Part 2 (1/2)

Donald Smith in 1838

Much of Smith's fifty-day voyage was spent studying the only reference book aboard, Francis Evans's The Emigrant's Directory and Guide, which stuffily advised: ”Canada is a country where immigrants should not expect to eat the bread of idleness, but where they may expect what is more worthy to be demonstrated as happiness-the comfortable fruits of industry.” Smith landed in Montreal at a time when nationalist stirrings had reached their culmination in the Papineau rebellion, and his vessel pa.s.sed the steamer Canada, carrying the last of the Patriotes of the 1837 uprising to Bermudan exile. British North America then had a population of 1.2 million, with most of the lands north and west of what is now Ontario belonging to ”The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Tradeing into Hudsons Bay.” Montreal was a crude bush settlement numbering scarcely 30,000 inhabitants, its only patch of sidewalk being in front of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. On dry 24 LABRADOR SMITH.

days, blinding limesto ne- powdered wind eddies made walking difficult, while rain turned the streets of the hilly town into mudslides that made getting about all but impossible. McGill College consisted of a medical fac- ulty staffed by only two part-time professors.

Smith walked upriver to Lachine, where Simpson administered the Hudson's Bay Company's 170 trading posts, scattered not only across the Prairies to the Pacific but also down to the Oregon Country, through half a dozen future American states, south to San Francisco, and as far west as Hawaii.

The young Scot was hired at ”Y,20 and found” a year and a.s.signed to counting muskrat skins in the Company warehouse.*

The initial drudgery in the Lachine warehouse was a useful lesson for Smith in learning how to differentiate the various qualities of pelts, and he soon graduated from muskrat to grading beaver, marten, mink and otter, learning to judge the value of a silver fox by the number

*At the time, apprentice-clerks worked five-year terms at a gradually increasing salary that culminated at E50 in the final twelve months. If their i ecords were acceptable, they could then sign up for another five years at Y.75. A third contract with a.10 00 maximum was offered to the best of them, followed, after a total of at least fifteen years of loyal and efficient service, bv a chance to be promoted to a Chief Trader's and, eventually, Chief Factor's commission. These two ranks were eligible for shares in the Company's annual profits that ranged as high as E2,000.

Retired commissioned officers received half-pay for seven years. All HBC personnel were granted free board but had to buy such basic goods as soap and boots from Company stores, at a onethird discount. They were responsible for providing their own bedding and room furniture. Typical yearly food rations consisted of 240 pounds of flour, 20 pounds of tea, 120 pounds of sugar, 10 pounds of raisins, and 5 pounds of coffee or cocoa per person.

Their annual liquor allowance was two gallons each of sherry, port, brandy, runi, Scotch whisky, and all the linie juice they could drink.

GROWING UP COLD 25.

Montreal iii 1838, the year Smith arrived

of white hairs in its glossy patina. Buoyed by his uncle's introductions, he spent a memorable evening mingling with some of Montreal's leading citizens, including his host, the international financier Edward Ellice, HBC Arctic explorer Peter Warren Dease, Duncan Finlayson, then about to leave for his new a.s.signment as Governor of a.s.siniboia at Fort Garry, and Peter McGill, chairman of the Champlain and St Lawrence Rail-road and president of the Bank of Montreal. The Forres apprentice would leave Lachine soon afterwards and not return to Montreal permanently for another thirty years, but the memory of the sweet adrenalin of social acceptance he had experienced that brief, magic evening never left him.

The circ.u.mstances of Smith's departure remain mysterious. One version involves Frances Simpson, the Governor's vivacious wife, twenty-six years younger than a husband who spent most of his time away on inspection tours. According to a fellow apprentice, the lonely Mrs Simpson, who ”took a friendly interest in the 'indentured young gentlemen'. . . was attracted by the simplicity and gentle address of the new-comer's manners.”

26 LABRADOR SMITH.

Thev seem to have enjoyed an innocent flirtation, the odd 1)oating excursion on Lake St Louis and several cups of tea. Harmless it may have been, but the Governor was not amused. lie called Smith into his office soon after his return and was heard shouting that lie was not about to endure ”any upstart, quill-driving apprentices dangling about a parlour reserved to the n.o.bility and gentry.” Smith was abruptly banished to the Company's career purgatory, the King's Posts district at Tadoussac.

Owned by the French Crown before 1760 and mainly by British monarchs thereafter, the seven tiny trading locations had been leased in 18 3 0 by the HBC, which also rented the more easterly Seigniory of Mingan. Trade was slow because most of the territory had been beavered out and the Company did not enjoy the monopoly there it had elsewhere. a.s.signment to the region was regarded as an unwelcome alternative to being fired.

Tadoussac itself was one of the oldest trading points in North America; this was where Jacques Cartier had obtained his furs in 1515. Summers,” ere cool and damp, the winters bitterly windy; nothing disturbed the rugged, sterile geography-certainly not the huddle of huts in the hollow of a mountain without even the presumption of a stockade, near the confluence of the broad St Lawrence and the deep Saguenay. That was the Tadoussac of Smith's initial a.s.signment. He spent seven of his most unhappy and unproductive years in the area, trading princ.i.p.ally for fox, marten and sable pelts with the Montagnais Indians, who paddled down annually from the Quebec-Labrador plateau. ”You would have to travel the whole world over to find a greater contrast to the Scotch than these same Indians,” the young trader wrote home. ”If civilisation consists in frugality and foresight, then the Montagnais are far worse than dogs, who at least have sense enough to bury a bone against an evil day. In some of their lodges even before winter has properly GROWING UP COLD 27.

begun their rations have come to an end. Everything about the place has been swallowed that can be swallowed, and starvation stares them in the face.

They stalk in the tracks of a solitary caribou, and in their excitement forget their own hunger, but this does not make their families forget theirs. The caribou eludes them. They wander farther afield and at length bring down a bear. They cut him up and return to find their families dying or dead, which is what happened last month near Manwan Lake.”

Smith tried to keep his spirits up by reading such cla.s.sics as Plutarchs Lives and Benjamin Franklin's Correspondence, but often he found himself scanning every line of outdated copies of the Montreal Gazette and Quebec Mercury left behind by travellers. At this point he also suffered a strange ”second sight” experience, dreaming that Margaret, his favourite sister, on a sickbed in Forres, was muttering ”Donald! Oh, Donald” with her dying breath. Letters that reached him later revealed she had indeed died, of smallpox, on January 12, 1841, at the very hour, allowing for difference in longitude, of Smith's nightmare.

Eventually placed in charge of Mingan, the most remote of the Kings Posts (opposite North Point on Anticosti Island) and an even more dreary locale than Tadoussac, Smith incurred the wrath of Simpson, who arrived for a surprise inspection in the summer of 1845. The post's account books, which to Simpson were the Company's secular bibles, were far from satisfactory.

Following his visit, the Governor sent the young clerk this devastating a.s.sessment: ”Your counting house department appeared to me, in a very slovenly condition, so much so that I could make very little of any doc.u.ment that came under my notice. Your schemes of outfits were really curiously perplexing, and such as I trust I may never see again, while letters, invoices and accounts were to be 28 LABRADOR SMITH.

found tossing about as wastepaper in almost every room in the house ... if you were but to give a few hours a week to the arrangement of your papers your business would be in a very different state to that in which I found it.”

Smith hoped to redeem himself by submitting a neater set of accounts the following season, but on September 29, 1846, his house burned down. Ile had been briefly away on an errand, and one ofhis a.s.sistants had salvaged most of his belongings. With the Company records destroyed, Smith turned so despondent that he descended into a highly uncharacteristic public display of anger and frustration. According to eyewitnesses, he danced around the still-burning pyre of the tiny post, feeding the flames with his clothes and private papers, cackling incoherently: ”Let them go, too, if the Com- pany's goods have gone!”

The following winter he suffered from snow blindness and feared he might become permanently sightless without medical attention. Not bothering to wait for official permission, he boarded the HBOS Montrealbound supply s.h.i.+p Marren and reported his condition to Simpson. The Governor immediately ordered an eye examination. When the attending physician found no clinical problem, Simpson accused his clerk of malingering, then interrupted his catalogue of Smith's perfidies in mid-flight to offer him another chance.

It was not a typical Simpson gambit. Smith had now been with the Company most of a decade. He was

Smith's successors at the various King's Posts where he had kept the books had similar complaints, and the originals in the HBC Archives are scrawled with frustrated notations such as ”Hang Donald S.!” or ”d.a.m.n Donald Smith, I cannot make head or tail ofthis!” But there is evidence that Smith, rather than being care- less, was beginning to exercise his penchant for secrecy and that the accounts were kept in a code to which he alone had the key.

GROWING UP COLD 29.

twenty-eight and bad done little to distinguish himself Yet Simpson must have sensed a potential in the intense but sensitive young Scot that Smith himself probably didn't recognize. At the time, the HBC was busy trying to revive its Labrador district, partly to counter competing freebooters moving in from Newfoundland and also to prevent nomadic Indians from evading their Company debts as they migrated from one post to the next.

Simpson's business ac.u.men was attracted by that mammoth, frigid Labrador peninsula for precisely the reason no sane man wanted to go there. For its lat.i.tude, it was the coldest place on earth. Mercury froze in ther mometers. Snow fell early and deep; it stayed so long that winter stretched over nine months. To survive in that harsh climate, animals had to grow extra thick, tight pelts that fetched premium prices at the HBCs London auc tion house. As early as 1828, a Company trader named William Hendry bad sailed up the Ungava coast from Moose Factory injames Bay as far as Richmond Gulf and explored an overland route into Ungava Bay. Two years later, Nicol Firdayson established Fort Chimo about thirty miles above where the Koksoak River flows into Ungava Bay. There he waited twenty months for the local Naskapi to appear. When they finally did, Finlayson described them as ”the most suspicious and faithless set of Indians I ever had to deal with ... they must be sharply dealt with before they are properly domesticated.” The primitive tribe, then numbering less than three hundred, suffered from having no internal political structure--no chiefs, no social organization large ' r than the family, no ritual ceremonies to facilitate trade, no formal alliances with any other groups. They were subsistence hunters, living off migrating caribou, and it was mainly their addiction to the HBC,s rum and tobacco that prompted them to become trappers. As trade expanded, Simpson opened Fort Nascopie on the 30 LABRADOR SMITH.

northwest arni of Lake Pet.i.tsikapau (near present-day Schefferville) and purchased from some Quebec inerchants their post at North West River on Esquimaux Bay (now known as Lake Melville) about halfway up the eastern Labrador coast.

just before Smith come to Lachine with his eye problem, word had reached Simpson that Chief Trader William Nourse, then in charge of that faraway region, had been incapacitated and badly needed medical attention. The Governor directed the ”malingering” Smith to leave immediately at the head of an emergency winter relief party to North West River. A_lthough he had come out of the bush seeking solace for bruised eyes and for an even more seriously damaged ego, Smith now found himself with a challenging option.

The bristle of his Scottish nature had been touched: if Simpson was mean enough to issue such an order, Donald Smith was too proud not to obey it.

Accompanied by a young HBC clerk named James Grant and three Iroquois boatmen, Smith accomplished the thousand-mile journey in record time, almost starving to death along the wav and being lost for extended periods in snowstorms. It was the toughest physical ordeal of his life. Years later lie refused to dwell on the details, though it is known that two additional Indian guides hired along the way starved to death.

Once in Labrador, Smith found Nourse paralysed, the victim of a serious stroke. While Grant stationed himself at North West River, Smith took temporary charge of the smaller but more strategically located post at nearby Rigolet. The North West River station (near modern-day Goose Bay airport) was tucked into a clearing on the sh.o.r.e of a I 10-mile-deep salt-water gash in the frowning eminence of the unexplored Labrador coast, with mountain ranges rolling out of both horizons. Rigolet sat nearer the Atlantic, at the mouth of the rocky gorge that joined Hamilton Inlet to Esquimaux Bay. The GROWING UP COLD 31.

unpredictable riptides of those treacherous narrows had already claimed many an over-confident vessel, including the British maii-of-war Cleopatra. Smith placed the gravely il I Nourse aboard the annual supply s.h.i.+p, and by September his successor, Chief Trader Richard flardisty, had arrived from Montreal. Smith was promptly relegated to his earlier i ank of clerk, though he was delighted to welcome his new superior and especially his accompanying family. Hardisty, who had served in Wellington's army as an ordnance officer in the Peninsular campaign and the Battle of Waterloo, came to Labrador accompanied by his Mixed Flood wife (Margaret Sutherland) and their lively daughters, Isabella, Mary and Charlotte.*

While the Hardisty family moved inland to live at North West River, Smith remained at Rigolet. Under his direction, the little station becanic more than the mother post's maritime outlet. Ile met head-on the marauding free traders who were attempting to lure the Naskapi to their sh.o.r.e trading posts, ranging far back into the fur country to finalize his trades and claim defacto exclusivity over a territory outside the HBCs Charter.