and _Discovery_ come rolling over the
long swell of the sheeny Pacific towards Drake's land of New Albion,
California. Suddenly, one morning, the dim sky line resolved into the
clear-cut edges of high land, but by night such a roaring hurricane had
burst on the ships as drove them {320} far out from land, too far to
see the opening of Juan de Fuca, leading in from Vancouver Island,
though Cook called the cape there "Flattery," because he had hoped for
an opening and been deluded. Clearer weather found Cook abreast a
coast of sheer mountains with snowy summits jagging through the clouds
in tent peaks. A narrow entrance opened into a two-horned cove. Small
boats towed the ships in amid a flotilla of Indian dugouts whose
occupants chanted weird welcome to the echo of the surrounding hills.
Women and children were in the canoes. That signified peace. The
ships were moored to trees, and the white men went ashore in that
harbor to become famous as the rendezvous of Pacific fur traders,
Nootka Sound, on the sea side of Vancouver Island.

[Illustration: CAPTAIN COOK]

Presently the waters were literally swarming with Indian canoes, and in
a few days Cook's crews had received thousands of dollars' worth of
sea-otter skins for such worthless baubles as tin mirrors and brass
rings and bits of red calico. This was the beginning of the fur trade
in sea otter with Americans and English. Some of the naked savages
were observed wearing metal ornaments of European make. Cook did not
think of the Russian fur traders to the north, but easily persuaded
himself these objects had come from the English fur traders of Hudson
Bay, and so inferred there _must_ be a Northeast Passage. By April,
Cook's ships were once more afloat, {321} gliding among the sylvan
channels of countless wooded islands up past Sitka harbor, where the
Russians later built their fort, round westward beneath the towering
opal dome of Mount St. Elias, which Bering had named, to the waters
bordering Alaska; but, as the world knows, though the ships penetrated
up the channels of many roily waters, they found no open passage. Cook
comes down to the Sandwich Islands, New Year of 1779. There the vices
of his white crew arouse the enmity of the pagan savages. In a riot
over the theft of a rowboat, Cook and a few men are surrounded by an
enraged mob. By some mistake the white sailors rowing out from shore
fire on the mob surrounding Cook. Instantly a dagger rips under Cook's
shoulder blade. In another second Cook and his men are literally
hacked to pieces. All night the conch shells of the savages blow their
war challenge through the darkness and the signal fires dance on the
mountains. By dint of persuasion and threats the white men compel the
natives to restore the mangled remains of the commander. Sunday,
February 21, amid a silence as of death over the waters, the body of
the dead explorer is committed to the deep.

[Illustration: FORT CHURCHILL, AS IT WAS IN 1777]

[Illustration: TOTEM POLES, BRITISH COLUMBIA]

The chance discovery of the sea-otter trade by Cook's crew at Nootka
brings hosts of English and American adventurers to the Pacific Coast
of Canada. There is Meares, the English officer from China, who builds
a rabbit hutch of a barracks at Nootka and almost involves England and
Spain in war because the Spaniards, having discovered this region
before Cook, knock the log barracks into kindling wood and forcibly
seize an English trading ship. There is Robert Gray, the Boston
trader, who pushes the prow of his little ship, _Columbia_, up a
spacious harbor south of Juan de Fuca in May of 1792 and discovers
Columbia River, so giving the United States flag prior claim here.
There is George Vancouver, the English commander, sent out by his
government in 1791-1793 to receive Nootka formally back from the
Spaniards of California and to explore every inlet from Vancouver
Island to Alaska. As luck would have it, Vancouver, the Englishman,
and Gray, the American, are both hovering off {322} the mouth of the
Columbia in April of 1792, but a gale drives the ships offshore, though
turgid water plainly indicates the mouth of a great river somewhere
near. Vancouver goes on up north. Gray, the American, comes back, and
so Vancouver misses discovering the one great river that remains
unmapped in America. Up Puget Sound, named after his lieutenant, up
Fuca Straits, round Vancouver Island, past all those inlets like seas
on the mainland of British Columbia, coasts Vancouver, rounding south
again to Nootka in August. In Nootka lie the Spanish frigates from
California, bristling with cannon, the red and yellow flag blowing to
the wind above the palisaded fort. In solemn parade, with Maquinna,
the Nootka chief, clad in a state of nature, as guest of the festive
board, Don Quadra, the Spanish officer, dines and wines Vancouver; but
when it comes to business, that is another matter! Vancouver
understands that Spain is to surrender _all_ sovereignty north of San
Francisco. Don Quadra, with pompous bow, maintains that the
international agreement was to surrender rights only north of Juan de
Fuca, leaving the rest of the northwest coast free to all nations for
trade. Incidentally, it may be mentioned, Don Quadra was right, but
the two commanders agree to send home to their respective governments
for {323} instructions. Meanwhile Robert Gray, the American, comes
rolling into port with news he has discovered Columbia River.
Vancouver is skeptical and chagrined. Having failed to discover the
river, he goes down coast to explore it. It may be added, he sends his
men higher up the river than Gray has gone, and has England's flag of
possession as solemnly planted as though Robert Gray had never entered
Columbia's waters. The next two years Vancouver spends exploring every
nook and inlet from Columbia River to Lynn Canal. Once and for all and
forever he disproves the myth of a Northeast Passage. His work was
negative, but it established English rights where America's claims
ceased and Russia's began, namely between Columbia River and Sitka, or
in what is now known as British Columbia.

[Illustration: CAPTAIN GEORGE VANCOUVER]

[Illustration: NOOTKA SOUND (From an engraving in Vancouver's journal)]

As the beaver had lured French bushrovers from the St. Lawrence to the
Rockies, so the sea otter led the way to the exploration of the Pacific
Coast. Artist's brush and novelist's pen have drawn all the romance
and the glamour and the adventure of the beaver hunter's life, but the
sea-otter hunter's life is {324} almost an untold tale. Pacific Coast
Indians were employed by the white traders for this wildest of hunting.
The sea otter is like neither otter nor beaver, though possessing
habits akin to both. In size, when full-grown, it is about the length
of a man. Its pelt has the ebony shimmer of seal tipped with silver.
Cradled on the waves, sleeping on their backs in the sea, playful as
kittens, the sea otters only come ashore when driven by fierce gales;
but they must come above to breathe, for the wave wash of storm would
smother them. Their favorite sleeping grounds used to be the kelp beds
of the Alaskan Islands. Storm or calm, to the kelp beds rode the
Indian hunters in their boats of oiled skin light as paper. If heavy
surf ran, concealing sight and sound, the hunters stood along shore
shouting through the surf and waiting for the wave wash to carry in the
dead body; if the sea were calm, the hunters circled in bands of twenty
or thirty, spearing the sea otter as it came up to breathe; but the
best hunting was when hurricane gales churned sea and air to spray.
Then the sea otter came to the kelp beds in herds, and through the
storm over the wave-dashed reefs, like very spirits of the storm
incarnate, rushed the hunters, spear in hand. It is not surprising
that the sea-otter hunters perished by tens of thousands every year, or
that the sea otter dwindled from a yield of 100,000 a year to a paltry
200 of the present day.

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