Part 19 (1/2)
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veteran of the service. ”There was a young fellow from Scotland with me as clerk, and we decided we'd take his arm off above the elbow. We put him on the kitchen table, and I found some morphine in the first-aid kit. It was outdated by a couple of years, so I fig-ured we'd give him a double dose. We overdosed the poor son of a gun and every hour or so we'd have a look to find out how bad it was. One of the symptorns was to watch his eyes and see how much they had contracted. His pupils got as small as pinpoints. He was really overdosed. The firstaid book said the remedy was to keep him moving. But he was out for the count. He couldn't move. So we got him off the table, and my clerk would roll the poor b.u.g.g.e.r across the kitchen floor one way, and I'd roll him back. Every once in a while we'd skin back the eyes to see if they were dilating, and we were just about exhausted when he began coming around. To liell with cutting his arm off after that. We forgot about it. In a day or two he started to get better.
It was the exercise that had started up his circulation again. He came around. Other-wise, we'd have taken his arm off-we had the saws and every- thing ready. . . .”
, Fhe best of the Bay men in the Arctic- characters like Ches Russell, Lorenz Learmonth, Scotty Gall, Sandy Liman, Bert Swaffield, Jimmy Ford, John Stanners, Bob Cruickshank and J.W Nichols-became true northerners, growing grey in the service, and as
*Apart from their rough but ready medical skill, some of the post managers were unusually ingenious, even inventing a better mousetrap. ”Using a large ten-gallon pail, halffilled with water, I laid narrow pieces of board against it,” recalled Hugh Mackay Ross. ”Then I dangled a juicy piece of salt pork from a nail directly over the pail. ”'hen the inice smelled the pork, they ran up the boards to get at it, and overbalancing, fell into the water and drowned.”
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Leonard Budgell, who was one of them, remarked: ”[We] accepted a more intimate responsibility for [our] customers. It was a good way to live, no matter what today's experts will tell you ... we could not have existed without that paternal feeling ... no one will ever convince me that it was not right in its time and place.” Certainly that streak of paternalism characterized the FIBC's dealings. P.A.C. Nichols, who for a time was in charge of the Arctic stores, referred to the Inuit as ”these simple, primitive folk of the Arctic” who had remained ”unspoiled” but some of whom could now ”see no reason to struggle for survival if the wherewithal to live can be acquired with little effort” so that ”the temptation to relax and be looked after often becomes too strong to conquer.” That att.i.tude was inst.i.tutionalized in The Eskimo Book of Knowleike, published and distributed bv the Company in 193 1. Its author, an HBC Factor and Oxford graduate named George Binney, utilized biblical cadence to praise the Company not only as ail agent of the British King but as a Divine presence. ”Take heed,” ran a typical pa.s.sage aimed at the Inult, warning them against doing business with independent fur traders that threatened the HBCs nionopoly, ”strange traders will come ainong you seeking only your furs ... these wanderers are like the drift-ice; today they come with the wind, toinorrow they are gone A ith the wind. Of these strangers some will be fairer than others, as is the nature of men; but whosoever they be, they cannot at heart possess that deep understanding ofyour lives through which our traders have learned to bestow the care of a father upon you and upon your children.”
The northern field nien may have been patronizing in their outlook and dictatorial in their methods, but they certainly weren't in the HBCS service for the itionev. ”Sometimes we could be trading in the store for ov~r twenty-fOLir hours at a stretch without stopping,” Ernie 318 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.
Lyall remembered. ”We never got any overtime for this sort of thing, of course, or for any ofthe extra work we did evenings or weekends.... I was getting $120 a month when I started in Spence Bay in 1949, and $185 when I left the HBC in 1962.”
The Company's influence grew in the first half of the second decade of the twentieth century, as the HBC became determined to take advantage of its monopoly by significantly expanding its northern presence. The move prompted Winnipeg's Free Ness to comment approvingly: ”The Company will make a last stand against civ1lizjtion at the Arctic Ocean.” But when the First World War disrupted European trade, the British government suspended London fur auctions, forcing pelt prices into dramatic, if temporary, decline. In the 1914-15 season, for the first time in its long history the Company halted its North American fur purchases, forbidding its traders to grant the natives new credit. Some of the HBC veterans ignored the sour directive and continued to distribute limited quant.i.ties of food and essential supplies to the Inuit and Indians, entering these shadowy transactions in ”purgatory ledgers” that didn't show up in their posts'
regular accounts. But enough aboriginals were deprived of rations for one deadly season that, as the HBC's Philip G.o.dsell later observed, ”I think any experienced trader will agree that the Hudson's Bay Company never fully regained their old-time prestige.” In 1916, as the American fur market expanded, prices surged upward, more than doubling to $38 per white fox skin within the next four years, then nearly doubling again to $70 in 1928.
The trade became so lucrative that in some posts along the Mackenzie, the HBC owed considerable amounts in trade goods to its customers. By 1924 the Inuit ofAklavik had purchased a private fleet of thirtynine auxiliary-powered schooners and twenty-eight whaleboats, valued at $128,000.
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The 11BC was operating inore than two hundred northern posts, opening new stores as high in the Arctic as Gjoa Haven, where Amundsen had wintered during his traverse of the North West Pa.s.sage, and for a time even maintaining a string of trading outlets in eastern Siberia. Despite this rapid expansion, or perhaps because of it, the Mic began behaving like a bloated dinosaurbig, awkward and ,ilmost totally disconnected from its s.h.i.+fting environment. Writing of the trade along the Mackenzie, Heather Robertson noted in her evocative memoir of the IIP,(:,s Richard Bonnycastle that ”the Company had lost control in the north. The economy was changing: Imperial Oil was developing the oil field A Norman Wells; prospectors were searching for gold and silver; fly-by-night free traders had introduced a cash econoiny among the natives. The Company's political base, the Indians-once the proud wives and children of fa in ous post factors, the loyal 'fainily' of a mighty patron-had been reduced to patients and pupils, cooks and ch.o.r.e boys; and the great factors themselves ... once feared as demi-G.o.ds, were more often than not the objects of laughter and ridicule for their pompous manners and foolish bra.s.s hats. The unthinkable was happening-the Hudsons Bay Company was losing money.”
It was a measure of the Company's fiscal desperation that its directors took seriously the suggestion of an old Arctic hand to turn a fortune in breeling reindeer as a cheap subst.i.tute for beef. Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the Icelandic-Canadian who becarne the Arctic's most accomplished non-Inuit sledge driver, won fame leading three daring expeditions that added one hundred thousand square miles to the maps of Canada's Far North, charting its last sizeable unknown islands. Like Samuel Hearne andjohn Rae before him, Stefarisson was able to dash across the Arctic by adopting Inuit survival techniques instead of being burdened by what he derisively 320 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.
described as ”the portable-boarding-house school” methods of British adventurers. Stefansson genuinely believed that exploration required less courage than drivinga New York taxicab, with preparation and adaptability taking the place of mock heroics. ”I know nothing whatever about courage,”
he was fond of pointing out. ”Everything you add to an explorer's heroism you have to subtract frorn his intelligence.” He predicted Canada's North could support thirty-five million reindeer because its grazing territory was superior to most senii-arld sheep lands-but n.o.body took him seriously except the 11BC. In 1920, the Company approved his scheme to establish a subsidiary to breed the ungainly beasts on Baffin Island, purchased 14,000 LapLnd reindeer in northern Norway, hired a dozen herders, and s.h.i.+pped the first contingent of 689 animals (plus ;,000 sacks of” moss) across the Atlantic aboard the Nascopie. Only 550 reindeer were still alive by the time the s.h.i.+p anch.o.r.ed off Amadjuak on the south coast of Baffin Island, the spot chosen by one of Stefansson's a.s.sociates as having the best moss. A storm immediately dispersed the seasick reindeer, and though there was indeed plentv of moss, it turned out to be the wrong variety. (The reindeer wanted to munch on Cladonia rangtfierina, which grew out of the soil in Lapland and thus contained delicious nutrients; the Baffin moss, which sproated out of bare rock, contained no nutritional equivalent.) ”We soon found,” reported Captain John Alikkelborg, the HBC official charged with the loony venture, ”that the pastures would not permit us to keep a large herd under restraint; if we did, they would starve to death. Consequently, we had to divide them into flocks and let them spread over a wide area, after the style of the caribou.... Sometimes the caribou would come and mix with our reirideer-niore often the reverse-and that was the last we would see of them.” Only 2 10 animals survived the winter, and with expenses NORTHERN GRIDLOCK 321.
Arctic explorer Vilbjalmur Stefansson
still mounting, HBC accountants calculated by the end of 1922 that each beast was nou worth $80.22. The $200,000 venture was eventually written off, though the Hudson's Bay Reindeer Company was still on the HBCs books as late as 1956.
Because the HBC operated in an area virtually inaccessible to visitors, its spreading northern presence was immune to criticism; any outsider wanting to live in the Arctic depended on its supplies. That protection from 322 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.
censure was challenged in 1927 when Dr Frederick Banting, the co-discoverer of insulin, went on an Arctic expedition with his sketching companion, A.Y.
Jackson, a founding member of the Group of Seven, whose work caught the enduring beauty of the -Arctic's desolation. The two men went along as guests aboard the Department of the Interior's supply s.h.i.+p Beothic and vis- ited most of the HBCs stations in the Eastern Arctic. Banting had embarked on the journey as an amateur painter badly in need of a vacation, but his medical training and essential humanity could not long be denied. His journal contained many astute observations, such as that ”a native cannot live on white man's food or in white men's dress,” a correct diagnosis of the unsuitability of woollen and cotton goods for Arctic wear and of salted and canned provisions for Arctic food. But he was harshest in his a.s.sessments of the 10C. ”The company have systeiria ti call y possessed themselves of this country,” he noted. ”They have at each post an interpreter who puts before the native the company's view & teaches them that the great company will look after them & is their savior. While at the same time they hire them at ten dollars peryear to'retain'them as their men.
They buy their furs very cheap-in trade-tea-tobacco-woollens etc.-which are by no means as good for the native as his former life without these things.
At this port [Arctic Bay] we took on 2 3 bales of fox furs & there are said to be one hundred skins per bale--They sell at $50 to $60 per skin. 2300 x 50 = $115,000. Now where does the native come in? He hunts $100,000 worth of furs & the Company takes the profits.”
In a Toronto Star interview after his return (given to a reporter while he thought he was speaking off the record), Banting expanded on his criticism, charging that the Inuit were getting goods worth only $5,000 in exchange for fox skins marketed at $100,000 and that the NORTHERN GRIDLOCK 323.
natives' resistance to disease was being lowered by the diet the Company encouraged its northern customers to eat. In a subsequent letter to an official at the Department of the Interior, he recommended that the Canadian government ”take over full control of the fur trade throughout Eskimo territory. From the profits of the trade, proper administration could be carried out and steps be taken to improve rather than destroy the chances of the Eskimo race.” The doctor, who because of his n.o.bel Prize was one of the best-known and most trusted Canadiam of his day, went on to comment that ,,the native should be encouraged to lay up a reserve of money or credit in time of plenty to take care of the inevitable lean years ... generally speaking, the policy of the trader has been to keep the F-skirno in his debt.”
In the face of this and Banting's many other criticisms, Giovernor Charles Vincent Sale wrote a twentyseven-page letter to Deputy Minister W.W. Cory in which he denied the charges, claiming that ”it is obvious that we must be interested in their [the Inuit] welfare since they are the people who, given reasonable opportunities, can best occupy and make use of the snow covered regions in which we operate, and where we have embarked so much of our capital.” Banting's attack was a timely indication that the HBC could no longer insulate itself against outsiders questioning its divine right to rule. The North, especially the Arctic's western sector, was exploding with activity that would change the fur trade forever.
THE MACKENZIF RIVFR HAD 13ECOME a comfortable superhighway through the Western Arctic, with the 11BC.'s impressive fleet of thirteen s.h.i.+ps leading the way. By 1927, the Company was offering tourists thirty-fiveday round-trip cruises on the Mackenzie as far north as 324 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.
Aklavik for $325, including meals, and was unable to accommodate all the pa.s.sengers who swarmed in every summer to take advantage of the journey, advertised as being ”2000,1VULES OFF THE BEATEN TRACK.”* s.h.i.+ps such as the Atbabasca River boasted a cruising speed of thirteen knots, electric lights, and luxury salon accommodation for fifty-eight pa.s.sengers. Those were great days on the river. ”You bad time, for there was no schedule but the riverboat's own,” recalled Laco Hunt, a former I 113C Factor who took the journey many times. ”You had time to niuse on the legends you'd heard about the great Northern lakes whose names echoed with history; about the fur-trading forts and the men who'd fought to put them in the wilderness....
The long procession of days brought a new rhythm to your life; it seemed to fall in with the pattern made by the mornings and afternoons filled with the sounds of birds, and the swift undercurrents of water, (lark blue with reflected sky.”
That romantic vision was disrupted by construction of the Alberta and Greot Waterways Railway, known to every northern hand as the Muskeg Limited, which tapped the Mackenzie Basin into the country's main transportation network. The most disturbing influence was the dramatic mineral strike in the region by a Toronto prospector muried Gilbert LaBine. On the unseasonably cold morning of May 16, 193 0, at a forlorn inlet on the eastern sh.o.r.e of Great Bear Lake, a dav's walk from the Arctic Circle, he found a pluni-sized glob
*The meals the Company advertised received mixed reviews.
'”,'ben one of the steamer captains asked a pa.s.senger, the Reverend Gerald Card, to say grace, the Anglican minister refused. ”Indeed, I won't,” he thundered. ”After pai ingthe Hudsons Bay Company fiftN cents for:i meal, against w]kich even my stomach registersthe mostvigorous and continual protests, I fail tosee any reason why I should lift my voice in thanks to G.o.d!”
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of rock that turned out to be pure pitchblende. This would become the great Eldorado Mine, the source first of radium and later of the uranium that was used in the atomic bomb dropped on Hiros.h.i.+ma. The find, which trebled the world stock of radium (before LaBine's discovery, supplies of the precious metal amounted to only half a pound, worth $22 million), set off a mining rush. Would-be prospectors included a Russian prince who arrived with his princess, accompanied by a bearded valet, and an Arab sheikh who wandered aimlessly along the sh.o.r.es of Great Bear, his robes catching in the stunted conifers. The most ingenious method of discovering surface traces of the radioactive ore was that used by Tom Creighton, a veteran sourdough who had earlier helped stake the Flin Flon mine in northern Manitoba. Ile dropped undeveloped film on likely-looking rocky outcrops; the presence of pitchblende would show up as streaks of light.
At about the same time, major gold deposits were discovered at Beaverlodge, on the north sh.o.r.e of Lake Athabasca, while a Cominco prospector named Spud a.r.s.enault struck gold at Yellowknife. Most of the bushwhackers and goldseekers who poured into every part of the North arrived by airplane. LaBine himself had first spotted the pitchblende deposit from the back seat of C.H. ”Punch” d.i.c.kins's primitive biplane.
Peering through the aircrafts humming shrouds, he noticed rocks sinudged with the peach-red hues that indicated cobalt bloom, one of the clues a.s.sociated with radium deposits-a mineral strike that would eventually create a world-scale mine. ”I suddenly realized,” he later recalled, ”that I was in elephant country.”