Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (15 page)

He was a short, thick, fair-haired, blue-eyed man, now about fifty, who swam daily in the coldest weather, and was one of the hardiest and swiftest of wilderness travellers—‘built upon the Egyptian model’, as a contemporary wrote of him, ‘or like one of those short square massy pillars one sees in old country churches’. He had run the whole gamut of the Canadian experience. He had gone for days without food sometimes, and at other times had gorged himself with a true trapper’s gusto—with eleven others, he once recorded with satisfaction, he had eaten three ducks and twenty-two geese at a single session. He knew all about drunken Indians, gloomy Hebrideans, mutinous
voyageurs
. He had swum icy rivers, waded through swamps, sledged or snow-shoed for weeks at a time, and had explored for himself much of the immense new territory recently opened up in the far west. He went around the world once, and had the journey recorded by a ghost-writer in two self-conscious volumes.

Simpson was a lusty fellow, like many another Company man. He father several children by half-breed women, but in 1830 he had pensioned off his last ‘bit of brown’ and married a cousin, Frances Simpson, aged 18, whom he immediately took by canoe from Montreal to Hudson Bay, starting each morning before dawn, often travelling till well after dark, frequently soaked to the skin in weather which was almost freezing, sleeping on rocks, sand or damp earth, and attended only by gentlemen ‘not exactly calculated’, as poor Frances recorded in her diary, ‘to shine in polished Society’.
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This alarming little man was the local dictator of the Company, maintaining from his agreeable house at Lachine an iron grip upon all its affairs. He was a disciplinarian of the Scottish school, regarding a man’s private and public life, his personal and his professional character, as integrates of a whole, and thus subject equally to the supervision of his employer. When he first went to Canada he was described as ‘one of the most pleasant little men I ever met with’, but over the years his image changed. Now he was ‘the crafty fox Sir George’, ‘an intriguing courtier’, master of ‘stratagems in bows and smiles’, a despot and a martinet. He kept an almost inquisitorial
record of the Company’s chief employees, meticulously analysed in a pocket notebook. Its judgements were stringent. ‘Manages Indians and Servants very well … but is rather hippish and fanciful in regard to ailments.’ ‘Lavish of his own means, extravagant and irregular in business, and his honesty is very questionable.’ ‘A sly, sneaking, plausible fellow who lies habitually, full of low cunning, suspicion and intrigue.’ ‘Would be a Radical in any Country under any Government and under any circumstances.’

By 1845 he had achieved complete mastery in Canada, and he had turned the annual council meetings at York Factory or Norway House into mere formalities of assent. ‘You are dependent’, wrote one Company officer, ‘upon the goodwill and caprice of one man … it is his foible to exact not only strict obedience, but deference to the point of humility.’ Another disgruntled colleague, recently exiled to an unpromising outpost called Chimo in Ungava, went further still: ‘In no colony subject to the British Crown is there to be found an authority so despotic as is at this day exercised in the mercantile colony of Rupert’s Land; an authority combining the despotism of military rule with the strict surveillance and parsimony of the avaricious trader. From Labrador to Nootka Sound the unchecked, uncontrolled will of a single individual gives law to the land.’

This was the remarkable man, shrewd, bland, rich, tough, cynical, whose personality dominated those wastelands of the west, and whose presence brought such pageantry to Norway House—where, as the same bitter victim expressed it, ‘the sham Council is held, and everything connected with the business of the interior arranged’.

Commercially the Company, after a long lean period when beaver hats went out of fashion, had flourished since the amalgamation with the Nor-Westers. This was not, like the East India Company, a mere front or shadow of a business concern. This was still a working company, unimpeded by Government interference, which possessed capital stock and paid dividends. It was a profit-sharing enterprise: two-fifths of its profits, split into eighty-five shares, were paid to its
own officials in the field The rest went to some 200 shareholders or ‘proprietors’, and they were paid dividends that never, during Simpson’s ascendancy, fell below 10 per cent, and sometimes rose as high as 25 per cent.

Technically the headquarters of the Company was Hudson’s Bay House, in Fenchurch Street in the City of London, but by 1848 the Northern Department, which covered most of the uncultivated Canadian west, was the dominant force. The Company was primarily a collection and distribution agency. It collected furs, it distributed manufactured goods like blankets, ironwork, firearms and hard liquor.
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The whole of the north-west was like a great watershed for its trade, and down multitudinous rivers and inlets, over thousands of portages, the annual brigades of York boats carried their cargoes of fur to the collection point at York Factory on the Bay. This was a township in itself, gathered around the big clap-board building of the Factory, with its huge flagpole of Norway pine, its belfry tower and its palisaded compound. Here were the warehouses, the repair shops, the coopers’ yards, living quarters for officials and servants, boatyards, food stores. Here the accountancy of the trade was done, and here the Company ships, each year when the ice broke, collected their cargoes and discharged their trade goods. In summer, when the brigades came down the Hayes River from the interior, the foreshore at York blazed with hundreds of camp fires, and the place was boisterous with drink and fisticuffs. In winter, when the ice came over the Bay, the woods behind were muffled in snow, and the opaque winter light of the north fell like a veil over the landscape, then the Great House was shuttered and barricaded, and the Company officials shut themselves in with oil-lamps and beaver rug? to await the spring.

All over the hinterland, west and south, isolated trading posts represented both the acumen and the authority of the Honourable Company. In the wildest and remotest parts of Canada, in the bitterest weeks of winter, one would find the Company store with its
flag flying, its stock of simple goods, its half-breed storekeeper or even perhaps its unexcitable Scot with his Bible, his Shakespeare and his
Ivanhoe.
In the larger posts Chief Factors or Chief Traders presided, and everywhere the hierarchy was strict. Chief Traders deferred to Chief Factors. Juniors were respectful to seniors. Promotion was by ability, and generally went to Scots of dogged resolution and craft, Englishmen being too carefree, Frenchmen too foreign. Accountancy was strict. Storekeeping was thorough. It was an organization solid, experienced and stubborn.

Yet it inspired among its employees a truly romantic sense of loyalty. Son followed father into its service, and whole communities of northern Scotland thought of themselves as Company folk. Men and women passed their entire lives within its orbit. Jessy Ross, for example, whose father sat at Sir George’s right hand at the Council table, was born at York Factory, married a Company man, spent most of her life in Company trading posts, and was to die at Norway House. Simpson himself was followed into the Company’s employ by two illegitimate sons and three cousins, and over on the Pacific coast ‘Big John’ McLoughlin, the celebrated Chief Factor of Vancouver, had among his underlings three sons and a son-in-law.

For there was to life in the Company’s service a northern beauty that captured the imagination of the most unlikely participants. This was a wild tremendous country, like a vaster Scotland perhaps, where the emptiness had a desert allure. The light was haunting and the air electric, and even the terrible cold had its own compensations. Hudson’s Bay House at Lachine, looking out upon all the bustle of its wharves and warehouses upon the Lachine Canal, sometimes blazed with winter festival, when the Governor gave one of his famous parties, and the traders and their wives arrived merrily by sledge in beaver hats and poke bonnets, when the newest timorous arrival from Britain was jollied along with hot punch and badinage, and the Company’s current crop of children was entertained by old Sir George at his most disarming:

There was excitement of a different kind to the loneliness of the trading posts, buried in their woods beside their creeks. The isolation, of course, could be fearfully depressing: no neighbours but Indians and crude
voyageurs
, nothing to read but Scott and Holy Writ, no visitors but the odd taciturn trapper, the dour inspecting official, or the fur brigades when they swept by once a year. The insects were terrible, too: blackflies, buffalo gnats, deerflies, moose-flies, klegs, no see-ums, creepin’ fire and ubiquitous, unspeakable mosquitoes.
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But there were lovely spring flowers to see, low on the ground when the snow cleared, and bears, beavers and foxes to watch, and through the aromatic forests the creeks ran with a wonderful blue-green sheen, gleaming through the undergrowth as though the whole land were resting upon a sheet of coloured glass. In the older stations, too, Rupert House, Cumberland House, Norway House, York Factory, there survived some of the antique splendour of the Honourable Company, which could still fire the pride of Company men,
and gave to their life’s adventure an extra dimension of dignity. At the mouth of the Churchill River, for instance, on the Bay itself, there stood on a low protruding spit the ramparts of Prince of Wales Fort, founded in 1732, captured by the French in 1782, restored to the British after the wars, and still one of the grandest works of masonry in North America.

It was a great square structure of dressed granite, with curtain walling and loopholes for 42 guns. Inside was a yard, with living quarters and lookouts. Outside one could see, beautifully carved above its main gate, the graffiti of the craftsmen who had come to this end of the world to build it long before, with the masonic
symbols of their craft. It was not in itself a very beautiful building, but its evocations were thrilling. It spoke still of old adventures, wars and profits, the beginnings of expeditions, the end of long voyages, and often the Company men from the new post up-river would clamber over its walls and look out across the bay from its ramparts. In the spring it could be lovely up there, but in the winter it was terrific. Then one could walk across the frozen ice to the fortress, and to the north there was nothing but ice, congealed in its last waves of autumn, with the grey clouds of the arctic above it, and a mystic northern radiance. Ravens, ptarmigans and snow-geese flew across the muskeg behind. Occasionally a wolf howled. Sometimes one saw a polar bear, far out on the ice, or the motionless forms of seals: and sometimes from behind the headland a team of Eskimo hunters would slide out with their dogs and sledges, whips lashing, ice-crystals flying, and their voices echoed across the ice as they grew small in the distance, and hung upon the silence behind them.

This was empire-building, but of a shallow and infertile kind. It was, in the words of one British merchant, the ‘patient, thrifty, dexterous assiduity of private and untrammelled enterprise’. It is true that the presence of the Company prevented the horrible Indian wars that occurred on the American side of the frontier, and under its auspices something was done to improve the social standards of the tribes: it was at Norway House that the Reverend James Evans, a Wesleyan missionary, first devised an alphabet for the Cree language, printing parts of the Bible on birch bark with ink made of fish oil and soot, and type cut from tea-chests.
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But patriotism played a secondary part in it, the elevation of the natives was only incidentally considered, and the flag that flew so bravely across Canada bore always the qualifying characters H.B.C. The Adventurers dabbled in agriculture, but only as a means of self-benefit—one function of their
subsidiary the Puget Sound Agricultural Company was to raise cereals for the Russian colonists in Alaska.
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The Company did not want to see the west settled or developed It would be bad for the fur trade. It would pervert the local Indians, or lead to wars against them. Doubtless it would in time force the Company out of its monopoly—‘where the axe of the settler rang’, it was said, ‘there the trapper must certainly disappear’. The Scotsmen who set the tone of the Company, and thus of the British presence in western Canada, were not the colonizing type: the senior men were traders
par
excellence
, and the rank-and-file were mostly simple Scotsmen, from the dispossessed sheepfolds or the austere northern isles, with little gift for arable forming and a fragile sense of domesticity—‘close, prudent, quiet people’, as an unsympathetic observer wrote of them, ‘strictly faithful to their employers and sordidly avaricious’. The Company did not publicize the existence of good agricultural land in its domains. The Pacific coast, its spokesmen maintained, was quite unfit for colonization, while the terrible frosts, the uncontrollable floods and the periodic plagues of grass-hoppers obviously made the great plains of Manitoba and Saskatchewan perfectly useless too.

By the 1840s, nevertheless, there was pressure from eastern Canada to open up the west for colonization. To the south the Americans were pursuing their own manifest destiny boldly across the prairies, and the eastern Canadians wanted the same freedom to expand—besides, they were afraid that if they did not move into that tempting vacuum, the Americans would. Since 1811 there had in feet been one isolated European colony in the heart of the Canadian west. It stood at the confluence of the Red River and the Assiniboine, two of the chief thoroughfares of central Canada. There an idealistic young peer, Lord Selkirk, had planted a colony of Scotsmen and Irishmen, on a land grant of 116,000 square miles allowed him by the Company—of which, as it happened, he was a substantial stockholder.
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Their progress had been fitful. They were inept settlers
 
anyway, and they had faced the hostility not only of the Nor’-Westers, but worse still of the Metis, the half-caste hunters and
voyageurs
of the area, than whom no class of person could be less in rapport with Gaelic-speaking Presbyterian pastoralists. The Metis depended, like the traders, upon the wilderness of Canada. They roamed the prairie in search of buffalo and the creeks in pursuit of beaver, and they felt the presence of the settlers, with their crudely ploughed fields and their council meetings, to be a threat to their entire manner of life. In 1816 they had killed twenty-one of the settlers, and though by 1845 the settlers lived more securely under Company administration, and had established a picturesque rural community along the river, still they were like grit in the prairie machine—inorganic deposits in that country of hunters, toughs and nomads.