CHAPTER XXII

1790-1810

“THE COMING OF THE PEDLARS” CONTINUED—HENRY’S ADVENTURES AT PEMBINA—THE FIRST WHITE WOMAN IN THE WEST—A STOLEN CHILD AND A POISONER AND A SCOUT—HOW HARMON FOUND A WIFE—THE STORY OF MARGUERITE TROTTIER.

Strikingacross Lake Winnipeg from Winnipeg River, the southbound canoes ascend the central channel of the three entrances to Red River, passing Nettley Creek on the west, or River au Mort, as the French called it, in memory of the terrible massacre of Cree families by Sioux raiders in 1780, while the women and children were waiting here for the men to return from York Factory. South of Lake Winnipeg, the woodland banks of the mud-colored river give place to glimpses and patches of the plains rolling westward in seas of billowing grass. It was August when the brigades left Fort William. It is September now, with the crisp nutty tang of parched grasses in the air, a shimmer as of Indian summer across the horizonthat turns the setting sun to a blood-red shield. Bluest of blue are the prairie skies. Scarcely a feathering of wind clouds, and where the marsh lands lie—“sloughs” and “muskegs,” they are called in the West—so still is the atmosphere of the primeval silences that the waters are glass with the shadows of the rushes etched as by stencil. Here and there, thin spirals of smoke rise from the far prairie—camp fires of wandering Assiniboine and Cree and Saulteur. The brigades fire guns to call them to trade, or else land on the banks and light their own signal fires. Past what is nowSt.Peter’s Indian Reserve, and the two Selkirk towns, and theSt.Andrew Rapids where, if water is high, canoes need only be tracked, if low the voyageurs may step from stone to stone; past the bare meadow where to-day stands the last and only walled stone fort of the fur trade, Lower Fort Garry—the brigades come to what is now Winnipeg, the Forks of the Red and Assiniboine.

Of the French fur traders’ old post here, all that remains are the charred ruins and cellars. Near the flats where the two rivers overflow in spring are the high scaffoldings of a Cree graveyard used during the smallpox plague of the eighties. Back from the swamp of the forks are half a dozen tents—Hudson’s Bay traders—that same Robert Goodwinwhom Cameron tricked at Osnaburg, come up the Albany River and across country to Manitoba—forty days from the bay—with another trader, Brown.

The Nor’West brigades pause to divide again. A dozen canoes go up the Assiniboine for Portage la Prairie and Dauphin, and Swan Lake, and Lake Manitoba and Qu’Appelle, and Souris. Three or four groups of men are detailed to camp at the Forks (Winnipeg) and trade and keep an eye on the doings of the Hudson’s Bay—above all keep them from obtaining the hunt. When not trading, the men at the Forks are expected to lay up store of pemmican meat for the other departments, by buffalo hunting. Not till the winter of 1807-8 does MacDonald of Garth, a wiry Highlander of military family and military air, with a red head and a broken arm—build a fort here for the Nor’Westers, which he ironically calls Gibraltar because it will command the passage of both rivers, though there was not a rock the size of his hand in sight. Gibraltar is very near the site of the Cree graveyard and boasts strong palisades with storage cellars for liquors and huge warehouses for trade. Not to be outdone, the Hudson’s Bay look about for a site that shall also command the river, and they choose two miles farther down Red River, where their cannon can sweep allincoming and outgoing canoes. When this fort is built a few years later, it is called Fort Douglas.

Two brigades ascend the Red as far south as Pembina south of the Boundary, one to range all regions radiating from Grand Forks and Pembina, the other to cross country to the Mandanes on the Missouri.

Charles Chaboillez sends Antoine Larocque with two clerks and two voyageurs from the Assiniboine and the Red to the Missouri in 1804, where they meet the American explorers, Lewis and Clarke, with forty men on their way to the Pacific; and, to the Nor’Westers’ amazement, are also Hudson’s Bay traders. The American officers draw the Canadians’ attention to the fact—this is American territory. British flags must not be given to the Indians and no “derouines” are to take place—a trade term meaning that the drummers who come to beat up trade are not to draw the Indians away to British territory. Charbonneau, the Northwest voyageur, ignores his debt to the Company and deserts to become guide for Lewis and Clarke.

“I can hardly get a skin when the Hudson’s Bay trader is here,” complains Larocque, “for the Englishmen speak the Mandan language.” Nevertheless Larocque dispatches to the bourgeois Mr. Chaboillez on the Assiniboine, six packs worth £40each. Charles MacKenzie, the clerk, remains three years trading among the Mandans for the Nor’Westers, and with true trader’s instinct chuckles within himself to hear Old Serpent, the Indian Chief, boast that if he had these forty Americans “out on the plains, his young warriors would do for them as for so many wolves.”

Two main trails ran from the Red River to the Missouri: one from Pembina, west; the other from the Assiniboine, by way of Souris, south. The latter was generally followed, and from the time that David Thompson, the Northwest surveyor, first led the way to the Mandans, countless perils assailed the traveler to the Missouri. Not more than $3000 worth of furs were won a year, but the traders here were the buffalo hunters that supplied the Northern departments with pemmican; and on these hunts was the constant danger of the Sioux raiders. Eleven days by pony travel was the distance from the Assiniboine to the Missouri, and on the trail was terrible scarcity of drinking water. “We had steered to a lake,” records MacKenzie of the 1804 expedition, “but found it dry. We dug a pit. It gave a kind of stinking liquid of which we all drank, which seemed to increase our thirst. We passed the night with great uneasiness. Next day, not a drop of water was to be found on the route and our distressbecame unsupportable. Lafrance (the voyageur) swore so much he could swear no more and gave the country ten thousand times to the Devil. His eyes became so dim or blurred we feared he was nearing a crisis. All our horses became so unruly we could not manage them. It struck me they might have scented water and I ascended the top of the hill where to my great joy I discovered a small pool. I ran and drank plentifully. My horse had plunged in before I could stop him. I beckoned Lafrance. He seemed more dead than alive, his face a dark hue, a thick scurf around his mouth. He instantly plunged in the water ... and drank to such excess I fear the consequences.”

In winter, though there was no danger of perishing from thirst where snow could be used as water, perils were increased a hundredfold by storm. The ponies could not travel fast through deep drifts. Instead of eleven days, it took a month to reach the Assiniboine, one man leading, one bringing up the rear of the long line of pack horses. If a snow storm caught the travelers, it was an easy matter for marauding Indians to stampede the horses and plunder packs. In March, they traveled at night to avoid snow glare. Sleeping wrapped in buffalo robes, the men sometimes wakened to find themselves buried beneath a snow bank with the horsescrunched up half frozen in the blizzard. Four days without food was a common experience on the Mandane trail.

Of all the Nor’Westers stationed at Pembina, Henry was one of the most famous. Cheek by jowl with the Nor’Westers was a post of Hudson’s Bay men under Thomas Miller, an Orkneyman; and hosts of freemen—half-breed trappers and buffalo runners—made this their headquarters, refusing allegiance to either company and selling their hunt to the highest bidder. The highest bidder was the trader who would give away the most rum, and as traders do not give away rum for nothing, there were free fights during the drunken brawls to plunder the intoxicated hunters of furs. Henry commanded some fifty-five Nor’Westers and yearly sent out from Pembina one hundred and ten packs of furs by the famous old Red River ox carts made all of wood, hubs and wheels, that creaked and rumbled and screeched their way in long procession of single file to waiting canoes at Winnipeg.

Henry had come to the wilderness with a hard, cynical sneer for the vices of the fur trader’s life. Within a few years, the fine edge of his scorn had turned on himself and on all life besides, because while he scorned savage vices he could never leave them alone. Like the snare round the feet of a manwho has floundered into the quicksands, they sucked him down till his life was lost on the Columbia in a drunken spree. One can trace Henry’s degeneration in his journals from cynic to sinner and sinner to sot, till he has so completely lost the sense of shame, lost the memory that other men can have higher codes, that he unblushingly sets down in his diary how, to-day, he broke his thumb thrashing a man in a drunken bout; how, yesterday, he had to give a squaw a tremendous pommelling before she would let him steal the furs of her absent lord; how he “had a good time last night with the H. B. C. man playing the flute and the drum and drinking the ten-gallon keg clean.” Henry’s régime at Pembina became noted, not fromhischaracter, but from legends of famous characters who gathered there.

One night in December, 1807, Henry came home to his lodge and found a young Hudson’s Bay clerk waiting in great distress. The Nor’Wester asked the visitor what was wanted. The intruder begged that the others present should be sent from the room. Henry complied, and turned about to discover a young white woman disguised in man’s clothes, who threw herself on her knees and implored Henry to take pity on her. Her lover of the Orkney Islands had abandoned her. Dressed in man’s garb, she had joined the Hudson’s Bay service and pursued himto the wilderness. In Henry’s log cabin, her child was born. Henry sent mother and infant daughter across to Mr. Haney of the Hudson’s Bay Company, who forwarded both to the recalcitrant Orkneyman—John Scart, at Grand Forks. Before her secret was discovered, according to legend, the woman had been in Hudson’s Bay service of Red River Department for four years. Mother and child were sent back to the Orkneys, where they came to destitution.

At Pembina, there always camped a great company of buffalo hunters. Among these had come, in the spring of 1806, a young bride from Three Rivers—the wife of J. Ba’tiste Lajimoniere, one of the most famous scouts of the Hudson’s Bay Company. J. Ba’tiste had gone down to Quebec the year before and cut a swath of grandeur in the simple parish of Three Rivers that captured the heart of Marie Anne Gaboury, and she came to the wilderness as his wife.

To the Indian wives of the Frenchmen in the freemen’s camp, Madame Lajimoniere was a marvel—the first white woman they had ever beheld. They waited upon her with adoration, caressed her soft skin and hair, and handled her like some strange toy. One, especially, under show of friendliness, came to Marie’s wigwam to cook, but J. Ba’tiste’s conscience took fright. The friendly squaw hadbeen a cast-off favorite of his own wild days, and from the Indians he learned that she had come to cook for Marie in order to poison her. J. Ba’tiste promptly struck camp, packed his belongings and carried his wife back to the safety of the fort at Pembina. There, on the 6th of January 1807, the first white child of the West was born; and they called her name Reine, because it was the king’s birthday.

When Henry moved his fifty men from Pembina up the Saskatchewan, in 1808, among the free traders who went up with the brigades were the Lajimonieres. Word of the white woman ran before the advancing traders by “moccasin telegram,” and wherever pause was made, Indians flocked in thousands to see Marie Gaboury. Belgrade, a friend of Ba’tiste’s, thought it well to protect her by spreading in advance the report—that the white woman had the power of the evil eye; if people offended her, she could cause their death by merely looking at them, and the ruse served its purpose until they reached Edmonton. This was the danger spot—the center of fearful wars waged by Blackfeet and Cree. Marauding bands were ever on the alert to catch the traders short-handed, and in the earliest days, when Longmore, and Howse, and Bird, and Turner, the astronomer, were commanders of the Hudson’s Bayfort, Shaw and Hughes of Nor’Westers, the dangers from Indian attack were so great that the rival traders built their forts so that the palisades of one joined the stockades of the other, and gates between gave passage so the whites could communicate without exposing themselves. Towers bristling with muskets commanded the gates, and many a time the beleaguered chief factor, left alone with the women while his men were hunting, let blaze a fire of musketry from one tower, then went to the other tower and let go a cross fire, in order to give the Indians the impression that more than one man was on guard. This, at least, cleared the ambushed spies out of the high grass so that the fort could have safe egress to the river.

Here, then, came Marie Gaboury, in 1808, to live at Edmonton for four years. Ba’tiste, as of old, hunted as freeman, and strange to say, he was often accompanied by his dauntless wife to the hunting field. Once, when she was alone in her tepee on the prairie, the tent was suddenly surrounded by a band of Cree warriors. When the leader lifted the tent flap, Marie was in the middle of the floor on her knees making what she thought was her last prayer. A white renegrade wandering with the Crees called out to her not to be afraid—they were after Blackfeet. Ba’tiste’s horror may be guessed when he camedashing breathless across the prairie and found his wife’s tent surrounded by raiders.

“Marie! Marie!” he shouted, hair streaming to the wind, and unable to wait till he reached the tepee, “Marie—are you alive?”

“Yes,” her voice called back, “but I—am—dying—of fright.”

Ba’tiste then persuaded the Crees that white women were not used to warriors camping so near, and they withdrew. Then he lost no time in shifting camp inside the palisades of Edmonton. The Abbé Dugas tells of another occasion when Marie was riding a buffalo pony—one of the horses used as a swift runner on the chase—her baby dangling in a moss bag from one of the saddle pommels. Turning a bluff, the riders came on an enormous herd of buffalo. The sudden appearance of the hunters startled the vast herd. With a snort that sent clouds of dust to the air, there was a mad stampede, and true to his life-long training, Marie’s pony took the bit in his mouth and bolted, wheeling and nipping and kicking and cutting out the biggest of buffaloes for the hunt, just as if J. Ba’tiste himself were in the saddle. Bounced so that every breath seemed her last, Marie Gaboury hung to the baby’s moss bag with one hand, to the horse’s mane with the other, and commended her soul to God; but J.Ba’tiste’s horse had cut athwart the race and he rescued his wife. That night she gave birth to her second daughter, and they jocularly called her “Laprairie.” Such were the adventures of the pioneer women on the prairie. The every day episodes of a single life would fill a book, and the book would record as great heroism as ever the Old World knew of a Boadicea or a Joan of Arc. We are still too close to these events of early Western life to appreciate them. Two hundred years from now, when time has canonized such courage, the Marie Gaboury’s of pioneer days will be regarded as the Boadiceas and Joan of Arcs of the New World.

There was constant shifting of men in the different departments of the Northwest Company. When Henry passed down Red River, in 1808, to go up the Saskatchewan, half the brigades struck westward from the Forks (Winnipeg), up the Assiniboine River to Portage la Prairie and Souris, and Qu’ Appelle and Dauphin and Swan Lake. Each post of this department was worth some £700 a year to the Nor’Westers. Not very large returns when it is considered that a keg of liquor costing the Company less than $10 was sold to the Indians for one hundred and twenty beaver valued at from $2.00 to $3.00 a skin. “Mad” McKay, a Mr. Miller and James Sutherland were the traders for the Hudson’sBay in this region, which included the modern provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Among the Nor’Westers, McLeod was the wintering partner and his chief clerks were the mystic dreamers—Harmon, that Louis Primo, who had deserted from Matthew Cocking on the Saskatchewan, and Cuthbert Grant, the son of a distinguished Montreal merchant and a Cree mother, who combined in himself the leadership qualities of both races and rapidly rose to be the chosen chief of the Freemen or Half-Breed Rangers known as theBois Brulés—men of “the burnt or blazed woods.”

The saintly Harmon had been shocked to find his bourgeois Norman McLeod with an Indian spouse, but to different eras are different customs and he presently records in his diary that he, too, has taken an Indian girl for a wife—the daughter of a powerful chief—because, Harmon explains to his own uneasy conscience, “if I take her I am sure I shall getallthe furs of the Crees,” and who shall say that in so doing, Harmon did either better or worse than the modern man or woman, who marries for worldly interests? Let it be added—that, having married her, Harmon was faithful to the daughter of the Cree chief all his days and gave her the honor due a white wife. In the case of the fur traders, there was a deep, potent reason for these marriagesbetween white men and Indian women. The white trader was one among a thousand hostiles. By marrying the daughter of a chief, he obtained the protection of the entire tribe. Harmon was on the very stamping ground of the fights between Cree and Sioux. By allying himself with his neighbors, he obtained stronger defense than a hundred palisaded forts.

The danger was not small, as a single instance will show. Until May each year, Harmon spent the time gathering the furs, which were floated down the Assiniboine to Red River. It was while the furs were being gathered that the Sioux raiders would swoop from ambush in the high grasses and stampede the horses, or lie in hiding at some narrow place of the river and serenade the brigades with showers of arrows. Women and girls, the papoose in the moss bag, white men and red—none were spared, for the Sioux who could brandish the most scalps from his tent pole, was the bravest warrior.

Among the hunters of Pembina was a French Canadian named Trottier married to a Cree woman. The daughter—Marguerite, a girl of sixteen—was renowned for her beauty. Indian chiefs offered for her hand, but the father thought she would be better cared for as the wife of a white man and gave her in marriage to a hunter named Jutras, who left Pembinawith Henry’s brigades in 1808. Jutras went up the Assiniboine. A year later, Daniel MacKenzie appointed him and five others to take the Qu’ Appelle furs down the Assiniboine to Red River. As usual, some of the partners accompanied the brigades for the annual meetings at Fort William. Daniel MacKenzie and McDonald of Garth—the bourgeois—were riding along the river banks some distances behind the canoes. Marguerite Trottier was in the canoe with Jutras, and the French were advancing, light of heart as usual, passing down Qu’ Appelle River toward the Assiniboine. A day’s voyage above the junction of the two rivers, the current shoaled, and just where brushwood came close to the water’s edge, Jutras was startled by a weird call like a Sioux signal from both sides. Another instant, bullets and arrows rained on the canoes! Four of the six voyageurs tumbled back wounded to the death. Jutras and the remaining man lost their heads so completely they sprang to mid-waist in the water, waded ashore, and dashed in hiding through the high grass for the nearest fort, forgetting the girl wife, Marguerite Trottier, and a child six months old. MacKenzie and McDonald of Garth sent scouts to rally help from Qu’ Appelle to recover the furs. When the rescue party reached the place of plunder—not very far from the modernWhitewood—they found the four voyageurs lying on the sand, the girl wife in the bottom of the canoe. All had been stripped naked, scalped and horribly mutilated. Two of the men still lived. MacKenzie had advanced to remove the girl’s body from the canoe when faint with horror at the sight—hands hacked, an eye torn out, the scalp gone—the old wintering partner was rooted to the ground with amazement to hear her voice asking for her child and refusing to be appeased till they sought it. Some distance on the prairie in the deep grass below a tree they found it—still breathing. The English mind cannot contemplate the cruelties of such tortures as the child had suffered. Such horrors mock the soft philosophies of thelife natural, being more or less of a beneficent affair. They stagger theology, and are only explainable by one creed—the creed of Strength; the creed that the Powers for Good must be stronger than the Powers for Evil—stronger physically as well as stronger spiritually, and until they are, such horrors will stalk the earth rampant. The child had been scalped, of course! The Sioux warrior must have his trophy of courage, just as the modern grinder of child labor must have his dividend. It had then been suspended from a tree as a target for the arrows of the braves. Hardened oldrouéas MacKenzie was—it was too much for his blackenedheart. He fell on his trembling knees and according to the rites of his Catholic faith, ensured the child’s entrance to Paradise by baptism before death. It might die before he could bring water from the river. The rough old man baptized the dying infant with the blood drops from its wounds and with his own tears.

Returning to the mother, he gently told her that the child had been killed. Swathing her body in cotton, these rough voyageurs bathed her wounds, put the hacked hands in splinters, and in all probability saved her life by binding up the loose skin to the scalp by a clean, fresh bladder. That night voyageurs and partners sat round the wounded where they lay, each man with back to a tree and musket across his knees. In the morning the wounded were laid in the bottom of the canoes. Scouts were appointed to ride on both sides of the river and keep guard. In this way, the brigade advanced all day and part of the following night, “the poor woman and men moaning all the time,” records McDonald of Garth. Coming down the Assiniboine to Souris, where the Hudson’s Bay had a fort under Mr. Pritchard, the Nor’Westers under Pierre Falçon, the rhyming minstrel of the prairie—the wounded were left here. Almost impossible to believe, Marguerite Trottier recovered sufficiently in a monthto join the next brigade bound to Gibraltar (Winnipeg). Here she met her father and went home with him to Pembina. Jutras—the poltroon husband—who had left her to the raiders, she abandoned with all the burning scorn of her Indian blood. It seems after the Sioux had wreaked their worst cruelty, she simulated death, then crawled to hiding under the oilcloth of the canoe, where, lying in terror of more tortures, she vowed to the God of the white men that if her life were spared she would become a Christian. This vow she fulfilled at Pembina, and afterward married one of the prominent family of Gingras, so becoming the mother of a distinguished race. She lived to the good old age of almost a hundred.

Another character almost as famous in Indian legend as Marguerite had been with Henry at Pembina and come north to Harmon on the Assiniboine. This was the scout, John Tanner, stolen by Shawnees from the family of the Rev. John Tanner on the Ohio. The boy had been picking walnuts in the woods when he was kidnapped by a marauding party, who traded him to the Ottawas of the Up Country. Tanner fell in good hands. His foster mother was chief of the Mackinaw Indians and quite capable of exercising her authority in terms of the physical. Chaboillez, the wintering partner, saw the boy at the Sault and inquiries as to who hewas put the foster mother in such a fright of losing him that she hid him in the Sault cellars. Among the hunters of Pembina were Tanner and his Indian mother, and later—his Indian wife. He will come into this story at a later stage with J. Ba’tiste Lajimoniere.

Notes to Chapter XXII.—I have purposely hung this chapter round Henry as a peg, because his adventures at Pembina, whence journeys radiated to the Missouri and the Assiniboine, merge into his life on the Saskatchewan and so across the Rockies to the Columbia—giving a record of all the N. W. C.’s departments, as if one traveled across on a modern railroad.Henry’s Adventures are to be found in his Journals edited by Dr. Coues and published by Francis P. Harper. Several reprints of Harmon’s Journals have recently appeared. Harmon was originally from Vermont and one of his daughters until recently was prominent in Ottawa, Canada, as the head of a fashionable school. I can imagine how one of the recent reprints would anger Harmon’s family, where the introduction speaks glibly of Harmon having taken a “native wifead interim.” What those words “ad interim” mean, I doubt if the writer, himself, knows—unless his own unsavory thought, for of all fur traders Harmon was one of the most saintly, clean, honorable, and gentle, true to his wife as to the finest white woman.I have referred to Daniel MacKenzie as an oldroué. The reasons for this will appear in a subsequent chapter on doings at Fort William.The adventures of Tanner will be found in James’ life of him, in Major Long’s travels, in Harmon, and in the footnotes of Coues’s Henry, also by Dr. Bryce in the Manitoba History Coll., most important of all in the Minnesota Hist. Collections, where the true story of his death is recorded.The adventures of Marguerite Trottier are taken from two sources: from McDonald of Garth’s Journal (Masson Journals) and from the Abbé Dugas’ Legends. I hesitated whether to give this shocking and terrible story, for the most thoughtless reader will find between the lines (and it is intended) more than is told. What determined me to give the story was this: Again and again in the drawing rooms of London and New York, I haveheard society—men and women, who hold high place in social life—refer to those early marriages of the fur traders to native women as somethingsub rosa, disreputable, best hidden behind a lie or a fig leaf. They never expressed those delicate sentiments to me till they had ascertained that tho’ I had lived all my life in the West, I had neither native blood in my veins nor a relationship of any sort to the pioneer—not one of them. Then some such expressions as this would come out apologetically with mock modest Pharisaic blush—“Is it true that So and So married a native woman?” or “Of course I know they wereallwicked men, for look how they married—Squaws!” I confess it took me some time to get the Eastern view on this subject into my head, and when I did, I felt as if I had passed one of those sewer holes they have in civilized cities. Of course, it is the natural point of view for people who guzzle on problem plays and sex novels, but what—I wondered—would those good people think if they realized that “the squaws” of whom they spoke so scornfully were to Northwest life what a Boadicea was to English life—the personification of Purity that was Strength and Strength that was Purity—a womanhood that the vilest cruelties could not defile. Then, to speak of fur traders who married native women as “all wicked” is a joke. Think of the religious mystic, Harmon, teaching his wife the English language with the Bible, and Alexander MacKenzie, who had married a native woman before he had married his own cousin, and the saintly patriot, Dr. McLoughlin—think of them if you can as “wicked.” I can’t! I only wish civilized men and women had as good records.In this chapter I wished very much to give a detailed account of each N. W. C. department with notes on the chief actors, who were in those departments what the feudal barons were to the countries of Europe, but space forbids. It is as impossible to do that as it would be to cram a record of all the countries of Europe into one volume.I have throughout referred to the waters as Hudson Bay; to the company as Hudson’s. This is the ruling of the Geographical societies and is, I think, correct, as the charter calls the company “Hudson’s Bay.” The N. W. C. were sometimes referred to as “the French.”Charles MacKenzie and Larocque in their Journals (Masson Coll.) give the details of the Mandane trade. Henry also touches on it.

Henry’s Adventures are to be found in his Journals edited by Dr. Coues and published by Francis P. Harper. Several reprints of Harmon’s Journals have recently appeared. Harmon was originally from Vermont and one of his daughters until recently was prominent in Ottawa, Canada, as the head of a fashionable school. I can imagine how one of the recent reprints would anger Harmon’s family, where the introduction speaks glibly of Harmon having taken a “native wifead interim.” What those words “ad interim” mean, I doubt if the writer, himself, knows—unless his own unsavory thought, for of all fur traders Harmon was one of the most saintly, clean, honorable, and gentle, true to his wife as to the finest white woman.

I have referred to Daniel MacKenzie as an oldroué. The reasons for this will appear in a subsequent chapter on doings at Fort William.

The adventures of Tanner will be found in James’ life of him, in Major Long’s travels, in Harmon, and in the footnotes of Coues’s Henry, also by Dr. Bryce in the Manitoba History Coll., most important of all in the Minnesota Hist. Collections, where the true story of his death is recorded.

The adventures of Marguerite Trottier are taken from two sources: from McDonald of Garth’s Journal (Masson Journals) and from the Abbé Dugas’ Legends. I hesitated whether to give this shocking and terrible story, for the most thoughtless reader will find between the lines (and it is intended) more than is told. What determined me to give the story was this: Again and again in the drawing rooms of London and New York, I haveheard society—men and women, who hold high place in social life—refer to those early marriages of the fur traders to native women as somethingsub rosa, disreputable, best hidden behind a lie or a fig leaf. They never expressed those delicate sentiments to me till they had ascertained that tho’ I had lived all my life in the West, I had neither native blood in my veins nor a relationship of any sort to the pioneer—not one of them. Then some such expressions as this would come out apologetically with mock modest Pharisaic blush—“Is it true that So and So married a native woman?” or “Of course I know they wereallwicked men, for look how they married—Squaws!” I confess it took me some time to get the Eastern view on this subject into my head, and when I did, I felt as if I had passed one of those sewer holes they have in civilized cities. Of course, it is the natural point of view for people who guzzle on problem plays and sex novels, but what—I wondered—would those good people think if they realized that “the squaws” of whom they spoke so scornfully were to Northwest life what a Boadicea was to English life—the personification of Purity that was Strength and Strength that was Purity—a womanhood that the vilest cruelties could not defile. Then, to speak of fur traders who married native women as “all wicked” is a joke. Think of the religious mystic, Harmon, teaching his wife the English language with the Bible, and Alexander MacKenzie, who had married a native woman before he had married his own cousin, and the saintly patriot, Dr. McLoughlin—think of them if you can as “wicked.” I can’t! I only wish civilized men and women had as good records.

In this chapter I wished very much to give a detailed account of each N. W. C. department with notes on the chief actors, who were in those departments what the feudal barons were to the countries of Europe, but space forbids. It is as impossible to do that as it would be to cram a record of all the countries of Europe into one volume.

I have throughout referred to the waters as Hudson Bay; to the company as Hudson’s. This is the ruling of the Geographical societies and is, I think, correct, as the charter calls the company “Hudson’s Bay.” The N. W. C. were sometimes referred to as “the French.”

Charles MacKenzie and Larocque in their Journals (Masson Coll.) give the details of the Mandane trade. Henry also touches on it.

Back to Index Next