<SPAN name="startofbook"></SPAN>
<h2>CHRONICLES OF CANADA SERIES</h2>
<h3>THIRTY-TWO VOLUMES ILLUSTRATED</h3>
<h4>Edited by GEORGE M. WRONG and H. H. LANGTON</h4>
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<h1>THE 'ADVENTURERS<br/> OF ENGLAND' ON<br/> HUDSON BAY</h1>
<h3>A Chronicle of the Fur Trade<br/> in the North</h3>
<h5>BY</h5>
<h3>AGNES C. LAUT</h3>
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<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_1" id="Page_1"></SPAN></span></p>
<h2><SPAN name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></SPAN>CHAPTER I</h2>
<h2>THE FUR HUNTERS</h2>
<p>Thirty or more years ago, one who stood at the foot of Main Street,
Winnipeg, in front of the stone gate leading to the inner court of Fort
Garry, and looked up across the river flats, would have seen a
procession as picturesque as ever graced the streets of old Quebec—the
dog brigades of the Hudson's Bay Company coming in from the winter's
hunt.</p>
<p>Against the rolling snowdrifts appeared a line, at first grotesquely
dwarfed under the mock suns of the eastern sky veiled in a soft frost
fog. Then a husky-dog in bells and harness bounced up over the drifts,
followed by another and yet another—eight or ten dogs to each long, low
toboggan that slid along loaded and heaped with peltry. Beside each
sleigh emerged out of the haze the form of the driver—a swarthy fellow,
on snow-shoes, with hair bound back by a red scarf, and corduroy<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_2" id="Page_2"></SPAN></span>
trousers belted in by another red scarf, and fur gauntlets to his
elbows—flourishing his whip and yelling, in a high, snarling falsetto,
'marche! marche!'—the rallying-cry of the French wood-runner since
first he set out from Quebec in the sixteen-hundreds to thread his way
westward through the wilds of the continent.</p>
<p>Behind at a sort of dog-trot came women, clothed in skirts and shawls
made of red and green blankets; papooses in moss bags on their mothers'
backs, their little heads wobbling under the fur flaps and capotes.
Then, as the dog teams sped from a trot to a gallop with whoops and
jingling of bells, there whipped past a long, low, toboggan-shaped
sleigh with the fastest dogs and the finest robes—the equipage of the
chief factor or trader. Before the spectator could take in any more of
the scene, dogs and sleighs, runners and women, had swept inside the
gate.<br/><br/><br/></p>
<div class="figcenter"><SPAN href="images/002a.png"> <ANTIMG src="images/002a-thumb.png" width-obs="500" height-obs="295" alt="" title="Click for larger image" /></SPAN> <span class="caption">A VIEW OF THE INTERIOR OF OLD FORT GARRY<br/>Drawn by H. A. Strong</span><br/><br/></div>
<p>At a still earlier period, say in the seventies, one who in summer
chanced to be on Lake Winnipeg at the mouth of the great Saskatchewan
river—which, by countless portages and interlinking lakes, is connected
with all the vast water systems of the North—would have<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_3" id="Page_3"></SPAN></span> seen the fur
traders sweeping down in huge flotillas of canoes and flat-bottomed
Mackinaw boats—exultant after running the Grand Rapids, where the
waters of the Great Plains converge to a width of some hundred rods and
rush nine miles over rocks the size of a house in a furious cataract.</p>
<p>Summer or winter, it was a life of wild adventure and daily romance.</p>
<p>Here on the Saskatchewan every paddle-dip, every twist and turn of the
supple canoes, revealed some new caprice of the river's moods. In places
the current would be shallow and the canoes would lag. Then the paddlers
must catch the veer of the flow or they would presently be out
waist-deep shoving cargo and craft off sand bars. Again, as at Grand
Rapids, where the banks were rock-faced and sheer, the canoes would run
merrily in swift-flowing waters. No wonder the Indian voyageurs regarded
all rivers as living personalities and made the River Goddess offerings
of tobacco for fair wind and good voyage. And it is to be kept in mind
that no river like the Saskatchewan can be permanently mapped. No map or
chart of such a river could serve its purpose for more than a year.
Chart it to-day, and perhaps to-morrow it jumps its<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_4" id="Page_4"></SPAN></span> river bed; and
where was a current is now a swampy lake in which the paddlemen may lose
their way.</p>
<p>When the waters chanced to be low at Grand Rapids, showing huge rocks
through the white spray, cargoes would be unloaded and the peltry sent
across the nine-mile portage by tramway; but when the river was high—as
in June after the melting of the mountain snows—the voyageurs were
always keen for the excitement of making the descent by canoe. Lestang,
M'Kay, Mackenzie, a dozen famous guides, could boast two trips a day
down the rapids, without so much as grazing a paddle on the rocks.
Indeed, the different crews would race each other into the very vortex
of the wildest water; and woe betide the old voyageur whose crew failed
of the strong pull into the right current just when the craft took the
plunge! Here, where the waters of the vast prairie region are descending
over huge boulders and rocky islets between banks not a third of a mile
apart, there is a wild river scene. Far ahead the paddlers can hear the
roar of the swirl. Now the surface of the river rounds and rises in the
eddies of an undertow, and the canoe leaps forward; then, a swifter
plunge through the middle of a furious overfall.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_5" id="Page_5"></SPAN></span> The steersman rises
at the stern and leans forward like a runner.<br/><br/><br/></p>
<div class="figcenter"><SPAN href="images/map004a1&2.png"> <ANTIMG src="images/map004a1&2-thumb.png" width-obs="600" height-obs="203" alt="" title="Click for larger image" /></SPAN> <span class="caption">TRACK SURVEY<br/> of the<br/> SASKATCHEWAN<br/> between<br/> CEDAR LAKE & LAKE WINNIPEG</span><br/><br/></div>
<p>'Pull!' shouts the steersman; and the canoe shoots past one rock to
catch the current that will whirl it past the next, every man bending to
his paddle and almost lifted to his feet. The canoe catches the right
current and is catapulted past the roaring place where rocks make the
water white. Instantly all but the steersman drop down, flat in the
bottom of the canoe, paddles rigid athwart. No need to pull now! The
waters do the work; and motion on the part of the men would be fatal.
Here the strongest swimmer would be as a chip on a cataract. The task
now is not to paddle, but to steer—to keep the craft away from the
rocks. This is the part of the steersman, who stands braced to his
paddle used rudder-wise astern; and the canoe rides the wildest plunge
like a sea-gull. One after another the brigades disappear in a white
trough of spray and roaring waters. They are gone! No human power can
bring them out of that maelstrom! But look! like corks on a wave,
mounting and climbing and riding the highest billows, there they are
again, one after another, sidling and lifting and falling and finally
gliding out to calm water, where the men fall to their<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_6" id="Page_6"></SPAN></span> paddles and
strike up one of their lusty voyageur songs!</p>
<p>The Company would not venture its peltry on the lower rapid where the
river rushes down almost like a waterfall. Above this the cargoes were
transferred to the portage, and prosaically sent over the hill on a
tram-car pulled by a horse. The men, however, would not be robbed of the
glee of running that last rapid, and, with just enough weight for
ballast in their canoes and boats, they would make the furious descent.</p>
<p>At the head of the tramway on the Grand Rapids portage stands the Great
House, facing old warehouses through which have passed millions of
dollars' worth of furs. The Great House is gambrel-roofed and is built
of heavily timbered logs whitewashed. Round it is a picket fence; below
are wine cellars. It is dismantled and empty now; but here no doubt good
wines abounded and big oaths rolled in the days when the lords of an
unmapped empire held sway.<br/><br/><br/></p>
<div class="figcenter"><SPAN href="images/map006a.png"> <ANTIMG src="images/map006a-thumb.png" width-obs="500" height-obs="324" alt="" title="Click for larger image" /></SPAN> <span class="caption">THE PRINCIPAL POSTS OF THE HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY<br/>Map by Bartholomew.</span><br/><br/></div>
<p>A glance at the map of the Hudson's Bay Company's posts will show the
extent of the fur traders' empire. To the Athabaska warehouses at Fort
Chipewyan came the furs of Mackenzie river and the Arctic; to Fort<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_7" id="Page_7"></SPAN></span>
Edmonton came the furs of the Athabaska and of the Rockies; to Fort Pitt
came the peltry of the Barren Lands; and all passed down the broad
highway of the Saskatchewan to Lake Winnipeg, whence they were sent out
to York Factory on Hudson Bay, there to be loaded on ships and taken to
the Company's warehouses in London.</p>
<hr style="width: 45%;" />
<p>Incidentally, the fur hunters were explorers who had blazed a trail
across a continent and penetrated to the uttermost reaches of a northern
empire the size of Europe. But it was fur these explorers were seeking
when they pushed their canoes up the Saskatchewan, crossed the Rocky
Mountains, went down the Columbia. Fur, not glory, was the quest when
the dog bells went ringing over the wintry wastes from Saskatchewan to
Athabaska, across the Barren Lands, and north to the Arctic. Beaver, not
empire, was the object in view when the horse brigades of one hundred
and two hundred and three hundred hunters, led by Ogden, or Ross, or
M'Kay or Ermatinger went winding south over the mountains from New
Caledonia through the country that now comprises the states of
Washington and Oregon and Idaho, across the deserts of Utah<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_8" id="Page_8"></SPAN></span> and Nevada,
to the Spanish forts at San Francisco and Monterey. It is a question
whether La Salle could have found his way to the Mississippi, or
Radisson to the North Sea, or Mackenzie to the Pacific, if the little
beaver had not inspired the search and paid the toll.</p>
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