CHAPTER XX

1760-1810

“THE COMING OF THE PEDLARS”—A NEW RACE OF WOOD-ROVERS THRONGS TO THE NORTHWEST—BANDITS OF THE WILDS WAR AMONG THEMSELVES—TALES OF BORDER WARFARE, WASSAIL AND GRANDEUR—THE NEW NORTHWEST COMPANY CHALLENGES THE AUTHORITY AND FEUDALISM OF THE HUDSON’S BAY COMPANY

LaPerouse’s raid on Churchill and York was the least of the misfortunes that now beset the English Adventurers. Within a year from the French victory, the English prisoners had been ransomed from France and the dismantled forts were rebuilt. It was a subtler foe that menaced the Hudson’s Bay Company. Down at Abbittibbi, halfway to Quebec—in at Henley House and Martin’s Falls and Osnaburg House on the way from Albany to the modern Manitoba—up the Saskatchewan, where Cocking and Batts and Walker held the forts for trade—between Churchill and Athabasca, where Longmore and Ross had been sent on Hearne’s trail—yes, even at the entrance to the Rockies,where Mr. Howse and the astronomer Turner had found a pass leading from the headwaters of the Saskatchewan, constantly there emerged from the woods, or swept gayly up in light birch canoes, strange hunters, wildwood rovers, free-lances, men with packs on their backs, who knocked nonchalantly at the gates of the English posts for a night’s lodging and were eagerly admitted because it was safer to have a rival trader under your eye than out among the Indians creating bedlam by the free distribution of rum.

“Pedlars,” the English called these newcomers, who overran the sacred territory of the Hudson’s Bay Company as though royal charters were a joke and trading monopolies as extinct as the dodo. It was all very well to talk of the rights of your charter, but what became of your rights if interlopers stole them while you talked about them? And what was the use of sending men to drum up trade and bring Indians down to the bay with their furs, if pedlars caught the Indians halfway down at portage, carrying place and hunting rendezvous, and in spite of the fact that those Indians owed the English for half-a-dozen years’ outfit—rifled away the best of the furs, sometimes by the free distribution of rum, sometimes by such seditious talk as that “the English had no rights in this country anyway and theIndians were fools to become slaves to the Hudson’s Bay Company?”

This was a new kind of challenge to feudalism. Sooner or later it was bound to come. The ultimate umpire of all things in life is—Fact. Was the charter valid that gave this empire of trade to a few Englishmen, or was it buncombe? “The Pedlars” didn’t talk about their rights.They took them.That was to be supreme test of the English Company’s rights. Somebody else took the rights, and there were good reasons why the Hudson’s Bay Company did not care to bring a question of its rights before the courts. When the charter was confirmed by act of Parliament in 1697, it was specified for only seven years. At the end of that period the Company did not seek a renewal. Request for renewal would of itself be acknowledgment of doubt as to the charter. The Company preferred “to have and to hold,” rather than risk adverse decision. They contented themselves with blocking the petitions of rivals for trade privileges on the bay, but the eruption of these wildwood rovers—“The French Canadian Pedlars”—was a contingency against which there seemed to be no official redress.

It remained only for the old Company to gird itself to the fray—a fight with bandits and free-booters and raiders in a region where was law ofneither God nor man. Sales had fallen to a paltry £2,000 a year. Dividends stopped altogether. Value of stock fell from £250 to £50. The Company advertised for men—more men. Agents scoured the Orkneys and the Highlands of Scotland for recruits, each to sign for five years, a bounty of £8 to be paid each man. Five ships a year sailed to the bay. Three hundred “patroons” were yearly sent into the woods, and when their time expired—strange to relate—they did not return to Scotland. What became of them? Letters ceased to come home. Inquiries remained unanswered. The wilderness had absorbed them and their bones lay bleaching on the unsheltered prairie where the arrow of Indian raider inspired by “the Pedlars” had shot them as they traversed the plains. No wonder service with the Hudson’s Bay Company became ill-omened in the Orkneys and the Highlands! In spite of the bounty of £8 a man, their agents were at their wits’ ends for recruits.

When Hendry had gone up the Saskatchewan in 1754, he had seen the houses of French traders. French power fell at Quebec in 1759, and the French wood-rovers scattered to the wilds; but when Cocking went up the Saskatchewan in 1772, what was his amazement to find these French rovers organized under leadership of Scotch merchants from Montreal—Curry,and Frobisher, and McTavish, and Todd, and McGill, and McGillivrays.

Under French rule, fur trade had been regulated by license. Under English rule was no restriction. First to launch out from Montreal with a cargo of goods for trade, was Alexander Henry, senior, in 1760. From the Michilimackinac region and westward, Henry in ten years, from 1765 to 1775, brought back to Montreal such a wealth of furs, that peltry trade became a fever. No capital was needed but the capital of boundless daring. Montreal merchants advanced goods for trade. One went with the canoes as partner and commander. Three thousand dollars worth of goods constituted a load. Frenchmen were engaged as hunters and voyageurs—eight to a canoe, and before the opening of the century, as many as five hundred canoes yearly passed up the Ottawa from Montreal for thePays d’en Haut, west of Lake Superior, ten and twenty canoes in a brigade. In this way, Thomas Curry had gone from Lake Superior to Lake Winnipeg, and Lake Winnipeg up the Saskatchewan, in 1766, as far as the Forks, bribing that renegade Louis Primo, to steal the furs bought by Cocking for the Hudson’s Bay, and to lead the brigade on down to Montreal. One voyage sufficed to yield Curry $50,000 clear, a sum that was considered a fortune in those days,and enabled him to retire. The fur fever became an epidemic, a mania. James Finlay of Montreal, in 1771, pushed up the Saskatchewan beyond the Forks, or what is now Prince Albert. Todd, McGill & Company outfitted Joseph and Benjamin Frobisher for a dash north of the Saskatchewan in 1772-5, where, by the luckiest chance in the world, they met the Chippewyan and Athabasca Indians on their way to Churchill with furs for the Hudson’s Bay Company. The Frobishers struck up friendship with “English Chief”—leader of the Indian brigades—plied the argument of rum night and day, bade the Indians ignore their debts to the English company, offered to outfit them for the next year’s hunt and bagged the entire cargo of furs—such an enormous quantity that they could take down only half the cargo that year and had to leave the other half cached, to the everlasting credit of the Indian’s honesty and discredit of the white man’s. Henceforth, this post was known as Portage de Traite. It led directly from the Saskatchewan to the Athabasca and became a famous meeting place. Portage “of the Stretched Frog” the Indians called it, for the Frobishers had been so keen on the trade that they had taught the Indians how to stretch skins, and the Indians had responded in mischief by tacking a stretched frog skin on the door of the cabin. Pushingyet farther toward Athabasca, the Frobisher brothers built another post norwestward, Isle à la Crosse, on an island where the Indians met for the sport of lacrosse.

Besides the powerful house of McTavish, Frobisher, Todd, McGill and McGillivray, were hosts of lesser traders who literally peddled their goods to the Indians. In 1778, these pedlars pooled their stock and outfitted Peter Pond to go on beyond the Frobisher posts to Athabasca. Here, some miles south of the lake, Pond built his fort. Pond was a Boston man of boundless ambition and energy but utterly unscrupulous. While at Athabasca, he heard from the Indians rumors of the Russian fur traders on the Pacific Coast and he drew that famous map of the interior, which was to be presented to the Empress of Russia. He seems to have been cherishing secret designs of a great fur monopoly.

Fur posts sprang up on the waterways of the West like mushrooms. Rum flowed like water—50,000 gallons a year “the pedlars” brought to the Saskatchewan from Montreal. Disorders were bound to ensue. At Eagle Hills near Battleford, in 1780, the drunken Crees became so obstreperous in their demands for more liquor that the three terrified traders cooped up in their house tried to save themselves by putting laudanum in the liquor. An Indianwas drugged to death. The sobered Crees sulky from their debauch, arose to a man, rammed the doors, stabbed the three whites and seven half-breed traders to death, burnt the fort and sent coureurs running from tribe to tribe across the prairie to conspire for a massacre of all white traders in the country. Down on the Assiniboine at what is now known as Portage la Prairie, where the canoemen portaged across to Lake Manitoba and so to Lake Winnipeg and the Saskatchewan, were three strong trading houses under two men called Brice and Boyer. With them were twenty-three Frenchmen. Three different companies had their rendezvous here. The men were scattered in the three houses and off guard when one night the darkness was made hideous by the piercing war cry of the Assiniboines. Before lights could be put out, the painted warriors had swooped down on two of the houses. The whites were butchered as they dashed out—eleven men in as many seconds. The third house had warning from the shots at the others. Brice and Boyer were together. Promptly, lights were put out, muskets rammed through the parchment windows and chinks of the log walls, and a second relay of loaded weapons made ready. When the Assiniboines attempted to rush the third house, they were met with a solid crash of musketry that moweddown some thirty warriors and gave the assailants pause. With checked ardor, the Indians retreated to the other houses. They could at least starve the white men out, but the white men wisely did not wait. While the Assiniboines rioted, drunk on the booty of rum in the captured cabins, Brice ordered all liquor spilt in his house. Taking what peltries he could, abandoning the rest, Brice led a dash for the river. Darkness favored the fugitive whites. Three only of the retreating men fell under the shower of random arrows—Belleau, Facteau, Lachance. Launching canoes with whispers and muffling their paddles, the white men rowed all night, hid by day, and in three days were safe with the traders at the Forks, or what is now Winnipeg.

Up at Athabasca, Pond, the indomitable, was setting a bad example for lawless work. Wadin was his partner; Le Sieur, his clerk. No greater test of fairness and manhood exists than to box two men in a house ten by ten in the wilderness, with no company but their own year in, year out. Pond was for doing impossibles—or what seemed impossibles at that day. He had sent two traders down Big River (the MacKenzie) as far as Slave Lake. The Indians were furiously hostile. Wadin, the Swiss partner, opposed all risks. Lonely, unstrung and ill-natured, Pond conceived that hatred for hispartner which men, who have been tied too close to an alien nature, know. The men had come to blows. One night the quarrel became so hot, Le Sieur withdrew from the house. He had gone only a few steps when he heard two shots. Rushing back, he found the Swiss weltering in his blood on the floor. “Be off! Never let me see your face again,” shouted the wounded man, catching sight of Pond. Those were his last words. It is a terrible commentary on civilization that the first blood shed in the Athabasca was that of a white man slain by a white man; but the Athabasca was three thousand miles away from punishment and the merry game had only begun. Later, Pond was tried for this crime, but acquitted in Montreal.

Roving Assiniboines had visited the Mandanes of the Missouri, this year. They brought back with them not only stolen horses, but an unknown, unseen horror—the germ of smallpox—which ran like a fiery scourge for three years, from Red River and the Assiniboine to the Rockies, sweeping off two-thirds of the native population. Camp after camp, tribe after tribe, was attacked and utterly destroyed, leaving no monument but a heap of bleaching bones scraped clean by the wolves. Tent leather flapped lonely to the wind, rotting on the tepee poles where Death had spared not a soul of a whole encampment.In vain the maddened Indians made offerings to their gods, slew their children to appease this Death Demon’s wrath, and cast away all their belongings. Warriors mounted their fleetest horses and rode like mad to outrace the Death they fancied was pursuing them. Delirious patients threw themselves into the lakes and rivers to assuage suffering. The epidemic was of terrible virulence. The young and middle-aged fell victims most readily, and many aged parents committed suicide rather than live on, bereft of their children. There was an end to all conspiracy for a great uprising and massacre of the whites. The whites had fled before the scourge as terrified as were the Indians and for three years there was scarcely a fur trader in the country from the Missouri to the Saskatchewan.

During the interval, the merchants of Montreal had put their heads together. Division and internecine warfare in the face of Indian hostility and the Hudson’s Bay traders steady advancement inland, were folly. The Montrealers must unite. The united traders were known as the Northwest Company. The Company had no capital. Montreal partners who were merchants outfitted the canoes with goods. Men experienced in the trade led the brigades westward. The former gave credit for goods, the latter time on the field. The former acted asagents to sell the furs, the latter as wintering partners to barter for the furs with the Indians. To each were assigned equal shares—a share apiece to each partner, or sixteen shares in all, in the first place; later increased to twenty and forty-six and ninety-six shares as the Company absorbed more and more of the free traders. As a first charge against the proceeds were the wages of the voyageurs—£100 a year, five times as much as the Hudson’s Bay Company paid for the same workers. Then the cost of the goods was deducted—$3,000 a canoe—and in the early days ninety canoes a year were sent North. Later, when the Nor’Westers absorbed all opposition, the canoes increased to five hundred. The net returns were then divided into sixteen parts and the profits distributed to the partners. By 1787, shares were valued at £800 each. At first, net returns were as small as £40,000 a year, but this dividend among only sixteen partners gave what was considered a princely income in those days. Later, net returns increased to £120,000 and £200,000, but by this time the number of partners was ninety-six. Often the yearly dividend was £400 a share. As many as 200,000 beaver were sold by the Nor’Westers in a year, and the heaviest buyer of furs at Montreal was John Jacob Astor of New York. Chief among the Eastern agents, were the two Frobisher brothers,Benjamin and Joseph—McGill, Todd, Holmes, and Simon McTavish, the richest merchant of Montreal, nicknamed “the Marquis” for his pompous air of wearing prosperity. Chief among the wintering partners were Peter Pond, the American of Athabasca fame, the McGillivrays, nephews of McTavish; the MacLeods, the Grants, the Camerons, MacIntoshes, Shaws, McDonalds, Finlays, Frasers, and Henry, nephew of the Henry who first went to Michilimackinac.

Not only did the new company forthwith send ninety canoes to the North by way of Lake Superior, but one hundred and twenty men were sent through Lake Ontario and Lake Erie to Detroit, for the fur region between Lake Huron and the Mississippi. It was at this period that the Canadian Government was besieged for a monopoly of trade west of Lake Superior, in return for which the Nor’Westers promised to explore the entire region between the Great Lakes and the Pacific Ocean. When the Government refused to grant the monopoly, the Nor’Westers stopped asking for rights. They preparedto take them.

In Montreal, the Nor’Westers were lords in the ascendant, socially and financially, living with lavish and regal hospitality, keeping one strong hand on their interests in the West, the other hand on thepulse of the government. Some of the partners were members of the Assembly. All were men of public influence, and when a wintering partner retired to live in Montreal, he usually became a member of the governing clique. The Beaver Club with the appropriate motto, “Fortitude in Distress,” was the partners’ social rendezvous, and coveted were the social honors of its exclusive membership. Governors and councillors, military heroes and foreign celebrities counted it an honor to be entertained at the Beaver Club with its lavish table groaning under weight of old wines from Europe and game from thePays d’en Haut. “To discuss the merits of a beaver tail, or moose nose, or bear’s paw, or buffalo hump”—was the way a Nor’West partner invited a guest to dinner at the Beaver Club, and I would not like to testify that the hearty partners did not turn night into day and drink themselves under the mahogany before they finished entertaining a guest. Most lordly of the grandees was, of course, “the Marquis,” Simon McTavish, who built himself a magnificent manor known as “the Haunted House,” on the mountain. He did not live to enjoy it long, for he died in 1804. Indeed, it was a matter of comment how few of the ninety-six partners lived to a good old age in possession of their hard-earned wealth.“No wonder,” sarcastically commented a good bishop, who had been on the field and seen how the wealth was earned, “when the devil sows the seed, he usually looks after the harvest.”

But it was not all plain sailing from the formation of the Company. Pond and Pangman, the two Boston men, who had been in the North when the partnership was arranged, were not satisfied with their shares. Pond was won over to the Nor’Westers, but Pangman joined a smaller company with Gregory, and MacLeod, and Alexander MacKenzie, and Finlay. MacKenzie, who was to become famous as a discoverer, was sent to Isle à la Crosse to intercept furs on the way to Hudson Bay. Ross was sent up to oppose Peter Pond of the Nor’Westers in Athabasca. Bostonnais Pangman went up the Saskatchewan to the Rockies, with headquarters at what is now Edmonton, and the rest of what were known as the Little Company faithfully dogged the Nor’Westers’ footsteps and built a trading house wherever Indians gathered.

Failing to establish a monopoly by law, the Nor’Westers set themselves to do it without law. The Little Company must be exterminated. Because Alexander MacKenzie later became one of the Nor’Westers, the details have never been given to the public, but at La Crosse where he waited to barterfor the furs coming from the North to the Hudson’s Bay, the Nor’Westers camped on his trail. The crisis in rivalry was to meet the approaching Indian brigades. The trader that met them first, usually got the furs. Spies were sent in all directions to watch for the Indians, and spies dogged the steps of spies. It was no unusual thing for one side to find the Indians first and for a rival spy to steal the victory by bludgeoning the discoverer into unconsciousness or treating him to a drink of drugged whiskey. In the scuffle and maneuver for the trade, one of Alexander MacKenzie’s partners was murdered, another of his men lamed, a third narrowly escaping death through the assassin’s bullet being stopped by a powderhorn; but the point was—MacKenzie got the furs for the Little Company. The Nor’Westers were beaten.

Up at Athabasca, Pond, the Nor’Wester was opposed by Ross, the Little Company man. Hearne, of Hudson’s Bay, had been to Athabasca first of all explorers, but Pond was the first of the Montreal men to reach the famous fur region of the North, and he did not purpose seeing his labors filched away by the Little Company. When Laroux brought the Indians from Slave Lake to the Nor’Westers and Ross attempted to approach them, there was a scuffle. The Little Company leader fell pierced bya bullet from a revolver smoking in the hand of Peter Pond. Did Pond shoot Ross? Was it accidental? These questions can never be answered. This was the second murder for which Pond was responsible in the Athabasca, and ill-omened news of it ran like wildfire south to Isle à la Crosse and Portage de Traite where Alexander MacKenzie and his cousin Roderick were encamped. Nor’Westers and Little Company men alike were shocked. For the Montreal men to fight among themselves meant alienation of the Indians and victory for the Hudson’s Bay. Roderick MacKenzie of the Little Company and William McGillivray of the Nor’Westers decided to hasten down to Montreal with the summer brigades and urge a union of both organizations. Locking canoes abreast, with crews singing in unison, the rival leaders set out together, and the union was effected in 1787 by the Nor’Westers increasing their shares to admit all the partners of the Gregory and MacKenzie concern. Pond sold his interests to the MacGillivrays and retired to Boston.

The strongest financial, social and political interests of Eastern Canada were now centered in the Northwest Company. There were ways of discouraging independent merchants from sending pedlars to the North. Boycott, social or financial, the pulling of political strings that withheld a governmentpassport, a hint that if the merchant wanted a hand in the trade it would be cheaper for him to pool his interests with the Nor’Westers than risk a $3,000 load on his own account—kept the field clear or brought about absorption of all rivals till 1801. Then a Dominique Rousseau essayed an independent venture led by his clerk, Hervieux. Grand Portage on Lake Superior was the halfway post between Montreal and thePays d’en Haut—the metropolis of the Nor’Westers’ domain. Here came Hervieux’s brigade and pitched camp some hundred yards away from the Nor’West palisades. Hardly had Hervieux landed when there marched across to him three officers of the Northwest Company, led by Duncan McGillivray, who ordered the newcomers to be off on pain of death, as all the land here was Northwest property. Hervieux stood his ground stoutly as a British subject and demanded proof that the country belonged to the Northwest Company. To the Nor’Westers, such a demand was high treason. McGillivray retorted he would send proof enough. The partners withdrew, but there sallied out of the fort a party of the famous Northwest bullies—prize fighters kept in trim for the work in hand. Drawing knives, they cut Hervieux’s tents to shreds, scattered his merchandise to the four winds and bedrubbed the little men, whotried to defend it, as if they had been so many school boys.

“You demand our title to possession? You want proofs that we hold this country? Eh? Bien! Voila! There’s proof! Take it; but if you dare to go into the interior, there will be more than tents cut! Look out for your throats.”

Totally ruined, Hervieux was compelled to go back to Montreal, where his master in vain sued the Nor’Westers. The Nor’Westers were not responsible. It was plain as day: they had not ordered those bullies to come out, and those bullies were a matter of three thousand miles away and could not be called as witnesses.

Determined not to be beaten, Rousseau attempted a second venture in 1806, this time two canoes under fearless fellows led by one Delorme, who knew the route to the interior. He instructed Delorme to avoid clashing with the Nor’Westers by skirting round their headquarters on Lake Superior, if necessary by traveling at night till beyond detection. Delorme was four days’ march beyond Lake Superior when Donald McKay, a Nor’Wester, suddenly emerged from the underbrush leading a dozen wood-rovers. Not a word was said. No threats. No blustering. This was a no-man’s-land where there was no law and everyone could doas he liked. McKay liked to do a very odd thing just at this juncture, just at this place. His bush-lopers hurried on down stream in advance of Delorme’s canoes and leveled a veritable barricade of trees across the trail. Then they went to the rear of Delorme and leveled another barricade. Delorme didn’t attempt to out-maneuver his rivals. At most he had only sixteen men, and that kind of a game meant a free fight and on one side or the other—murder. He sold out both his cargoes to McKay at prices current in Montreal, and retreated from the fur country, leaving the sardonic Nor’Westers smiling in triumph. These were some of the ways by which the Nor’Westers dissuaded rivals from invading thePays d’en Haut. On their part, they probably justified their course by arguing that rivalry would at once lead to such murders as those in the Athabasca. In their secret councils, they well knew that they were keeping small rivals from the field to be free for the fight against the greatest rival of all—the Hudson’s Bay Company.

CHARTShowing the RoutesofHUDSON and MUNK

Footnote to Chapter XX.—The contents of this chapter are taken primarily from the records of the Hudson’s Bay House; secondarily, from the Journals of the Nor’West partners as published by Senator Masson, Prof. Coues, and others; also, and most important, from such old missionary annals as those of the Oblates and other missionaries like Abbé Dugas, Tassé, Grandin, Provencher and others. In the most of cases, the missionary writer was not himself the actor (there are two exceptions to this) but he was in direct contact with the livingactor and took his facts on the spot, so that his testimony is even more non-partisan than the carefully edited Masson essay and records. I consider these various missionary legends the most authentic source of the history of the period, though their evidence is most damning to both sides. These annals are exclusively published by Catholic organizations and so unfortunately do not reach the big public of which they are deserving.The exact way in which the N. W. C. was formed, I found very involved in the Masson essay. A detailed account of all steps in the organization is very plainly given in the petitions of the Frobisher Brothers, Peter Pond and McGill to Gov. Haldimand for a monopoly of the fur trade. The petitions are in the Canadian Archives. A curious fear is revealed in all these petitions—that the Americans may reach and possess the Pacific Coast first. As a matter of fact that is exactly what Grey and Lewis and Clarke did in the Oregon region.From the H. B. C. Archives I find the following data on this era: Batts and Walker and Peter Fidler held the mouth of the Saskatchewan for the English; one Goodwin worked south from Albany almost to Lake Superior and west to modern Manitoba; half a dozen French run-aways from the N. W. C. were engaged as spies at £100 a year; the Martin Falls House is built inland from Albany in 1782; in spite of ignominious surrender, Hearne and Humphrey Martin go back as Governors of Churchill and York; Edward Umfreville leaves the H. B. C. (wages £141) and joins the N. W. C.; Martin and Hearne, La Perouse’s prisoners, were dropped at Stromness in November, whether on the way to France or back from France, I can’t tell; their letters do not reach the H. B. C. till March, 1783; William Paulson is surgeon at East Main; no dividends from 1782 to 1786; Joseph Colen succeeds Martin at York in ’86; William Auld succeeds Hearne at Churchill in ’96; James Hourie is massacred by the Indians of East Main; H. B. C. servants from the growing dangers become mutinous, six are fined at East Main for mutiny; four at York fined £4 each, namely Magnus Tait, Alex. Gunn, John Irvine, Benj. Bruce, two at Churchill £20 each, Robert Pexman and Henry Hodges. Andrew Graham, the old factor of Severn, being now destitute at Edinburg, is given thirty guineas in 1801.

The exact way in which the N. W. C. was formed, I found very involved in the Masson essay. A detailed account of all steps in the organization is very plainly given in the petitions of the Frobisher Brothers, Peter Pond and McGill to Gov. Haldimand for a monopoly of the fur trade. The petitions are in the Canadian Archives. A curious fear is revealed in all these petitions—that the Americans may reach and possess the Pacific Coast first. As a matter of fact that is exactly what Grey and Lewis and Clarke did in the Oregon region.

From the H. B. C. Archives I find the following data on this era: Batts and Walker and Peter Fidler held the mouth of the Saskatchewan for the English; one Goodwin worked south from Albany almost to Lake Superior and west to modern Manitoba; half a dozen French run-aways from the N. W. C. were engaged as spies at £100 a year; the Martin Falls House is built inland from Albany in 1782; in spite of ignominious surrender, Hearne and Humphrey Martin go back as Governors of Churchill and York; Edward Umfreville leaves the H. B. C. (wages £141) and joins the N. W. C.; Martin and Hearne, La Perouse’s prisoners, were dropped at Stromness in November, whether on the way to France or back from France, I can’t tell; their letters do not reach the H. B. C. till March, 1783; William Paulson is surgeon at East Main; no dividends from 1782 to 1786; Joseph Colen succeeds Martin at York in ’86; William Auld succeeds Hearne at Churchill in ’96; James Hourie is massacred by the Indians of East Main; H. B. C. servants from the growing dangers become mutinous, six are fined at East Main for mutiny; four at York fined £4 each, namely Magnus Tait, Alex. Gunn, John Irvine, Benj. Bruce, two at Churchill £20 each, Robert Pexman and Henry Hodges. Andrew Graham, the old factor of Severn, being now destitute at Edinburg, is given thirty guineas in 1801.

Transcriber’s NotesPage 186—changed accomodated toaccommodatedPage 242—changed Palcentia toPlacentiaPage 263—changed pursuading topersuadingPage 272—changed quittting toquittingPage 319—changed proceeeds toproceedsPage 366—changed suggetsed tosuggestedPage 407—changed necesssary tonecessaryThe variant spellings of the following name has been left as printed: Grossilier, Grosilier, Groseilier, Groseillers.

Page 186—changed accomodated toaccommodated

Page 242—changed Palcentia toPlacentia

Page 263—changed pursuading topersuading

Page 272—changed quittting toquitting

Page 319—changed proceeeds toproceeds

Page 366—changed suggetsed tosuggested

Page 407—changed necesssary tonecessary

The variant spellings of the following name has been left as printed: Grossilier, Grosilier, Groseilier, Groseillers.

Back to Index Next