Rainy Lake House

by Theodore Catton

  For all of these reasons, McLoughlin blamed competition between traders for the sorry state of his world. Eventually, after the merger of the two companies in 1821, he would get to see monopoly restored more or less as he wanted. And, in his role as chief factor in the new concern, he would, to a degree, implement a kind of paternalism over the Indians in his department. In the decade beginning in 1810, however, the struggle for monopoly entered its most destructive phase ever. Ironically, McLoughlin would finally achieve his goal of becoming a partner in the very year when the North West Company’s fortunes began to plummet.

  16

  The Restive Partnership

  To appreciate the remarkable rise and fall of the North West Company, it is helpful to consider a few things about the geography of Canada. North and west of the St. Lawrence River valley, bent like a horseshoe around the enormous Hudson Bay, lies a vast plateau known as the Canadian Shield. Geologically, the region is the oldest part of the North American continent and constitutes the largest mass of exposed Precambrian rock found anywhere on Earth. Most of the shield is made up of hard crystalline bedrock of ancient volcanic origin. During the ice ages, continental glaciers covered the land, scouring the surface down to the bedrock and carving out depressions that became lakes as the ice sheets melted back. Today the western rim of the U-shaped shield features a chain of massive lakes of ice-age origin, stretching from the Great Lakes in the south to Great Slave Lake and Great Bear Lake in the Far North. Other big lakes in this far-flung chain include Rainy Lake, Lake of the Woods, Lake Winnipeg, and Lake Athabaska. Throughout this region soils are thin, outcroppings of bedrock are numerous, and drainage systems are geologically young and not well defined. The land is laced with an intricate maze of large and small lakes, rivers and streams, and sprawling marshlands.

  In its competition with the Hudson’s Bay Company, the North West Company was severely disadvantaged by geography. A royal charter of 1670 gave the Hudson’s Bay Company an exclusive right to trade with North American Indians by way of Hudson Bay. Despite its high latitude, the bay afforded a relatively easy approach to the very heart of the continent. The Hudson’s Bay Company’s supply ships sailed from England across the North Atlantic up the Labrador Coast and through Hudson Strait into Hudson Bay, where they offloaded men and trade goods on the beach and picked up furs for the return voyage. For the first century of its existence, that was all the transporting that the Hudson’s Bay Company needed to do, for it relied on Indian middlemen to bring peltries overland to its several forts situated on the bay. Two of these bayside forts did the bulk of the company’s business. York Factory, on the mouth of the Nelson River, lay only 300 straight-line miles from Lake Winnipeg. Albany Factory, by the Albany River on the shore of James Bay (a Lake Michigan–size extension of Hudson Bay) lay a similar distance from Lake Superior. When the Hudson’s Bay Company did begin moving its operations inland toward the end of the eighteenth century, it did not have far to go.1

  By contrast, the North West Company, working out of Montreal, had no easy access to the heart of the continent. Instead of carrying furs, European goods, and men by ship, it had to exploit the Canadian Shield’s remarkable network of inland rivers and lakes, devising an elaborate transportation system based almost entirely on the birchbark canoe. By the time McLoughlin entered upon his five-year apprenticeship, the North West Company had established a network of water routes that stretched over 3,000 miles from Montreal to Fort Chipewyan on the shores of remote Lake Athabaska, employed around 1,000 voyageurs, and involved hundreds of canoes. Flotillas of canoes were called “brigades,” and their cargoes were identified as “inbound” or “outbound.” The system not only transported European goods in one direction and furs in the other, it also provided passenger service and communications between posts.2

  The central feature of this transportation network was a relay system in which the voyageurs passed the baton—exchanged inbound and outbound cargoes—at Fort William during the summer rendezvous. From the many posts in the interior the men set out in the spring in their canots du nord, each one laden with bales of furs collected over the winter. Coming down the Saskatchewan, the Assiniboine, the Red, and other rivers that eventually feed into Hudson Bay, the North West Company’s canoes entered Lake Winnipeg. But rather than following the outlet of that lake to Hudson Bay as the Hudson’s Bay traders were privileged to do, the Nor’ Westers paddled to the southeast corner of the lake and continued their journey upstream, ascending the Winnipeg and Rainy rivers to Rainy Lake. From there, they traversed the chain of smaller rivers and lakes that stairstep over the Height of Land between the Hudson Bay and Great Lakes watersheds (the region known today as the Boundary Waters), which brought them finally to Fort William. Meanwhile, from Montreal came the canots du maître, the master canoes, which were nearly twice as long as the canots du nord and carried double the cargo. Packed with trade goods and other supplies, they came up the St. Lawrence River to Lake Ontario, then via rivers and lakes to Lake Huron, then up the St. Mary River and around the rapids at Sault Ste. Marie to Lake Superior. Hugging the north shore of Lake Superior in case of storms, they continued around to Fort William. At the rendezvous, cargoes were exchanged for the return trips. Among the northbound brigades, those with the longest journeys set out first. Brigades departed at two-day intervals in order to avoid backups at the many portages.3

  So great was the distance from Montreal to the fur-rich Athabaska territory that the relay point for that supply line had to be pushed farther westward to the company’s Rainy Lake post. At Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabaska the voyageurs set out as soon as the ice melted from the rivers and lakes, sometimes as late as May, and they raced to get to Rainy Lake and back again before the waterways in the Far North froze up again in the fall. At Fort William, meanwhile, a contingent of voyageurs from Montreal transferred their cargoes to the smaller canoes and proceeded onward to meet the Athabaska men at Rainy Lake.4 Thus, soon after the great rendezvous at Fort William, another rendezvous took place at the North West Company’s trading house at Rainy Lake. Fort William was the company’s great entrepȏt in the wilderness, and Rainy Lake was its forward base.5

  It might seem a riddle why the North West Company penetrated so far across the continent when its northern competitor possessed such an enormous geographic advantage in its position on the bay. The answer is that at the start of the nineteenth century the two companies each owed their relative breadth of operations to the previous 150 years of fur-trade history. Both grew organically out of the century-long contest between Britain and France in America that ended with France’s ejection from the continent in 1763. The Hudson’s Bay Company’s passive position on the bay suited its shareholders well when France had dominion over the St. Lawrence River valley, the Great Lakes region, and the Mississippi valley. The company’s London-based leadership was slow to shake off that conservative outlook in the latter part of the eighteenth century. The North West Company, meanwhile, organized itself to fill the vacuum left by the French. It was fundamentally expansionist. Structurally it was hardly a company at all but rather “a restive partnership of aggressive colonial merchants.”6 Each year a handful of the few dozen partners retired, while the most ambitious and energetic junior officers rose to take their place. The semiannual covenants by which these men bound their fortunes together were aimed at rapid growth of the business and speedy financial reward for the partners.

  With few exceptions, the North West partners came from the English-speaking population of Canada. Most were of Scottish extraction. Many of the founding members maintained strong family ties in Scotland or England. They exploited those ties to leverage financial support from across the Atlantic and edge out their French Canadian competitors. Even after the North West Company was well established, those ties to the mother country mattered as much as a person’s energy and ability in determining which clerks became partners.

  That was especially true for the Montreal agents. From its start in the
1780s, the North West Company was a partnership between shipping agents in Montreal and traders in the interior, the wintering partners. While the Montreal agents’ primary responsibility was to hire voyageurs and handle logistics, assembling ironware, guns, clothing, blankets, tobacco, liquor, and sundry items of trade and supply, their other function was to seek out fur buyers and investors in Britain and Europe. Control of the company was delicately balanced between Montreal agents and wintering partners. The Montreal agents held the largest individual shares, but the wintering partners collectively held the greater number of shares—the more so as the years passed.7

  Besides its aggressive, entrepreneurial spirit, the Montreal-based company possessed another advantage over its London-based rival: it had access to an experienced labor pool. The company found no shortage of fit and experienced men in Lower Canada willing to indenture themselves for months or even years at a time. Most of these engagés were French Canadians. The oldest among them had begun their careers in the years of French control, and as time went on the company found plenty of new recruits among the French Canadian population who were eager to carry on the proud tradition of the voyageur.8

  For a few short decades the North West Company enjoyed spectacular success. The historian Harold Innis, in his classic and meticulously researched work The Fur Trade in Canada, calculated that the company, at the height of its fortune, controlled something like 80 percent of the trade compared to 7 percent by its northern rival and 13 percent by independent traders.9

  McLoughlin, for all of his gloom about the future of the enterprise, took pride in knowing that he was involved in one of the great business ventures of his time. Even as he complained about his desolate circumstances and inadequate pay, he yearned to become a partner. He still held out hope that a partner’s share would someday yield him a sizeable nest egg—provided that the wealth of furs was not exhausted first. What he recognized only dimly if at all, however, was that the North West Company’s domination of the fur trade would not last. With the Hudson’s Bay Company now insurgent, the North West Company had become a teetering giant straddling an indefensible swath of the North American continent.

  17

  The Pemmican War

  The contest between the two big fur companies started in the 1790s and gradually deepened during McLoughlin’s apprentice years from 1803 to 1808. The contest began when Hudson’s Bay traders deployed west and south of Hudson Bay: west into the Saskatchewan and Athabaska districts, and south into the Red River and Rainy Lake districts. While the Hudson’s Bay Company’s advance into the fur-rich Saskatchewan and Athabaska made Nor’ Westers uneasy, it was their rivals’ southward push that really touched a nerve with them. New posts on the Rainy River and at the junction of the Red and Assiniboine rivers confronted the Nor’ Westers precisely where their many branching canoe routes came together to form their main-trunk line from Lake Winnipeg to Fort William. As a transportation hub, the area was vital to the Nor’ Westers’ ability to keep their many posts in communication and supply. Not only that, the region from Lake Winnipeg to Rainy Lake yielded two resources that were essential to the North West Company’s far-flung operations. One was birchbark for the construction and repair of canoes. The company’s forward base of Rainy Lake, site of the rendezvous for the Athabaska brigades, doubled as a canoe-making center. The other essential resource was bison. The animal was hunted primarily for its meat, which was made into pemmican. Pemmican was a portable, high-energy food that was used to provision the ­voyageurs’ canoes as well as to supplement the heavy diet of fish at the northernmost trading posts.1

  Birchbark and pemmican were key products of what the fur traders called the “provisioning trade,” a vigorous industry that supported the more conspicuous commerce in furs. Pemmican was the mainstay of the provisioning trade. It was produced by cutting the meat of buffalo and other large game into thin strips, drying the strips over a fire until they were hard and brittle, then pounding them into tiny flakes, and rendering the flakes with melted fat. Finally, the substance was wrapped in dried parchment-skin bags of ninety-pound weight (to match the standard ninety-pound packs of made beaver) and loaded in canoes like coal in a coal tender. Rich in calories, nonperishable, and portable, pemmican was the perfect high-energy food for fueling canoemen. A two-pound ration was sufficient to power a voyageur with his paddle all day long, while half that quantity could sustain an inactive passenger.2 Pemmican formed a part of subsistence economies all over North America, but its factory production for the provisioning trade was unique to the parkland and prairie west of the Red River. There, a growing population of Métis offspring of the fur traders made bison hunting and pemmican the center of their economy.3

  Since the Nor’ Westers regarded the Red River country as an essential resource area and strategic hub for their vast operations, they were deeply concerned when the Hudson’s Bay Company began to meddle in the area in a startling new way commencing around 1811. The source of their angst was the Scottish nobleman Thomas Douglas, Fifth Earl of Selkirk, who dreamed of founding an agricultural colony in the Red River valley for the resettlement of poor, dispossessed Scottish highlanders. Lord Selkirk, as he was commonly known, claimed to have a humanitarian interest in helping thousands of highland crofters who had been driven off their farms by Britain’s agricultural revolution. His first attempts at colonization centered in eastern Canada. Then, in 1809, he came into possession of considerable shares of stock in the Hudson’s Bay Company, and he began to consider the Red River country for another colonization scheme that would double as a place for Hudson’s Bay employees and their families to live in retirement. Over the next two years he acquired a controlling interest in the fur company and persuaded the board of directors to grant him rights to a huge tract of land as a step toward implementing his plan. The grant in fee simple, executed in 1811, covered a staggering 116,000 square miles and took in swaths of the present states of Minnesota and North Dakota as well as portions of present-day Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

  As all of this land fell within the Hudson Bay watershed, it was part of Rupert’s Land under the Hudson’s Bay Company’s 1670 royal charter and was legally the company’s land to give away. Nevertheless, the Nor’ Westers were outraged when they learned of Lord Selkirk’s scheme and the so-called Selkirk Grant. They considered the territory theirs by right of discovery (that is, it was theirs by way of the French, who were its first European discoverers). Equally important, a significant number of Métis considered the area to be the homeland of their rising nation. To both the ­Nor’ ­Westers and Métis, it mattered not a whit that Selkirk claimed to be acting in a humanitarian interest. From their perspective, Selkirk’s vision of turning the Red River valley into settled farmland clashed with their own interests in keeping the area wild for continued beaver and pemmican production.4

  The North West Company tried to stop Selkirk’s colonization scheme at its source, in the Scottish port towns where Selkirk expected to find his colonists. Simon McGillivray, the younger brother of William McGillivray, published a series of notices in the Scottish press aimed at frightening away prospective emigrants. Writing under the alias “Highlander,” McGillivray portrayed the long journey as extremely perilous and the Red River country as a horrible place to scratch farms out of the wilderness. He warned that the Hudson’s Bay Company would not be prepared to take care of the colonists when they arrived. They would likely lose their scalps to the warlike Indians if they did not die of starvation or drown in one of the ice-cold rivers first.5 The North West Company’s propaganda effort may have depressed the number of emigrants willing to risk all and face such perils, but it could not stop the emigration altogether.

  The first party of Red River colonists sailed from Stornoway, Scotland, in the late summer of 1811. Numbering a few dozen men, women, and children, it landed on the shore of Hudson Bay, wintered over at the edge of the tundra, and in the spring made its way in clumsy bateaux up the Hayes River and Lake Winnipeg to the
Red River, arriving there at the end of the summer of 1812 with scarcely enough time to prepare for the onset of the next winter. Although the settlers were woefully ill prepared for their new environment, they survived the harsh prairie winter on buffalo meat and merciful gifts of food from Indians, Métis, and even the North West traders. Other parties followed, and by the end of 1813 the colony stood at about one hundred strong. The settlement was located near the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, a place the fur traders called the Forks (the site of downtown Winnipeg today). It consisted of about twenty-five long lots, a cluster of settler homes, livestock corrals, and a log storehouse.6

  Before the settlers arrived, the North West Company moved preemptively to occupy the Forks. The Nor’ Westers built a trading house and large stockade at the very junction of the Red and Assiniboine rivers in 1810. Shortly after the first settlers arrived, the Hudson’s Bay Company began construction of its own post two miles below the North West post. When the rival companies each developed a stronghold at the Forks, they showed their mutual intention to dig in there for a hard fight, winner take all. Their intentions were on display not only in the robustness of the forts, but in the names they picked for them. The Hudson’s Bay Company named its post Fort Douglas after Thomas Douglas, the Earl of Selkirk, signaling that the company stood foursquare behind Selkirk’s Red River colony. The North West Company named its post Fort Gibraltar, after Britain’s island fortress at the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea, signaling that it valued the place no less than the British navy valued its strategic base on the isle of Gibraltar.