Part 5 (1/2)
79.
80 LABRADOR SMITH.
supply stove-pipes for the barracks of the remaining army volunteers. The HBC submitted a high bid, a.s.suming it would get the business automatically.
A local merchant named James H. Ashdown sent in a much lower quote but lost thc contractwhen Smith convinced army officers the newcomer wasn't equipped to do the job. Once the HBC got the contract, Smith discovered there were no tinsmiths on his staff and ordered Ashdown to do the work under HBC auspices. When Ashdown refused, Smith asked the colonel to force the fellow into line. Wolseley cancelled the IJBCs contract instead and asked Ashdown (who went on to found western Canada's largest wholesale hardware house) to produce the stove-pipes at his original bid. The minor incident reflected the compet.i.tive new world in which the ancient fur-trading company would have to operate.
Smith's initial order of business was to settle accounts outstanding from the Red River Rebellion. It was typical of their corporate ethic that the HBC,s London Pooh-Bahs -.iewed Louis Riel's agonizing struggle on behalf of his people strictly as a bookkeeping entry. The uprising had disturbed the business of the Company, and now it was claiming refunds from the Canadian government for missing fur stocks, lost trading opportunities and six months' interest, at 5 percent, on the delayed transfer payment of E300,000-a total of Y,3 2,5 08, not counting the amounts Smith had paid out in bribes. It took a dozen years to settle the dispute, and the Company received very little cash because Ottawa subtracted the costs of surveying its territory, but the claim hurt the HBC's already poor reputation. ”A corporation has no conscience,” observed Captain WE Butler, Wolseley's intelligence officer, whose familiarity with the West produced its most evocative early literary portrait, The Great Lone Land.
THE GREAT FIRE CANOES 81.
”From a tvrant or a despot you may hope to win justice; from a roi)ber you may perhaps receive kindness; but a corporation of London merchants represents to my mind more mercenary mendacity, and more cowardly contempt of truth and fair play, than can be found in the human race.”
Despite such condemnation, there were some genuine worries about the 11BCs loss of stature. The Company had become vital in the daily lives of the North-West's Indians. Natural gathering places, its trading posts were the natives' only source of the barter goods that made wilderness life more bearable-the g,uns, blankets, axes and other items they had grown to depend on. ”The sudden withdrawal of the Company's operation from any part of the Indian country will cause widely spread misery and starvation and the consequent disorders and embarra.s.sment to the Government which spring from such scenes,” William Mactavish, Smith's predecessor, had warned, ”nor can any other company ... be in a position ... to supply the Indian tribes with the requisite regularity with those necessaries of life at present provided them. This is the secret of the Company domination-its existence is a necessity to the Indian.” That was true enough, but the fur trade itself was in a highly volatile state. Felt hats made from Canadian beaver had enjoyed a momentary fas.h.i.+on revival in the 1860s. The headgear took the shape of wide-brimmed adaptations of the ”wideawake,” a name i . rivented by the humour magazine Punch for a hat that had no nap. But now the new seamless silk toppers were much more in vogue, having been worn by the Prince Consort, the Prince of Wales and President Abraham Lincoln. Although there was continued strong demand for specialty pelts from North America, London's fur industry was turning towards other, less expensive sources, and to nutria, the skin of coypu rats, 82 LABRADOR SMITH.
being harvested in Brazil and Argentina by the million. The most immediate impact on the North-West was the final downgrading of York Factory, which for two centuries had been the flouris.h.i.+ng centre of the North American fur trade. By 1875, the headquarters of the HBC's Northern Department had been moved to Fort Garry and the magnificent tidewater depot was reduced to a regional trading post.
That s.h.i.+ft drew attention to the staggering realization that a full century after James Watt had perfected his steam engine, the Hudson's Bay Company was still depending on a primitive transportation system of horse- or ox-drawn carts, birchbark canoes and York boats. Apart from die immense manpower expenses, which were mounting now that the M6tis no longer thought of themselves as slaves, use of such primitive technology meant that it took the Company four years to realize returns on invested capital. As one frustrated shareholder exclaimed at the Company's 1871 annual meeting, ”Gentlemen, this Company has not been very celebrated for doing things in a hurry. It is really very much like Rip Van Winkle waking tip in the year 1871 and finding out that steam engines and steam boats will be of advantage to the trade.”
Right on cue, Donald Smith wrote to William Armit, the HBC's secretary, on November 6, 1871, recommending that the fur trade's cost structure be streamlined by the use of steamboats along the North Saskatchewan River, its main traffic artery. That would radically reduce costs and, ideally, bring the furs out in a season or two instead of four seasons. On top of these benefits, Smith recognized the possibility of perpetuating the Company's monopoly over western Canada, this time by controlling its commercial traffic flows, THE GREAT FIRE CANOES 83.
The Hudson's Bay Company decided to relaunch itself as a prairie s.h.i.+pping line, using a brand-new fleet of what the Indian,; quickly dubbed Fire Canoes.
INCREDIBLE AS IT NOW SEEMS, an awkward but sporadically effective flotilla of sternwheel steamboats for a time supplied the Canadian West. These s.h.i.+ps, chugging along at a respectable five knots, became a common sight in what everyone then-and now-a.s.sumed to be a landlocked prairie. They not only carried the materials of the fur trade (two or three trips in the high-water season easily handled the cargoes previously consigned to the large and expensive brigades of carts and fleets of York boats) but quickly branched out into ferrying the necessities of the new civilization being born on the Prairies. Ploughs and scythes, tea and bacon, thres.h.i.+ng machines, and the] r accompanying pioneers crowded the decks and cabins.*
The perky vessels' steam whistles could be heard up to Edmonton on the 1,200-mile flow of the North Saskatchewan River; along the South Saskatchewan past Saskatoon to Medicine Hat and beyond; on the a.s.simhome, from Fort Pelly and Fort Ellice to Lake Winnipeg; and up the Red to Fargo in Dakota Territory, which had connections to the railway networks of the northern United Statesj
*Pa.s.senger fares aboard the IIBC boats from Fort Garrv (Winnipeg) to Edmonton were fort~ dollars one wav for cabin s.p.a.ce, twenty dollars for a perch on the open promenade deck. Freight was carricd at four dollars a hundredweight.
tSee the map on page 136 for deoils of the prairie steamboat routes.
84 LABRADOR SMITH.
Steaming down Main Street in the a.s.siniboine during the Red Riverflood of 1897, Emerson, Manitoba
By 1879, seventeen s.h.i.+ps, not all owned by the HBC, were regularly employed on prairie rivers. Getting there was all the fun. Constant stops had to be made for cordwood to fire the boilers.* The flat-bottomed sternwheelers, difficult to control under the best of conditions, didn't so much travel the river routes as bounce their way through them. New obstructions were always being encountered, or a b.u.mping acquaintance with old ones was being renewed, Flood times were the worst because the surging waters hid dangerous rocks and made the keelless vessels impossible to steer. Occasionally a bold skipper would take advantage of the high water to
*Finding it could get tricky. The HBCs Lily, desperate for firewood, pulled into the tiny enclave of Red Deer Forks when her crew noticed two N16tis log cabins whose owners were out hunting. In minutes the buildings had been dismantled, their timbers loaded, and the s.h.i.+p was hastily puffing her way along the Saskatchewan.
THE GREAT FIRE CANOES 85.
invent a shortcut. On May 10, 1873, Captain Alexander Griggs was en route to Fort Garry aboard the International, carrying a large liquor consignment for the Hudson's Bay Company. He had to reach the border by midnight or his cargo would be liable for a new tariff. Cursing the day's delays and gazing at the waters spilling over the banks of the Red and flooding the plain, Griggs ”coolly turned the boat out of the bed of the river,” as reported later in the Mdnitoban, ”and made a short cut over the prairie ... thereby reducing the distance very inaterially and gaining the Customs House” in time.*
Summer low water was a much more common problem. s.h.i.+ps' captains, mostly recycled wharf rats from the Mississippi River trade, often ordered crew and pa.s.sengers overboard to help push or warp the vessels through shallow sections. Warping meant literally walking the s.h.i.+p over an obstacle. This was achieved by using four strong spars hinged to double derricks on either side of the bow. When aground, the vessel could lift itself over the obstruction by the manipulation of ropes running through these derricks to turn the poles into stilts. One skipper was exaggerating the shallowness of the river only slightly when he yelled at a settler who was dipping his pail into the a.s.siniboine, ”Hey! You put that water back!
” Stuck in the ankle-deep backwaters of the North Saskatchewan above c.u.mberland Lake, Captain Aaron Raymond Russell of the Marquis ordered his crew members overboard with picks and shovels to dam every creek flowing out of the main channel. The extra inches obtained this way made it possible for him to tiptoe his way downstream to deep water.
*Another example of overland navigation was the a.s.siniboine's astonis.h.i.+ng sweep down the main street of Emerson, Manitoba, to rescue and bring relief supplies to Red River flood victims in 1897.
86 LABRADOR SMITH.
”We go from one bank to the other,” complained Lady Dufferin in August 1877 when she and her husband, the first Governor General of Canada to tour the West, were aboard the Minnesota on their way to inspect the Red River settlement, ”crus.h.i.+ng and cras.h.i.+ng against the trees, which grow down to the waterside; I had just written this when I gave a shriek as I saw my ink-bottle on the point of being swept overboard by an intrusive tree....
The consequence of this curious navigation is that we never really go on for more than three minutes at a time. ... Our stern wheel is often ash.o.r.e, and our captain and pilot must require the patience of saints.” Later that day Lady Dufferin saw another s.h.i.+p, the Manitoba, approaching in the dark.
”It looked beautiful,” she reported, ”with two great bull's-eyes, green and red lamps and other lights on deck, creeping towards us; we stopped and backed into the sh.o.r.e, that it might pa.s.s us. It came close and fired off a cannon and we saw on the deck a large transparency with 'Welcome Lord Dufferin' on it, and two girls dressed in white with flags in their hands; then a voice sang'Canada, Sweet Canada,'and many more voices joined the chorus, and they sang'G.o.d Save the Queen' and 'Rule, Britannia', and cheered for the Governor General as they began to move slowly away disappearing into the darkness.”*
During the viceregal visit, Lady Dufferin hammered in the last spike of western Canada's first railway, a
*”0 Canada,” with music by Calixa Lavall6e and words by Adolphe-Basile Routhier, was not Aritten until 1880, and not widely sung outside Quebec until the early years ofthe twentieth century. Its use as the national anthem was approved by Parliament in 1967, and itwas officially adopted in 1980 under the National Anthem Act. Lavall6e, who had served as a bandsman with the Union forces in the U.S. Civil War and favoured U.S. annexation ofCanada, spent much ofhis adult life in the United States and died in Boston in 189 1. Routhier was a judge of the Superior THE GREAT FIRE CANOES 87.
primitive four-mile-long, narrow-gauge tramway built by the Hudson's Bay Company where the waters of the Saskatchewan roared down tl~e Cirand Rapids to Lake Winnipeg. The wilderness link provided horse-drawn wagons to handle goods en route between Edmonton and Fort Garry, bypa.s.sing the steep limestone canyon where the river dropped almost a hundred feet in three miles, causing painfully long portages. For a time, using a specially trained white horse, the little railwav actually ran its4 Trains consisted of a car laden with'the merchandise being trans-s.h.i.+pped, followed by an empty carriage. At the height of land, a platform was built the same height as the cars. I laving been taught the drill, the amtnal would pull the two carriages up from one or the other terminus, slip out of its own harness, walk onto the platform and into the empty car, which would then glide down behind the load to the end of steel, banked to provide an automatic brake.
Once this barrier was conquered, the prairie s.h.i.+ps grew in size and appointments. Captain Peter McArthur's Nortb West boasted a five-thousand-dollar grand piano and two bridal chambers. First-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers aboard the City of Winnipeg dined in soft leather chairs in a carpeted and chandelicred Grand Saloon. According to the Manitoba Free Press, one of their number was so overcome by the ambience-and presumably the booze-that he
CourtofQuebec from 1873 who later became chief justice of that court and was knighted. In English-speaking Canada, a popular national song for many years was -rhe Maple Leaf Forever,” written in 1867 by AJexander Muir, a Toronto teacher. Its emphasis on the Britisliness of Canada tended to rule out its use in French Canada. The English translation of ”0 Canada” now in use is a modified form of the words written in 1908 by R. Stanley Weir, an author of legal texts and later judge of the Exchequer Court of Canada.
88 LABRADOR SMITH.
61was trying to waltz across the deck with an umbrella ... for a partner.”