Disappointment River

by Brian Castner

  So he found a ghostwriter, a man named William Combe, who was known to have assisted many a prominent gentleman in such circumstances. And he collected the observations of his cousin Roderic, who had counted the steps on the rivers between Montreal and Grand Portage, and called them “A General History of the Fur Trade” and included the pages as his own work. At the end of the book, he attached a treatise on the importance of continental commerce, securing the west coast, and shipping furs directly to China via a partnership with the Hudson’s Bay Company, the same ideas that had earned him enmity and exclusion from the North West Company.

  His publisher was Cadell and Davies, the house of Samuel Johnson and Samuel Hearne before him. He warned readers in the foreword “not to expect the charms of embellished narrative.” Yes, he had “settled the dubious point of a practicable North-West passage” and put “that long agitated question at rest.” But otherwise, he warned, the “dreary waste” was not “effectively transferred to the page,” and anyone “enamored of romantic adventures” would be dissatisfied.

  Despite those caveats, Voyages from Montreal, on the River St. Laurence, Through the Continent of North America, to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans became a bestseller, published in six editions in French, German, and Russian. Only two months later, Alexander was knighted by King George III.

  The book changed the course of nations, but not in the way Mackenzie could have foreseen. Napoleon considered the volume a piece of military intelligence and devised plans to attack the United States and British Canada from the west, up the Mississippi valley; ultimately, he chose to invade Russia instead. And President Thomas Jefferson procured one of the very first American copies and read Voyages with his young secretary, Meriwether Lewis, at Monticello in 1802. The Corps of Discovery launched two years later, to seize the Pacific coast for the United States before the British followed Mackenzie’s advice; Lewis took Voyages with him on the journey.

  Sir Alex, as he now called himself, was frustrated. In 1808, he wrote to the British secretary of state for war and the colonies, complaining that the claim of the United States to the continent’s western reaches was “notoriously groundless.” In the first place, those lands were full of settlements “long before the United States of America existed as a Nation,” and, second, the “expedition of Discovery under Captains Lewis and Clark” meant nothing “because I myself, known to have been the first, who crossed thro’ it.” The secretary’s reply to Mackenzie, if any, is unknown.

  By then, Mackenzie had moved to London and only occasionally returned to Montreal. “I am determined to make myself as comfortable as circumstances will allow. I have a large field before me,” he told Roderic, after they reconciled. He enjoyed his time in the “immense City” and only rarely inserted himself into politics or business.

  His interests declined in proportion to his health. Alexander stayed in Britain for good after 1810. Two years later, he married Geddes Mackenzie, a teenage cousin more than thirty years his junior, and retired to her family’s estate of Avoch, on the Moray Firth, just north of Inverness. Alexander and Geddes socialized in London, played lord and lady of the manor in Scotland, produced three children, and borrowed money from his contacts in Montreal to maintain their lifestyle.

  His body was crumbling, though, lungs winded on simple walks and legs drained of their vigor, exercise reduced to sitting in an open carriage. The lifestyle of a pays d’en haut trader—starvation and alcohol, chiefly—had taken an early toll. “Stuper” and “dead pain” plagued him, plus “a listlessness and apathy which I cannot well describe,” he wrote in a final letter to Roderic. It reads like a final letter. He begs his cousin to come home to Scotland. He offers to host Roderic’s son and place him in Scotland’s best schools. Alexander had a young boy himself, and “if God spare him,” the two cousins could be fast friends, as Roderic and Alexander had been on the Isle of Lewis. They should make the arrangements soon. “I have been overtaken with the consequences of my sufferings in the North West,” he said. “Lady Mackenzie is sitting by me, and the children are playing on the floor.”

  One spring day, while returning from Edinburgh, where he had sought medical advice, his kidneys failed. Sir Alexander Mackenzie died on March 12, 1820, aged fifty-seven years.

  Only a few months later, the Hudson’s Bay Company absorbed its rival into a single monopoly, just as Mackenzie had petitioned, and the North West Company was no more.

  * * *

  ————

  In the mid-nineteenth century, at a settlement in the pays d’en haut, just south of Lake Winnipeg, a historian sat down with an old man who was one of the last living North West Company voyageurs. This is what the old man said:

  I have now been forty-two years in this country. For twenty-four I was a light canoe-man; I required but little sleep, but sometimes got less. No portage was too long for me; all portages were alike. My end of the canoe never touched the ground till I saw the end of it. Fifty songs a day were nothing to me. I could carry, paddle, walk, and sing with any man I ever saw. During that period, I saved the lives of ten bourgeois, and was always the favorite, because when others stopped to carry at a bad step, and lost time, I pushed on—over rapids, over cascades, over chutes; all were the same to me. No water, no weather, ever stopped the paddle or the song.

  I had twelve wives in the country. I was then like a bourgeois, rich and happy: no bourgeois had better-dressed wives than I. I beat all Indians at the race, and no white man ever passed me in the chase. I wanted for nothing; and I spent all my earnings in the enjoyment of pleasure. Five hundred pounds, twice told, have passed through my hands; although now I have not a spare shirt on my back, not a penny to buy one. Yet, were I a young man again, I should glory in commencing the same career again. I would willingly spend another half century in the same fields of enjoyment. There is no life half so happy as a voyageur’s life.

  * * *

  ————

  Just before he died, Alexander Mackenzie began a correspondence with John Franklin, the British naval officer. Franklin was preparing for a cartographic survey of the Arctic coast of North America, following Samuel Hearne’s route down the Coppermine River, with the goal of mapping the shore in an interest of scouting, from land, a potential maritime northwest passage.

  Franklin was destined for greatness and controversy. On that 1819 descent of the Coppermine, his troop would be caught by snow, run out of food, and be reduced to eating their leather moccasins and, perhaps, more. Franklin was racked by fever, holed up in camp, and kept alive only through the mercies of his voyageurs and Indian guides. He ate the meat that was put in front of him. Whether the Windigo inhabited his crew, no one said.

  Rather than destroy his career, though, this brush with death launched it. Six years later, in 1825, Franklin led the second European expedition to successfully reach the delta of the Deh Cho; an earlier attempt, in 1799, failed when the fur trader Duncan Livingston and his party of five North West Company voyageurs were killed in an Esquimaux ambush. Franklin’s canoes reached Mackenzie’s Whale Island and then explored the coast east and west, as far as Point Barrow, before being turned aside by ice. When Franklin returned, he wrote a book about the journey, and of the river he said that “in justice to the memory of Mackenzie” it should be named for him.

  Franklin met his famous end in the Arctic. In the summer of 1845, searching again for a northwest passage on behalf of the British Admiralty, Franklin led the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus through a barren archipelago north of Hudson’s Bay. The ships were caught in the ice and spent a winter near Beechey Island, west of Greenland. When the ice broke, they made it only a few hundred miles south, becoming encased again near King William Island in 1846. This time the ships were crushed, and the crew spent two more winters trying to claw back to civilization. All died. Over the generations, the Esquimaux told stories of the white men lost at sea. Flotsam from the wrecks—combs, tinted eyeglasses, fishhooks—would wash up onshore, and the Esquimaux wou
ld pass them down as family heirlooms. The wrecked ships were lost on the seabed for more than a century and a half and not discovered until 2014 via side-scan sonar.

  But all of that was still to come. When Franklin sought him out, Mackenzie was the experienced explorer who never lost a man. Franklin himself was the novice, and wished for any advice and encouragement the older mentor might provide.

  Mackenzie wrote generously back to Franklin, advising him on many specifics: the required canoes and voyageurs, twist tobacco and “two or three Bales of Dry Good suitable to the Trade,” powder and guns, “a quantity of spirits,” the importance of befriending the Esquimaux. Mackenzie told him to travel by way of Île-à-la-Crosse and then proceed to Athabasca when the ice allowed. That Franklin’s party—a clerk, two milieux, two steersmen, Indians and their wives—should look much like his own. Mackenzie, the bourgeois planning his last brigade, was “earnestly interested in the results of your exertion under such perilous circumstances,” even from his sickbed in Scotland.

  Mackenzie concludes the letter with one final piece of advice. Finding a local guide, someone who knew the land and the people and traveled its breadth, was essential. And he, Mackenzie, was not the one whom Franklin should talk to at all. There was another, far more valuable, who should serve as his partner.

  “I wish you could fall in with my old Friend, if alive, Nestabeck,” Mackenzie wrote. Though Franklin may know him by another name, for he was “commonly called the English Chief.”

  EPILOGUE

  It was late February, and Montreal was burdened by several feet of snow. The slush stuck stubbornly in the streets, mushing about like mud rather than a liquid that might someday drain away. The small cars navigating the cobblestones were salt stained, and the skies were dark, nights heavy and long.

  I was eating dinner in the ville vieux, at L’Auberge Saint-Gabriel, a restaurant that billed itself as the oldest in North America, tracing its roots to 1688. The dining room was wide, thick stone walls and exposed beams eighteen inches on center. I had roasted cauliflower and rabbit in a mustard sauce and two glasses of Malbec, and I took an old New Yorker along to read between courses.

  For more than a decade following his journeys, Mackenzie’s home was Montreal. I had spent my day looking for signs of him, poking my head in the very few old buildings remaining from his time. A random parking attendant opened up for me the modest house of Simon McTavish, the North West Company’s leading partner. There were offices on the ground floor, lofts in a new addition up top. The attendant said he had been a mason previously, and he showed me the calcium leaking from the original mortar in walls two feet thick. The building that housed L’Auberge Saint-Gabriel looked old, but a historian had warned me not to be deceived. He said it was reclaimed stone and beams, but new construction. I checked the mortar. No calcium. But it was hard to get a good look around, because the bar was hosting a riotous business meeting, the kind of alcohol-fueled mixer that involved name tags and product displays and branded content.

  After a day walking in the cold, it was good to sit near an open hearth and enjoy dinner with a glass of wine. I had returned from my northern travels six months before, and readapting to modernity was easy and quick. The calluses on my hands had long since faded. The weight I lost easily went back on, plus a little more; all I wanted to do was eat. I had stopped paying attention to weather reports and relished not caring about wind. One day I did the math, to figure out how many paddle strokes it took to canoe the 1,125 miles of the Deh Cho. Thirty or forty strokes a minute, ten hours a day, for over a month and a half. Almost a million swings of that wooden stick. Forty days on the water, same as Mackenzie’s outward journey. Forty is a nice round biblical number. It felt like forty days.

  Life in the wilderness is not simpler or easier. It is only a trade, like beaver furs for teakettles, but in reverse. Physical discomfort in exchange for an escape from the perpetual minor anxieties of middle-class American life: Am I wearing the right tie? Did I say something stupid with spinach in my teeth? Will my son make the hockey team, and if he does, did I remember the paperwork? Checking out and going north is at best a hard respite.

  But Mackenzie never saw it this way. He was the product of an age. Societal expectations were the reward for business success. He wanted to be back in the cocktail scene. He wanted to make his fortune and go home.

  And when he went home to Montreal, he met his fellow profit seekers and competitors and fur-trading colleagues at the fraternal order known as the Beaver Club, the most exclusive in town. They met on winter evenings, every two weeks, at supper clubs and restaurants and hotels, and membership was restricted to bourgeois hommes du nord only, a unanimous vote of current members required to gain entry. They were the city’s elite, and knew it, and they wore silver medals, with their names and the years they first wintered in the far northwest and their motto, stamped bold: “Fortitude in Distress.”

  Washington Irving said that they were full of such a “swelling and braggart” style that everyone “must remember the round of feasting and revelry kept up among these hyperborean nabobs.” And yet, when Irving himself traveled to Montreal, he gratefully accepted their invitation to be a guest at the Beaver Club.

  I had come to Montreal to see one of the last artifacts of the order, kept at the archives of the McCord Museum. Item M14449, stored in a pale cardboard box: the log of the Beaver Club. That book records each meeting, the attendees and guests, the locations of members—“town,” “country,” “Scotland”—the rules of order, the fine for breaking them, and the required toasts before meals. All the bourgeois from the beginning were listed—the Frenchmen Charles Chaboillez and Étienne Campion in 1751 and 1753, James Finlay in 1766, Peter Pond in 1770—and next to each old-timer’s name, his death, dutifully noted. As I opened the archivist’s box, I expected to see a grand tome, as would befit the official history of such an auspicious group. Gold leaf, leather-bound, a locking clasp. I was wrong.

  It was just a modest accounting ledger. Like a grammar school notebook. Paisley cardboard cover, pale lined pages. It was a clerk’s log, I realized. A memory from their apprenticeships in countinghouses, when they were just boys.

  I slowly paged through the log, wearing white gloves and using plastic forceps to carefully peel back each sheet. The grand statements, regulations, and membership votes were just prologue. The main body of the journal contained a detailed accounting of every meal and drop of alcohol, including a double-entry breakdown of the bill in pounds and shillings and pence. In a precise hand, despite sure drunkenness, they tallied brandy and tobacco and broken glasses as they had sewing awls and gunpowder and beaver furs in the pays d’en haut.

  And so as I sat there at dinner at L’Auberge Saint-Gabriel, on a winter evening and at a location so similar to the Beaver Club, I thought of one particular night I had just read about that day in the log.

  December 24, 1808, at the Montreal Hotel on the Place d’Armes. Christmas Eve, a time for ghost stories. Thirty-six men gathered that night, dressed in long coats and breeches, and buckles on their shoes, gloves and scarves and top hats made of the finest beaver felt. According to the ledger, by the end of the night, they had drunk forty bottles of Portuguese Madeira, twelve bottles of port, fourteen bottles of porter, eight quarts of ale, six quarts of cider, and four bottles of mulled wine, plus brandy, cigars, pipes, and tobacco.

  Alexander Mackenzie was there, having been elected to the Beaver Club over a decade before. In 1808 he was newly knighted, a best-selling author, traveling regularly to London and Scotland, and Montreal was changing so quickly it was different every time he returned. Old landmarks were plowed under, the city’s stone battlements coming down, all to make room for ships and commerce.

  But the old guard of his life, the men who shaped him and his business, were all there that Christmas Eve, including Roderic, elected to the Beaver Club in 1797. By 1808, the rift had healed, and the two men had renewed their lifetime friendship, the ugliness of th
e North West Company purge behind them. Also present that night was John Gregory, for whom Alexander had apprenticed back in 1778, when he first arrived in Montreal. And Normand MacLeod, who gave him his first break and traveled to Detroit personally to give him the chance to head to his first rendezvous. The only man missing was Peter Pond, who had succumbed to consumption the year before. Pond had returned to his birthplace of Milford, Connecticut; Roderic said he “died poor.” Even Sir John Johnson, his father’s commander in the American Revolution, was an honorary member, and once presented the club with a poem “to recount the toils and perils past.”

  The evening started civilly enough, at four o’clock, with a passing of the calumet peace pipe and five toasts, to the Mother of All Saints, to the King, to the Fur Trade in All its Branches, to the Voyageurs and their Wives and Children left in the pays d’en haut, and to all their Absent Members. Glasses and tumblers were thrown in the fireplace at the end of each round and tallied in the Beaver Club logbook so they could pay for replacements. Then followed a proper French dinner in multiple courses, all the country delicacies. Venison steaks, beaver tail, quail, buffalo tongue. After dinner came brandy and more bottles of Madeira. The rules were clear: “Every Member to drink as he pleases after the club toasts have gone round and retire at his pleasure.”

  The stories would flow, as wine replaced roasts. Of their mixed-blood children left with their à la façon du pays Cree and Chipewyan wives. Of the beautiful miseries of Rivière Maligne. Of the terror and fierce barrier of the western mountains. Of the dreaded Esquimaux. Of the trade disputes settled with pistols. Of the horsehair-and-shit-and-fat pemmican they ate to survive. Of the Barren Lands. Of the men drowned in the cataracts. Of Pierre Bonga, the black West Indian voyageur who once, by himself, carried five pièces—450 pounds!—in a single portage. No, it was six pièces! No, called Mackenzie, it was seven! He was sure of it and told everyone who would listen.