Taking into account that not all references to “starving” were as dire as the word suggests, it is still true that starvation loomed as a frightening prospect for the fur traders. The Indians faced this threat each winter with far greater equanimity, in part because actual death by starvation, which was rare from the Europeans’ standpoint, was fairly common in their experience. No one among the Ojibwas was immune to the danger. Old Premier, the prominent chief, starved to death with his entire extended family in the winter of 1825–26.6 The Indians’ seeming indifference to the prospect of starvation could be unnerving to the European fur trader. In contrast to the disciplined way in which the trading house laid in stores and measured out rations, the Indians displayed a feast-or-famine mode of living that struck the fur traders as recklessly improvident.7
The Rainy Lake region was a particularly hungry land in the early nineteenth century. The once abundant moose and caribou had largely been hunted out. Farther westward, on the prairie, fur traders and Indians still ate elk and buffalo during the winter months, but the Rainy Lake region afforded only meager amounts of animal protein from fishing, snaring rabbits, and occasionally killing a large mammal. “This is a miserable place for provisions,” McLoughlin remarked in the post journal in 1822. In this instance, he recorded an objective fact.8
Spring was the most welcome season of the year at Rainy Lake House, but it came on at an agonizingly slow pace. As the days lengthened and the sun rose higher in the southern sky, weeks passed and the enormous mantle of snow and ice remained locked in place. The snow might not completely leave the ground until the latter part of April, and ice would remain on the lakes and swamps for some while after that. During the long thaw, travel became exceedingly difficult. McLoughlin observed that although the climate of the Rainy Lake region was similar to that of his native Quebec, the flatness of the terrain meant that there was no appreciable current in the rivers to dislodge the ice and carry it away. Instead of a sudden and noisy spring breakup, the lake ice slowly thinned and loosened into plates that lingered for weeks. These “flakes,” as McLoughlin called them, drifted to and fro across the lake with the least breath of wind, so that a shore offering clear passage for a canoe one day might be jammed with ice the next.9
Notwithstanding the difficulty of travel during the long spring breakup, it was precisely at this time that the traders redoubled their efforts to go out and find Indians, who were then concluding their winter hunts. Those still at the fort kept busy filling the ice house, and cutting and hauling wood and birchbark for building and repairing canoes. The actual manufacture of canoes had to wait on warmer weather, as warm days were needed for stretching the birchbark. During the month of May, the men of the fort were variously employed making canoes and plowing and sowing the fields.10
With June came preparations for the outbound journey. First, the chief factor made final inventories of furs, goods, and provisions and settled the men’s accounts. Then all of the furs in the fur store were sorted and bundled into ninety-pound packs under a wedge press, and these were carried on strong backs down to the canoe landing and placed in the big north canoes.
With the departure of the chief factor and his brigade, Rainy Lake House was left in the hands of the chief trader, two clerks, and a few laborers together with all of the wives and children. With its total population of men, women, and children reduced to about half what it was in winter, the trading house then passed through the normally quiet summer months.
38
Opposing the Americans
While the merger of the two great fur companies in 1821 secured a monopoly over the country from Hudson Bay to Lake Athabaska, the reorganized Hudson’s Bay Company still faced competition along the international frontier with the United States. Nowhere was this threat greater than in the Rainy Lake region. The company’s aggressive new leader, George Simpson, recognized two sources of competition there: the American Fur Company and the independent traders. Of the two, Simpson saw a more urgent need to oppose the latter, the “petty Traders of Lake Superior.” Competition from such people could not be tolerated, for if they were permitted to chip away at the company’s territory then others would follow.
The largest independent trader in the area was George Johnston. Based in Sault Ste. Marie, Johnston established two posts in the Rainy Lake region in 1821. One post was on Crane Lake in American territory and the other on Mille Lacs in British territory. Johnston put two brothers, Paul and Bazil Beaulieu, in charge of the first post and a former Nor’ Wester, Joseph Cadotte, in charge of the second.1
By the time McLoughlin took over Rainy Lake House in September 1822, Cadotte had been driven out of British territory by an Indian attack that claimed the lives of two of his men. But the Beaulieu brothers still had their trading house at Crane Lake. McLoughlin’s first impulse was to send his chief trader, Simon McGillivray, to Crane Lake with a force of men to undercut their trade. En route, however, McGillivray learned that a US customs agent was in the vicinity, so he left his men inside British territory and returned to Rainy Lake House to confer with McLoughlin. Since 1816, the US government had banned British traders in American territory, but as yet there had been no enforcement of the law west of the Great Lakes. Now both men agreed that they should not risk the arrest of their men or the hefty $1,000 fine for trading without a US license. Instead, McGillivray established an outpost at nearby Basswood Lake in British territory, still with the object of capturing most of the trade and driving off the American competition.2
With McGillivray and his Hudson’s Bay men aggressively trading nearby, the Beaulieu brothers soon ran out of provisions at Crane Lake. All their hired men deserted them. Some of these deserters appeared at Rainy Lake House in December, “starving” and offering to work for food. McLoughlin refused to employ them, but on humanitarian grounds he gave them each two days’ rations and sent them on their way. The Beaulieu brothers stayed at Crane Lake through the winter, though by spring they were reduced to eating animal skins to keep alive.3
The Hudson’s Bay Company faced a far more formidable rival in the American Fur Company of New York financier John Jacob Astor. This company operated on a different business model than either the Hudson’s Bay Company or the North West Company. Astor acted as import-export agent for the American Fur Company, which in turn served as liaison to the traders in the field. Each trader was assigned a department, or “outfit.” The trader normally assumed all risk of profit or loss, although the company would sometimes share in profit or loss on a 50–50 basis. The American Fur Company tried to minimize competition between its own traders but was never completely successful.4
Although Astor liked to suggest that his fur company was a US equivalent to the Hudson’s Bay Company—“the only respectable one of any capital now existing in the country,” he once wrote to Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri—in fact, the American Fur Company behaved more like the rapacious independent traders with whom it competed.5 Its decentralized capital structure ensured that its traders would emphasize immediate profits over long-term interests. At a time when the reorganized Hudson’s Bay Company began taking small steps toward conserving wildlife, reducing imports of liquor, and improving the welfare of its employees, the American Fur Company did nothing of the sort.6 The only thing that distinguished it from George Johnston’s outfit was its size. As the American Fur Company had far more capital behind it, McLoughlin could not expect to defeat this rival so much as hold it at bay.7
In the fall of 1822, the American Fur Company established new posts at Grand Portage, Rainy Lake, Vermilion Lake, and Lake of the Woods—a line of posts running more or less along the US border with British America. (The US-British Convention of 1818 defined the international border from Lake Superior to Lake of the Woods as not along the forty-ninth parallel but following the main voyageur route through the maze of lakes and streams now known as the Boundary Waters. This description of the boundary line was unambiguous to most traders and Indians in the r
egion, although it would not be officially surveyed until 1823 and not finally settled until the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842.) The whole area from the shore of Lake Superior across what is now the northern tier of Minnesota counties was included in the American Fur Company’s Fond du Lac Department and placed in the capable hands of William Morrison, another former Nor’ Wester. In George Simpson’s judgment, Morrison was “one of the best and most experienced Salteaux traders in the country.”8
Informed by Simpson of the American Fur Company’s plans, McLoughlin waited for Morrison to come up the Rainy River in the early fall of 1822. Morrison sent a pair of clerks instead. One was Pierre Cȏté, a mixed blood from Fond du Lac, and the other was Joseph Cadotte, the former Nor’ Wester who had worked for George Johnston at Mille Lacs the previous winter. When the outfit finally arrived without Morrison on October 5, McLoughlin counted fourteen men in seven small canoes, the lead canoe flying the American flag. As he soon learned, the fourteen included the white Indian, John Tanner, whom McLoughlin still knew by his Indian name, Shaw-shaw-wa ne-ba-se, the Swallow. They camped on the south side of the river almost exactly opposite Rainy Lake House. The next day the men set to work building a post, which rose within sight of the Hudson’s Bay establishment. Morrison visited the new post only once during the winter, and although McLoughlin recorded his arrival and departure from across the river, he made no mention in the journal of any courtesy call between them.9
Cȏté and Cadotte proved to be wily foes for McLoughlin. The chief factor asked the Americans to refrain from trading with Indians on British soil, but the Americans refused. After enduring several months of the Americans’ trespasses, he called Cȏté and Cadotte over to Rainy Lake House on a ruse and took them prisoner as soon as they set foot on the British side of the river. The tactic was reminiscent of the old struggle between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company. McLoughlin wished not to venture too far down that road, so after keeping them confined for ten hours he extracted a promise from Cȏté in writing that he would not allow his people to trade with the British Indians any more, and then he let the two go. Writing at length in the post journal that evening, McLoughlin cogitated over the day’s excitement and what it meant for the future. Had he done wrong in holding the men prisoner? “Taking them after asking them to come over,” he wrote, “it may be said I broke my word—but it must be recollected that they first broke theirs by coming to our side.” If he could not treat his unscrupulous American rivals as roughly as he might have liked, neither could he stand by passively when they trespassed. And yet, as he tried to force a change in the American company’s practices, he still worried that it might provoke retaliation or expose him to legal action by higher authorities.10
But McLoughlin’s tactic seemed to do the trick. The Americans ceased trespassing on British territory. And with the Hudson’s Bay Company’s greater capacity for supplying the Indians their wants, he soon had the lion’s share of the trade. In his year-end report on the district, McLoughlin stated with obvious satisfaction that the Americans departed in June with twelve packs of furs (nine of them underweight) compared to the Hudson’s Bay Company’s twenty-nine. When McLoughlin reported in person to the governor and council of the Northern Department at York Factory that summer, he boldly predicted that the Americans would not be back the next season.11
VIII COLLISION
39
Working for Wages
Two years after leaving Indian country with Therezia, and four years after leaving it the first time, Tanner returned to Rainy Lake in the role of a fur trader. John McLoughlin observed the arrival of Tanner’s group from the British side of the Rainy River and recorded the event in the post’s journal. “About one PM Messrs Cote and Cadotte made their appearance in the Canoes with the American flag flying. They camped at the South side halfways between the two Forts. Several Saulteur Canoes brought up the rear, and seemed loaded with provisions.” The date was October 5, 1822.1
Tanner may have been the only American citizen in this outfit. The other dozen or so men were probably all French Canadians. The American Fur Company, like the Hudson’s Bay Company, found French Canadian voyageurs to be an indispensable source of labor in the Great Lakes region. The American Fur Company’s Northern Department was staffed almost entirely by these people. Tanner was the odd man out. He did not speak French like the others, nor did he understand their manners. He was little more at home in the close quarters of the American trading post at Rainy Lake than he had been the year before among Kentucky farmers.2
The clerk in charge of the post, Pierre Cȏté, soon sent Tanner to Manitou Rapids, a place on the Rainy River where the Indians gathered and caught sturgeon during the fall migration. Traders normally took a quantity of liquor along to trade for part of the Indians’ catch rather than seine for sturgeon themselves. In years past, Tanner’s friends had entered into this exchange both at Manitou Rapids and at the rapids on the inlet into Rainy Lake, a place the traders knew as Kettle Falls. Tanner had seen the traders make off with so much of the Indians’ dried sturgeon that their canoes could barely stay afloat, while the Indians got nothing for their work but a day of debauchery. He also remembered the time at Kettle Falls when he indulged in a drinking bout, passed out drunk, and awoke hours later to find all his possessions stolen. Contemplating these practices from his new vantage point, as a non-Indian engaged in stocking the fort with winter provisions, he felt as averse to the use of liquor as he had ever been. Refusing to take any whiskey in his outfit, he went to the rapids and caught 150 sturgeon by his own efforts.3
Soon after Tanner returned to the post, Cȏté assigned him and five other men to scour the country in search of Indians with peltries. They were to load up with trade goods and not return until they had exchanged every last item for furs. This aggressive mode of trade—taking the goods to the hunters rather than waiting for the hunters to bring their peltries to the post—was called “running en dérouine.” Traders increasingly employed the practice in order to maximize their returns and get an edge over their competitors. Tanner was to be the group’s guide and interpreter. He proposed to wait until the first snow so that they might use dog sleds to carry their freight. Cȏté insisted that they leave without delay. Tanner prevailed on another point, however: their outfit, like the one he took to the fall fishery, contained no liquor.4
On their fourth day out they ran into a snowstorm. Tanner called a halt while everyone made snowshoes. When the weather finally cleared, the land lay deep in snow. Tanner wanted to go on, but several in the party thought this foolhardy. The group finally split in two. Four men insisted on returning to the post, while Tanner and one other chose to keep going. This fellow, who went by the name Veiage, impressed Tanner as an exceptionally hardy one of his kind. The two men loaded as much of the outfit as they could on their backs before parting company with the others.
Tanner and Veiage each carried a substantial quantity of wild rice. This was their sole sustenance unless they could augment it by hunting or, should they become desperate, by trading some of their goods for food instead of furs. After struggling on through the deep snow for several more days, Tanner and Veiage grew weak on their meatless diet. Tanner led them to an Ojibwa encampment. These Indians were nearly as destitute as they. Leaving Veiage in their care, he trekked on to the next encampment, which the Indians told him lay some distance ahead. When he arrived at the second encampment, he found those Indians to be just as hungry and poor as the first group; they could offer him nothing. Wearily he turned back, for the first group had been willing to give Veiage and him shelter at least. But stumbling into the camp late in the day, he found the lodges were gone and neither the Indians nor the French Canadian were anywhere to be seen. Their trail led off through the snow, but Tanner was too spent to follow it. As dusk came on, he could not summon the will to make a fire. Foreseeing that the night would be an extremely cold one and he would likely freeze to death, he composed himself to die.
Tanner was alone but not abandoned. Just before dark, an Indian hunter returned to the site to look for him. He roused Tanner from his torpor, helped him build a fire, and huddled with him under his blanket through the still, frigid night. In the morning the man left him tending the fire while he went to check his trap line, returning with one beaver. Then he led Tanner to their new camp, where the flesh of the single beaver was cooked and divided among the twenty people of the band plus their two guests. Marginally fortified, Tanner and Veiage set out once more.5
As the winter progressed, they slowly converted their loads of goods and trinkets into furs. When the snow on the ground consolidated, they acquired dogs and a dogsled. There were more desperate days: sometimes it seemed they threaded a line between purposeful work and a sheer fight for survival.
Once, as they followed the trail of a band of Indians, they were reduced to gnawing on animal bones and scraps of leather that the Indians had discarded a few days before. Though the Indians’ tracks were now covered by snow, Tanner and Veiage began searching under the snow’s surface as they walked, looking for worn-out moccasins or anything else that could provide the least bit of sustenance. By and by they found two dead dogs, each one lying under a telltale snowdrift. These they dug out and ate.
On another occasion their wanderings brought them to the lodge of Oto-pun-ne-be, Tanner’s old friend who had avenged him on Plantation Island some four years earlier. Tanner was taken aback when Oto-pun-ne-be’s wife cried out at his emaciated appearance.6
Rainy Lake House Page 35