Part 13 (2/2)
with knightly orders, presented a spectacle of light and color and animation, which was not only charming but wonderfully impressive.” A month later, Strathcona decided on a lightning visit to Canada to inspect his lat- est investment, the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Montreal. His wife, Isabella, herself a frail elighty-nine, had always accompanied him everywhere, but, having suffered several mild strokes, was not feeling healthy enough to go along. When Strathcona gently reminded her that he might not be well enough to return, she insisted on going to Euston Station so she could see him off.
He last saw her there on the platform, lifted by four young men, gazing directly into the window of his private carriage, waving her fond fareA ell.
On the morning of November 7, after walking her Yorks.h.i.+re terrier in Grosvenor Square, Lady Strathcona collapsed. Her cold developed into pneumonia, and she died five days later. Her husband of sixty years-and four weddings-was devastated. His grief caused him to make a fatal mistake: he stopped working.
'Fen weeks later, on January 21, 1914, in his ninetyfourth year, Lord Strathcona died of ”great prostration and heart failure.” Incredibly, on his deathbed he was still worrying about the legitimacy of his marriage to Isabella, as if unwilling to carry the burden of that imagined sin to his grave. His two physicians, Sir Thomas Barlow and William Pasteur, signed a legal declaration with a firm of London solicitors testifying to his last words.*
”Lord Strathcona,” the affidavit stated, ”said he knew he was dying and asked us to (ome close to the bed and listen to what he was going to say...
He said his wife's first marriage was performed by a man who had not the legal power to do it in that district. The man to whom his wife was first married was called Grant. Grant treated tier so badly that life with him became impossible. They separated. Before Lord Strathcona married his wife he consulted several persons including Sir George THE RECKONING 225.
In their tributes, Strathcona's contemporaries attempted to outdo each other with purple praise. ”We need not fear exaggeration in speaking of Lord Strathcona,” declared Sir Charles Davidson, Chief .justice of the Quebec Superior Court. ”In especial degree has he enriched and uplifted Canadian life. May we emulate even if we cannot in the mean while at least reach to the lofty standards of his public and private careers.”
Sir William Peterson, the princ.i.p.al of McGill University, had little trouble topping that. ”Duty was his guiding star,” he said of Strathcona, ”duty and conscience. We ought to be glad, too-ought we not?-in our day and generation, that Canada can boast of him as a man of unspotted integrity.” Even Sir Wilfrid Laurier seemed overcome by grief. ”Since SirJohn Macdonald's time I do not know that there has been any Canadian who, on departing this life, has left behind him such a trail of sorrow as Lord Strathcona.... He came as a simple clerk to the Hudson's Bay Company, and from that station he rose step by step until he became . .
. at first in fact, and afterwards both in fact and name, the governor of that historic company, a position which he held to the last day of his life.” The Times summed up his amazing career most succinctly: ”With no advantages of birth or fortune, he made himself one of the great outstanding figures of the Empire.”
The Dean of Westminster had suggested the High Commissioner's rernains be preserved in a sepulchre in
Simpson ... and they all advised that [he] would be justified in marrying her. The domicile of Lord Stratheona being Scotland and he being a Scotchman he had no doubt about the validity of the marriage. The marriage was subsequently repeated in New York....” Oddly, his last Paris marriage, the only one accompanied by fidl religious rites, was not mentioned by the expiring peer.
226 LABRADOR SMITH.
the Abbey among Britain's most distinguished sons, but Strathcona had stipulated that he wished to rest beside his beloved Isabella at Highgate Cemetery in North London.* Still, the Abbey was the scene of his faneral, a state occasion of grand proportions attended by the Empire's n.o.blest citizens. His coffin, carried in to the sombre cadence of Chopin's funeral march, was followed by a single wreath of lilies and heliotrope orchids.
Attached to it was a card from the Dowager Queen Alexandra: ”In sorrowful memory of one of the Empire's kindest of men and the greatest of benefactors.”
By the time he died, Lord Strathcona had outlived most of the violent animosities he had created as Donald Smith. Yet his carefully drafted will perpetuated many of his earthly quarrels. Although the doc.u.ment was a model of philanthropic generosity, spreading funds across three continents, it never once mentioned Winnipeg. The former fur trader's sn.o.bbery also extended beyond the grave. His legacy establis.h.i.+ng a leper colony was conditional on a strict entrance test: only leprous English gentlemen of good standing might apply. More than $25 million-the bulk of his estate having been distributed to family members before his deatb-was dispersed to McGill, Queen's, Yale, Cambridge, and Aberdeen universities, as well as a dozen poor divinity schools and underfunded hospitals. He left small inheritances (11~50) to a number of HBC traders and set up the Strathcona Trust for Physical and Patriotic Education in the Schools, which still operates from Ottawa.
The will's strangest revelation was an obscure paragraph that stated: ”I remit and cancel the debts owing to me by (1) the estate of the late Right Hon. Richard Cartwright, (2) the estate of the late Lieut.-Colonel
*'Fhus sharing the graveyard with Karl Marx (1818-83).
THE RECKONING 227.
William ”ite, one time Deputy Postmaster-General of Canada, (3) the Hon.
George E. Foster.” Cartwright had been the Liberal finance minister who made his reputation denouncing politicians who had sold their souls to the CPR syndicate, yet shortly after formation of the Laurier government he became highly sympathetic to the railway and later authorized huge handouts to Canadian Pacific steams.h.i.+p lines. Foster, a former professor of Cla.s.sics at the University of New Brunswick, who had risen to be minister of finance in five Tory administrations, had similarly helped out the CPR while in office; the favours procured from William White were never revealed, though the CPR received many valuable mail contracts during his tenure. The heirs of the three men could now officially keep Strathcona's bribes-but only at the cost of'sullied family reputations.
ITHAD BEEN A h.e.l.l OF A RUN. The minor HBC clerk who began his career for ”Y,20 and found” had during his seven and a half decades with the Company not only preserved it and drastically altered its character but, unlike most of its modern Governors, had also become a pivotal figure in Canadian history. Here was a man of little privilege, unbridled ambition, and the mindset of a conquistador. For a time, he personified his country.
PART II.
QUEST FOR A.
NEW EMPIRE.
CHAPTER9.
ON THE TRAIL OF.
THE ARCTIC FOX.
”Most masters of the Company's posts is lak kings.... Yo kin be birthed and died without Itheir consent but dat's 'bout all.
-Annie Redsky
HAVING LOST ITS EMPIRE in the western Canadian plains, where the influx of railways and settlers had reduced its influence to the kind of commercial compet.i.tion for which the IFIBc had little skill and less stomach, the Company set out to establish a new kingdom on Canada's northern frontier, Man), things about this frigid realm were radically different: the climate and terrain, the pelts the Company traded (Arctic fox, not beaver); the aboriginal people who did the work-Inuit instead of Indians; and the animals that fed and supplied the hunters-seal and northern caribou rather than deer and buffalo. But nearly every other aspect of the Hudson's Bay Company's s.h.i.+ft north had an equivalent in its earlier sweep west.
The move into the Arctic took place mostly in the twentieth century, but, as in the plains, the Company had been operating successfully on the fringes of its new spread for most of two hundred years. While the pace of its expansion was at the speed of a funeral slow march,
231.
232 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.
the I 113C eventually prospered in the harsh new environment-as it had in the Prairies--but only as long as it could maintain a monopoly. Eventually, the HBC became the dominant retailer in each region, its initial customers being mainly the aboriginals whose way of life its presence had robbed of self-sufficiency.
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