Part 17 (1/2)

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them look like pregnant mountain goats. ”Growing numbers of fur buyers and traders, many of whom were Americans, were drawn into the Canadian north seeking new sources of supply,” noted Arthur Ray, a University of British Columbia historian who specializes in the fur trade. Canada's northern edges-though not yet the Arctic-were being opened up through the Klondike gold rush and construction of railways towards Port Nelson on Hudson Bay and into the Peace River country. Traders and merchants poured into the Mackenzie River Valley and Great Slave Lake territory KILLING THE COMPEt.i.tION 281.

so fast that the hamlet of Fort Resolution eventually boasted six retail stores, and Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca counted more than a dozen fur-trading posts cl.u.s.tered around the HBCs historic fort. Because these newcomers enjoyed much lower overheads and were not subject to decisions made by boards of directors on the other side of the world, they cut deeply into the HBCs established business. At the same time, consignment and mail-order houses appeared in Canada for the first time, buying and selling furs on commission, allowing compet.i.tors quick and simple entry into the trade.*

Occasionally, the IFIBC deliberately-and deviouslycompeted with itself John Montague of North West River in Labrador recalled, witha touch of humour and an exaggerated accent, how he had once been fooled into selling to an ”Independent,” with unexpected results: ”I remember one time for sure when I had quite a little bit of fur and there was this feller come from Cartwright. Martin he was, Jim or Frank, I fergits now.

I thought this feller was a fur buyer, not from H13C at all. I took my fur to HBC and they priced it. I took my fur to Martin and he didn't offer me quite as much, but I sold it to 'en anyway because I wanted to encourage hirn to come back. After he was gone I found out he was buyin'

fer HBC. That was wonderful funny.” But more often, the compet.i.tion was real, and it nearly drove the Company's fur business to the wall.

*The impact of th(se innovations forced the FIBC in 1920 to abandon its 2 50-year-old policy of auctioning only its own furs and to begin moving consignment pelts as well. Compet.i.tors opened alternative auction houses in London (C.Al. Larripson & Company and k.W Nesbitt), New York (New York Fur Auction Sales Company), St Louis (international Fur Exchange), IA'mmpcg(FurAuctIonSaies Company), Vancouver (Little Brothers), Montreal (Canadian Fur Auction Sales Comp~uiy) and Leipzig ((;. Gaudig,”, Blurn).

282 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

First to follow the 11BC into the Mackenzie district was Hislop and Nagle, which eventually opened twentvfour posts between Athabasca L,anding and Arctic Red River, built three steams.h.i.+ps, and even had its own sawmill and engineering shop. James Hislop, a niathematician and civil engineer from Pictou, Nova Scotia, had gone West as a surveyor on the Pembina Branch of the CPR and later move~ to Edmonton. His partner, Edniund Barry Nagle, was a millwright who had served with the St Hyacinthe Infantr~ Company during the Fenian raids and had taken part in :46tis buffalo hunts out of Fort Garry before joining Hislop in Edmonton. ”They were considered outlaws at the time, because the Hudson's Bay Company behaved as if it still had a monopoly,” notedJordan Zinovich, who studied the history of the enterprise.

”When Mrs. Nagle arrived at Fort Resolution, the 11BC Factors and their wives would not talk to her. She was so socially ostracized that she had to bring in a 'professional friend' from the Outside.” After harvesting fur worth $200,000, Hislop and Nagle in 1913 sold out to the Northern Trading Company of Edmonton, which eventually manned thirty-two small posts, obtaining financial sponsors.h.i.+p from London's A.W. Nesbitt and temporarily diminis.h.i.+ng the HBC trade. When Nesbitt went bankrupt in 1919, Northern was pushed into receiN ers.h.i.+p. A group of Winnipeg auctioneers led bv Max Finkelstein and fronted by Colonel J.K. Cornwail (the celebrated Alberta entrepreneur known as Peace Riverjim) obtained control and moved its headquarters to Fort Smith, but it never fully recovered and went bankrupt in 193 1; the HBC picked up its remaining a.s.sets.

Lamson and Hubbard Corporation, Bostons leading fur dealers, arrived in C anada right after the First World War, erecting a dozen outlets on the Mackenzie and two short-lived Arctic posts at Chesterfield Inlet and Baker KILLING THE COMPEt.i.tION 283.

Lamson and Hubbard employee R. D. Ferrier guarding winter suppliesfor Little Red River post

Lake. The firm moved in like an invading army, or rather navy, launching an impressive sternwheeler (the SS Distributor) that shuttled between Fort Smith and Fort McPherson, two other steamers, a pair of large gas boats, several gas-powered tugs and a fleet of fifty twenty-ton scows. Within six years its heavy overhead sank the firm, with the HBC yet again absorbing the pieces. Several smaller trading outfits tried to buck the Company, but none succeeded. The most tragic attempt was that of a group of retired British naval officers who incorporated the Sabellum Trading Company in 1911 and for the next dozen years dispatched trading vessels to Baffin Island. One of their s.h.i.+ps, the Erme, was blown up by a German submarine; another, the Vera, a forty four-year-old wooden Cowes-built racing yacht, proved comically unsuitable for Arctic voyages. Sabellum managed to land only one representative on Baffin, an elderly stone-deaf gunnery officer named Hector 284 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

Pitchforth, who starved to death in his ten-by-fifteenfoot shack at Cape Kater on the isolated Brodeur Peninsula during the cruel winter of 1927.

The following year Sabellum sold its few belongings to the IIBC.*

THEONLY SERIOUS LONGTERM RfVAL faced by the HBC in the North was Revillon Fr&res of Paris. Like that of the Nor'Westers who had challenged the Company's hegeniony a century earlier, Revillon's a.s.sault lasted for most of four decades and was led by far more enterprising spirits than the bureaucratic duffers who inhabited the 1113C'S middle management. Exactly like the Nor'Westers, Revillon ultimately failed because it expanded too fast, and its backers-unlike the Hudson's Bay Company, which had put aside adequate financial reserves and enjoyed access to guarantees from the Bank of England-were unable to withstand long periods of financial drought. A successor firm to the veteran (172 3) French furrier Franqols Givelet, Louis Victor Revillon's company had revolutionized the industry. It broadened the market by selling fur coats through drygoods shops. Instead of purchasing all its pelts from wholesalers, it established its own trading outlets to obtain the raw product from Russian and Canadian trappers. At the turn of the century, Revillon purchased a string of Mackenzie River posts from Colonel Cornwall, and also established half a dozen stores on the north sh.o.r.e of the St Lawrence and up the Labrador coast.

*Another inglorious venture backed by British interests was the Arctic Gold Exploration Syndicate, inaugurated by Captain Henry Toke Munn, forinerly of Pond Inlet. Munn persuaded Lord Lascelles and othei s to back him in seeking gold on Baffin Island, mainly by showing thern art photographs he had taken of soine ”naked Inuit girls reflected in pools.”

KILLING THE COMPEt.i.tION 285.

Revillon's a.s.sault on Hudson Bay, planned for the summer of 1903, was predicated on impressing local trappers by installing one of its prefabricated stores beside nearly everv HBC outlet. The necessary staff and material were gat~ered in Montreal and loajed on the Stord, a Norwegian -built merchant s.h.i.+p, which promptly ran aground at Pointe des Monts in the Gulf of St Lawrence. To get into the Bay before freeze-up, Revillon chartered the 820-ton Eldorado, then employed on the London-Liverpool run, whose skipper, Captain William Berry, had never ventured beyond England's coastal waters. He successfully crossed the Atlantic, picked up the Stord's crew and cargo, then somehow muddled his way through Hudson Strait. The crew and pa.s.sengers, numbering forty-seven, included Revillon's Montreal representative, a Monsieur d'Aigneaux, who was travelling with his wife, daughter and a governess, a doctor, four clerks and fourteen Quebec carpenters hired to erect the stores. Drawing a deep sixteen feet and carrying 1,450 tons of cargo, the Eldorado, her decks crowded with sections for the prefabricated buildings, lumbered into Hudson Bay bound for Fort George on the eastern sh.o.r.e ot'james Bay. After several close calls, the s.h.i.+p rammed a reef nine miles out of the settlement. ”When the tide fell, she listed so badly that her decks became almost vertical,” Third Engineer George Venables wrote in his journal. ”. . . So serious were matters now that the captain insisted that the ladies, child, and other pa.s.sengers should go in boats to Fort George, so as to be safe. It was ”ell this was done, for on the Wednesday [September 2, 1903] a terrible storm came on, the s.h.i.+p b.u.mped tip and down on the cruel rocks, and finally tore a great hole in her bottom, through which the water rushed in volumes. We saved wbat food we could, and, with some clothes, got away to an island ere the doomed vessel was lost.”

286 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

Donald Gillies, the HBC' Factor resident at Fort George, counted the four dozen survivors and quickly realized his spare supplies would feed them for only two days. Ile lent them boats and advised them to hurry South to Charlton Island, where an IJBC steamer, the Lady Head, ”as due to leave for London. After a hazardous pa.s.sage the Eldorado's crew reached Charlton the day after the steamer's departure-which was lucky, because the Lady Head was shortly afterwards wrecked on Gasket Shoals. The unhappy travellers made their way down to Moose Factory in borrowed HBC lighters, then had to travel five hundred miles tip the Moose and Abitibi rivers before they reached civilization. It was a harrowing journey.

”When we got tip each morning,” wrote Venables, ”it was invariabl~, to find that the blanket with which each person was provided was a solid piece of ice, as hard as iron, and we had to get it thawed and free as best we could. . . . We endeavoured to bake some of the flour into cakes each night; but as we had no baking powder you can imagine what the result was like. Our rations at best did not run to more than half a cake each per night, and wc began to feel very weak and ill from being so underfed and so much exposed.” When they came out of the bush at New Liskeard, without having lost a soul along the way, a correspondent for the Toronto Globe who interviewed the survivors wrote that they had portaged their ”lifeboats” around the rapids through a terrain ”as unknown to the partv as if it had been in the heart of Africa.”

The mishap set back Revillon's Hudson Bay venture, but by 1908, with supplies brought in on the 2,500-ton icebreaker Adventurer, Revillon had seven posts on line, including a dock and warehouse at Strutton Island in the lower bay. The Adveniurer was eventually wrecked in Hudson Strait, but not before she helped erect other KILLING THE COMPEt.i.tION 287.

Revillon posts at Baker Lake, Repulse Bay and the Belcher Islands.*

The French concern eventually operated forty-seven Canadian trading posts, mostly concentrated in the northwest. The firm's huge warehouse in Edmonton, its stock supplied from Montreal aboard a special twenty- six-car freight train, became the Wests largest departinent store, offering everything from food products, china, fabrics and farin equipment to bronze bells and missionaries' chasubles. Revillon was soon doing annual business in excess of $5 million, including supply contracts for the Indian treaties and Mounted Police on the Peace and Yukon rivers, but like the IIBC it had great difficulty supplying some of its western land posts. To move goods from F-dirionton to Hudson's Hope on the Peace River, for example, required taking them by sleigh injanuary as far asAthabasca, where theywere stored for the rest of the winter. In spring they were poled over by scow to Lesser Slax e Lake, where they were stored again until the primitive road to the Peace River became pa.s.sable.

That oxcart pa.s.sage was followed by another scow expedition to Hudson's Hope-the entire one-way journey having taken eight months.

It was typical of the Bay men that, although they had lost their official monopoly in 1870, they still behaved more than a generation later as if they owned the

*Revillon commissioned the explorer filin -maker Robert Flaherty to shoot Nanook oft& North on the Belchers and at Port Harrison during the winter of 1920--2 1. The first doc.u.mentary of its kind to achieve world-wide distribution, the movie was an instant hit, so much so that Americans marketed a new brand of ice-cream called Nanook, while Germans sold Nanook ashtrays. Brilliantly shot and edited, the film helped perpetuate the stereotype of Inuit as happy victims of their environment.

288 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

country. ”Only those who have worked for the Company,” explained Philip G.o.dsell, ”can understand the feeling that existed against the average opposition trader, and the perhaps misguided sense of loyalty which would, literally, cause a Hudson's Bay man to push even his own brother to the wall if he happened to be trading in opposition to the 'Gentlemen Adventurers.”' Bill Cobb, who traded against Revillon, echoed the thought.

'16 open tip a store against the Bay, that was heresy. Why, you were committing an act against G.o.d. It was G.o.d who gave the Hudson's Bay, that land!” he recalled in mock anger forty-eight years later, adding, ”I laugh about it now, but that's the way I felt-and still do, to some degree.”

In the field, compet.i.tion between the two firms quickly turned vicious.

Startled Inuit and Indians were treated to the sight of the only two white men in their settlements childishly squabbling over each pelt, spying on one another, outbidding each other's prices' It became standard practice for HBc Factors to decree that any trapper caught trading with Revillon could no longer sell to the Company. The Cree sensed this was a potent threat; then- name for Revillon was Tustowichuk-the ”people between them and the Company.” The French firm's post managers complained that their customers refused to trade in the daytime lest they be spotted by the HBC traders, who had ostentatiously trained telescopes on their compet.i.tors' front doors. Even at night, exchanges at the Revillon posts had to be carried out behind drawn blinds.

Revillon's first managers were mostly retired French armv and navy officers and superannuated bureaucrats, more familiar with wine vintages than the crude ways of the Canadian frontier. ['hey underestimated their opponems and patronized their customers. The Bay traders KILLING THE COMPEt.i.tION 289.

derisively referred to Revillon as ”the Frenchmen” and were not above delivering some low slurs. One Christmas at Moose Factory, a Revillon trader was celebrating alone while there was a big party at the Bay post.

The Anglican missionary R.J. Renison, later an archbishop, who was visiting Moose Factory, urged the Bay man to go over and invite his rival.