Part 3 (1/2)
Sinipson ignored the ro(ks, but Sinith proved to be correct. The area he pinpointed as ha~ ingvaluable inineralization laterproved to contain a huge iron-ore body, as Nvell as lesser quant.i.ties of fitaniuni, lead, zinc, nickel, asbestos, coluinbiurn and uraniuiri.
GROWING UP COLD 41.
iced or canned salmon to England, gave him an excuse for corresponding directly with HBC headquarters in London, bypa.s.sing his aging benefactor, Sir George Simpson. The Company eventually formalized this arrangement by separating Labrador from its Lachine administration, so that Smith now reported to London on all his activities. In one of his last letters, Simpson warned his ambitious prot6g6 against being heavyhanded trying to impress his British superiors: ”When you want to bring any point strongly under notice, it will have a better chance by putting it in a few clear and appropriate words than by spinning out the theme so as to make it look important by the s.p.a.ce it occupies on paper.”
Smith ignored that advice and his letters grew embarra.s.singly verbose.
As soon as he felt a promotion might be in the works, Smith did what lie would always do in later life: he remarried Isabella. This particular wedding, performed either by an itinerant missionary or a visiting sea captain, must ~ave been staged so that Smith could not only salve his conscience but also specifically refer to the sanctioned ceremony in his London correspondence.
He was appointed Chief Factor shortly afterwards at the age of forty-four, and in 1864 decided to take his first home furlough in twenty-six years. After visiting his mother, who was now almost blind, he hurried to London and spent the balance of his leave trying to ingratiate himself with the bigwigs at the HBCs Fenchurch Street head office. He met the Governor, Sir Edmund Walker Head, his deputy, Curtis Miranda Lampson, Eden Colvile, a future Governor, and most of the other important Committeemen. ”Smith, the officer in charge of our Esquimaux Bay District,” Colvile reported to Lampson, ” . . . gives a good account of our affairs in that region, where he has been stationed for many years. As he is just the sort of man you would like to meet, shrewd 42 LABRADOR SMITH.
and well-informed upon every topic relating to that terra incognita of the British Empire, I have asked him to dine with us on the 14th.” Lampson, in turn, had been predictably charined by the visitor who from now on was a marked man in the Company's. .h.i.ture planning. There was one small hitch. As was their custom, on the eve of the departure of the supply s.h.i.+p (which would carry Smith home), the Company directors proposed hearty toasts to the well-being of its Commissioned Officers. But when he was called on to reply, Smith had vanished. Overcome by a fit of shyness, the Labrador trader (who had known be would be requested to speak and had prepared his notes) could not face the distinguished gathering, afraid that he might somehow blot his copybook. It was the first public evidence of Smith's well-deserved reputation as a clamsh.e.l.l.
Smith was back in North West River by August 1865, but the visit had transformed him. f le now knew there was still a chance for him to partic.i.p.ate in the great events of his time. Despite his geographical isolation, Smith's reading of the Company's prospects was amazingly accurate. Perhaps because he had never been there and had no vested interest in the HBCs main fields of operation in the West, lie could clearly see that the future would not run with the buffalo hunters or fur-trade canoes but with the oxcarts and ploughs of settlers come to claim new lives in the new land. ”I myself am becoming convinced that before many decades are past,” he wrote to a friend at the time,”the world will see a great change in the country north of Lake Superior and in the Red River country when the Company's licence expires or its Charter is modified. . .
. You will understand that 1, as a Labrador man, cannot be expected to sympathize altogether with the prejudice against settlers and railways entertained by many of the western commissioned officers. At all events, it is probable that settlement of GROWING UP COLD 43.
the country from Fort William Westward to the Red River, and even a considerable distance beyond, will eventually take place and with damaging effect to the fur trade generally.”
Within a year, the newly self-confident Smith had decided to visit Boston, New York and Montreal. Ostensibly, his trip was to view the sights of the city he had left twenty-seven years earlier. ”The object I most wanted to see. . . ” he explained, ”was the Victoria Bridge, which is truly one of the wonders of the world, and gives Montreal an unbroken railway communication of I 100 miles. . . . ” In reality, he was seeking belated acceptance in the milieu he felt had suddenly become accessible to him.
The most important part of his trip, at least in retrospect, was a call on his cousin George Stephen. The son of a Banffs.h.i.+re carpenter, Stephen had emigrated from Scotland at twenty-one to become a clerk in his cousin's Montreal drapery business, in which he eventually purchased a controlling interest. He studied banking and had become a.s.sociated with some of Montreal's leading entrepreneurs. The cousins' initial meeting was hardly propitious. The Smith family had gone shopping, and Donald had purchased a gaudy crimson carpet-bag for his Labrador journeys. Later, ~e wouldn't discuss his encounter with Stephen, but when Isabella was asked whether his cousin had been happy to see Smith, she burst out: ”Really, why should Mr. Stephen be glad to see country cousins like us-all the way from Labrador? I wish ... [my husband] had waited until he had met Mr. Stephen before buying that red carpet-bag. But he wouldn't let me carry it and the rest of us waited outside.” Still, Stephen did condescend to introduce his country cousin to friends at the Bank of Montreal and leading members of the city's s.h.i.+pping circles. All the talk was about domestic electricity, still considered a risky innovation, William Gladstone's surprising eloquence in the 44 LABRADOR SMITH.
British House of Commons, Alfred Tennyson's latest verses and the prospects for Canada under Confederation, then only a year away.
Smith reluctantly reuurned to North West River, but mentally he had already left Labrador behind. Simpson had died in 1860, and his successor, Alexander Girant Dallas, had transferred the Company's North American headquarters to Red River, closer to its main field operations. Since Smith was already in charge of the Labrador District, all that remained in Lachine was direction of the relatively minor Montreal District, which included the King's Posts along the St Lawrence as well as trading forts up the Ottawa and Mattawa rivers. After the retirement on June 1, 1869, of the Montreal District's Chief Factor, F.M. Hopkins, ”Labrador Smith,” as he had become known in the Company's setvice, was appointed to the job.
And so Donald Alexander Smith came out of the wilderness at last. He was forty-nine years old, his skin permanently blackened by two decades of snow tans, his nerves as taut as those of a sprinter about to start his champions.h.i.+p turn.
Montreal by then had a population of about 100,000, its streets had been paved and its harbour dredged, and the city (North America's tenth largest) was becoming an important rail and steams.h.i.+p terininus. Smith fitted in as if he had never left. ”I called today to pay my respects . . . ” reported a startled HBC Factor shortly after Smith's arrival, ”and was surprised to find him so affable and a.s.suming, with no trace of the ruggedness you would a.s.sociate with the wilderness. You'd think lie had spent all his life at the Court of St James instead of Labrador. . . .” One reason Smith was treated as an equal by members of the city's financial elite was that in a modest way he was already one of thern. During most of his time in Labrador he had GROWING UP COLD 45.
Donald Smitb in 1871
put away virtually his entire HBC earnings (arriving in Montreal with a grub-stake of $50,000), but starting in 1853 with the purchase of two shares, he had also quietly been acc.u.mulating stock in the Bank of Montreal. Coincidentally, George Stephen had been doing the same thing, and within the next four years the two cousins would become the Bank of Montreal's secondlargest shareholders.
Overnight, Smith seemed to be launched on the urban business career that had been his long-postponed dream. Then a confluence of circ.u.mstances intervened and hurled him into the vortex of a strange rebellion gathering momentum halfway across the continent.
CHAPTER 3.
BRINGING LOUIS.
RIEL TO HEEL.
Louis Riel remains the perfect mai-tyr of the prototypical Canadian tragedy: a zeell-meaning yet deluded inystic who died prematurely by pretending to be sane.
'nm cotjNTRY miosF, iIIS'rom Smith was about to affect still seemed more an idea than a reality. Canada in 1869 consisted of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec and Ontario (the latter two iiiinus their present northern areas), plus the huge but nearly enipty western territories then in the process of being acquired from the Hudson's Bay Company.* After protracted negotiations, the Canadian government had agreed to purchase Prince Rupert's original land grant for 000,000 ($1,460,000) through a loan guaranteed by the Treasury of the United Kingdom. In addition to receiving cash, the I IBC was granted unhindered trading privileges and 45,000 acres around its 120 trading posts as well as the right to claim, during the ensuing fifty years, one-twentieth of the fertile land (about seven million acres) between Lake Winnipeg and the Rocky Mountains. The transfer that would extinguish the 1IBCs long-coveted monopoly rights was to take cffect on December 1, 1869.
In the decade after Confederation, most of the 3.6 million citizens of the new Dominion scratched for a
For de ta i Is, see Caewrv oj'tbe 47ihlerncu, hardcove r, pa ges 3 61-
47.
48 LABRADOR SMITH.
living in rural isolation; only 390 square miles were occupied by two dozen embryonic towns and cities. Montreal was the largest at 100,000 people, with Quebec and Toronto competing for second place at about 60,000 each. Across the broad continent west of the Lakehead, there was almost nothing. ”The plains were as thousands of years of geological and climatic change had made them,” wrote XV.L. Morton, the bard of western Canadian historians. ”The gra.s.ses flowed, the prairie fires ran in the wind; the buffalo grazed like cloud shadows in the plain; the buffalo hunt raised a flurry of dust in the diamond summer light; the rivers sought the distant sea unchecked; surnmer made green, autumn bronze, winter white, spring gray. . . What had been wrought . . . lay unchanged until it became the setting for the last frontier.”
Because the HBC had for two centuries kept nearly everyone who was not a Company employee out of its domain, the new Canadian West remained in the public mind a territory not far removed from those mysterious hunks of geography labelled on ancient charts ”Here Be Dragons.” Returning missionaries and the odd free spirit had brought out fragmentary reports of the lands contours and habitability, but it was the American, not the Canadian, West that attracted most settlers. The larger population base of the United States, its better climate and the mood of egalitarianism that characterized the self-confident republic made it a good place to start new lives. The notion of upward mobility still seemed foreign in Canada, which remained trapped in perpetuating vestiges of the British cla.s.s system.
Canada's West was isolated more because of the absence of transportation facilities than as the result of geography. There were only three means of entry: by s.h.i.+p to York Factory thi-ough Hudson Bay; by Red River cart northward from the headwaters of the Mississippi BRINGING LOUIS RIEL TO HEEL 49.
River in Minnesota; or by canoe along the historic furtrade routes from the Upper end of the Great Lakes. Local HBC post managers had from the beginning been encouraged to live off the land, but except for the tracts of cultivation at Red River and a tiny spread at c.u.mberland House, the pioneer trading post opened by Samuel Hearne in 1774, only a few kitchen gardens had taken root. That began to change with the report by John Palliser, a Dublin-born explorer and buffalo hunter who was commissioned bY the Royal Geographical Society to report on the region's potential. fie not only defined a fertile land crescentacross the prairie and noted deposits of coal and other minerals but also explored six pa.s.ses through the Rockies for possible future railway construction. His optimism was somewhat tempered by the conclusion that no railway could be built across the treacherous bogs north of Lake Superior-, the Red River settlement would have to be provisioned from the United States, via Chicago and St Paul.*
By the late 1860s, Red River's inhabitants, including the offspring of the dispossessed crofters from the Scottish clearances, had iurned the fifty-mile area around the I I BC postat Fort Garry, near the junction of the Red and a.s.siniboine rivers, into a relatively prosperous, if insular, community of about ten thousand souls. Half were proud buffalo hunters descended from the mixed marriages of voyageurs and HBC clerks with Cree, Saulteaux, Blackfoot, Chipewyan, Dogrib and Slavey women.
Their spiritual centre was the grey stone cathedral in the parish of St Boniface, presided over by the shrewd Roman Catholic bishop, Alexandre -Antonin Iach&. The tiny village of Winnipeg at the edge of the IIBC fort had grown into a miniature business centre, with half a dozen saloons,
*For the founding 4 Lord Selkirk's colony, see Caesars of'the Wildevness, hardcover, pages 137--89.