Company Of Adventures - Merchant Prince Part 15

250 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

vessels had been traversing for 240 years, the Company established its first Eastern Arctic post dedicated to trade with the Inuit. A treeless notch at the top of the Ungava Peninsula, the tiny harbour had been visited three centuries earlier by Henry Hudson and named Wolstenholme, after one of his financial backers. The HBC Factor placed in charge of the new venture was Ralph Parsons, who would quickly become a dominant force in the Company's northward expansion. Born at Bay Roberts on the west sh.o.r.e of Newfoundland's Conception Bay, Parsons was schooled at the local Church of England academy, then went to Labrador as tutor to an HBC Factor's children. He joined the Company himself as an apprentice at Cartwright in 1898 and spent six years commuting between Rigolet and North West River, the wilderness posts once managed by Donald Smith. Given only a week's notice to get the expedition to Wolstenholme organized, Parsons arrived at the desolate spot aboard the Company's supply ship Pelican, and after instructing his accompanying carpenter to start building the post, set off in a dinghy with two Inuit boys to seek customers. Finding none, they put in for the night sixty miles along Hudson Bay's east coast, and while they were asleep their boat and provisions were washed away by the tide. They had no choice but to walk back across hilly terrain, circuniventing the fiords that serrate the coast. The rocky ground cut to shreds first their boots and then their feet. Staggering along the tundra for four days, exhausted and starving, the two boys gave up (but were rescued later) while Parsons was reduced to crawling on all fours as he approached Wolstenholme. He waited at the new post a full two years before the first customers showed up. "Snowing fast, very tough wind," he noted in his journal on April 20, 1909. "This place should have been called 'Windhome' or something worse. Great place for a lunatic asylum, that sort of thing would pay." Once the ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 251.

N.. 58 rALL AND WINTER CATALOGUE, 1910~1911

Attractive Styles in Ladies' Fur Sets

9.5~ i

976.

.00 35.00.

105.0 4,.

AN Ll N UUA B-OW,.

Advertis.e.m.e.nt in HBC cataloglue, fall-winter 1910-11

Inuit found Parsons, the trade grew briskly, and by the summer of 1911 he felt confident enough to establish the Company's first Baffin Island post at Lake Harbour on the opposite side of Hudson Strait. Within the next eighteen years, Parsons inaugurated a dozen more posts (including Cape Dorset, Pangnirtung, Pond Inlet and Port Harrison), and a further twenty HBC stores were opened while he was in charge of the Eastern Arctic.

Parsons ruled over an immense empire with the righteousness of a latter-day Cromwell. The Company was everything to him, not just his job but his religion. He even made sure that the licence plates on his Newfoundland- based automobile always bore the 252 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

numbers 1670, commemorating the year of the HBCs founding. He married Flora May House in 1918, and they had a son born the following year. After his wife died in childbirth the year after that, Parsons never remarried and wore a black tie for the rest of his life. "He was naturally reserved, independent, self-con trolled," recalled Archibald Lang Fleming, first Anglican bishop of the Arctic, who knew Parsons intimately. "He also had amazing powers of detachment and never appeared to be surprised no matter how unexpected or absurd a report or incident might be. These qualities enabled him to rise step by step in the company's service until he became Fur Trade C ommissioner in charge of the whole extensive and complicated transportation system. . . . He raised the whole tone of the fur trade. He was ruthless in his determination to stop drunkenness and immorality, not perhaps because of any deep religious conviction, but because he knew that these spelled ruin to both trapper and trader." Reflecting on that same single-track mentality in less kindly fashion, Captain Henry Toke Munn, who had run a trading post at Pond Inlet before being bought out by the HBC, commented in his memoirs: "The Company is a hard taskmaster and Parsons serves it with cold-blooded efficiency. He had been a Company trader at Lake Harbour, on Baffin's Island, for some years, and knows the Eskimos well, but I do not think he has ever understood them. He neither likes nor dislikes them, but regards them merely as instruments to serve the great Company."

THE HBUS NORTHERN COMMERCE expanded gradually, with the Inuit trading in polar bear pelts, Arctic wolf and weasel skins, white whale hides (processed into shoe laces), the occasional find of mica (used for electrical insulators) or garnet crystals from Lake Harbour, eiderdown from Cape Dorset, and sealskins, used to make ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 253.

school satchels, boots and windbreakers. But such items were all incidental to the fox. The sharp-eared, fluffy amtrial that fed mainly on the remains of caribou brought down by wolves or the leavings of seal caught by polar bears lived everywhere north of the tree-line, often win- tering on floes. Unlike its more wary red or silver cousins foraging in the forested south, the Arctic fox is less clever than it looks. The animal's most noticeable feature is its tail, a portable Linus blanket that can be used in close encounters to blind attacking predators but more commonly serves as a heating pad when the fox is curled up against the cold, guarding its exposed nose and footpads from the frost, acting as both a wrap and a respirator. Before the white man's arrival, the Inuit had little use for fox pelts because they are too flimsy for clothing.

Their only application was as a hand or face wipe-a kind of furry Kleenex-or for tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs on children's clothes. The foxes' meagre back legs, their meatiest part, provided little nourishment.

Too curious for its own good, the Arctic fox has an unerring instinct to investigate any physical change within its field of vision. Trappers tell of foxes watching from a distance while they are setting a trap; the moment they're out of sight, the animal is already poking at it, often the victim of its iron jaws. If the fox doesn't freeze to death in the trap's deadly embrace, trappers kill it by diverting the animal's attention with an outstretched hand and when it lunges, hitting it across the snout with a snow knife, so that the stunned animal can then be removed from its leg-hold.*

An alternative trapping method was used in capturing wolves and even polar bears. Small seal bones were filed to sharp points, then bent into a U shape, the ends loosely tied together with sinew, and the whole thing wrapped in apiece ofmeat, which was allowed to freeze. Awolfwould gulp down the package; once inside its stomach, the meat would thaw and the bone would spring out, piercing the animal's stomach, causing a speedy death.

254 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

Valuable and relatively simple to catch though the white fox was, it had one drawback as a staple for the Inuit trade: its appearance in the North was subject to irreg-ular birth rates, peaking quadrennially according to the life cycle of the lemming, the fox's main diet. HBC posts would collect five thousand pelts in a good year and a hundred in a down-cycle season.*

Since the Inuit had become dependent on the white man's goods, the fox trade became essential. But few realized how fundamentally the switch from hunting to trapping would disrupt their traditional society.

BEFORE THE HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY moved into the North, Inuit life had followed specific seasonal patterns based largely around sea animals. Frozen water was a form of liberation because dog teams could whiz sleds along its smooth surface at much faster and safer speeds than over the fissured terrain of the tundra, allowing families to visit one another and to hunt together. Summers were spent at temporary fishing camps established at river mouths where the Arctic char wiggled towards their sp.a.w.ning grounds. The catch was stored for dog food; then, with in a month, the hunters were out in their kayaks, after seal. In October there was fishing from stone weirs at river mouths and seal hunting through breathing-holes in the ice. Much of this catch was used to fuel dog teams during the inland hunt for migrating caribou. Since the average Inuit family and its dogs consumed forty pounds of meat a day, this often caused a serious logistical problem. An inland Inuk had to kill at least two hundred caribou annually to keep his family and dogs alive. The constant search for food in a

*A record 30,000 white fox pelts were exported from the Canadian North by the I IBC in 1943.

ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 255.

land with severely limited resources meant that each family had to hunt over a large area. Except for the temporary shelters thrown up to hold the traditional family reunions early each autumn, there were few real settle- ments or communities. The Inuit lived on the hunting trails or in temporary, widely dispersed fishing and sealhunting camps. Inuit life was nomadic, coastal (except for the caribou forays), proud and independent.

In those early days, the Inuit lived in small, related family groups sprinkled along the coastline, and their visits to HBC posts were usualiv limited to two a year. In the dead of winter, the head d each family would arrive alone by dog team to trade and renew his essential supplies; in summer, whole families would come to greet the annual HBC supply vessel and mingle with kinfolk. Like the whaling ships, the Company's posts were there providing goods, but their presence was incidental to the seasonal rhythm oflnuit existence. As the fur trade accelerated, such FIBC supplies as rifles, hatchets, needles, matches, tea and tobacco became necessities instead of supplements, and everything changed. To satisfy these essentials, the Inuit had to abandon their subsistence inode of life and concentrate on the only "cash crop" there was: fox pelts.

This shift from the primary role of hunter to trapper involved a radical switch in the aboriginals' sense of selfworth. Unlike trapping, hunting-especially of seal and polar bear-was a test of manhood, a dignified and courageous occupation in which each family celebrated the day's bounty. To be a hunter was to be an Angut-"a Man, preeminently."

The fox had to be trapped in winter when fur was at its prime, which meant abandoning most of the seal and caribou hunts. That in turn meant not only having to change social customs but also having to buy from the mc the clothing and tools previously obtained as byproducts of seal and caribou kills. To 256 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

Inuit bunter witb frozen seal at Igloolik

maximize their trade and retail selling opportunities, the HBC encouraged the concentration of the Inuit into villages or settlements. The location of few HBC posts was chosen by aboriginals; sites were picked for their prox- imity to safe supply-ship anchorages and their nearness to areas where the abundance of Arctic fox promised profitable commerce. At least once, the HBC moved whole Inuit communities to their trading posts; in 1934, ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 257.

fifty-three Inuit volunteered to be transferred (with their 109 dogs) from Cape Dorset, Pangnirtung and Pond Inlet to Dundas Harbour on Devon Island in the High Arctic, where the Company had set up a new store.*

T] IE FIRST PRIMITIVF POSTS RALPH PARSONS planted in the Eastern Arctic- consisting of a trading store, twin warehouses and a staff house (which was the only heated structure)-set the physical pattern for the HBC's northern presence over the next four decades. The buildings were makeshift, slapped together and not insulated. Painted or limed white on the outside, with green trim and black roofing (changed to red in the 1930s), the compounds stood out from those of such later arrivals as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who customarily occupied quarters in two tones of grey, and most missionaries, who chose brown. The inside walls of the HBC stores were unpainted and there was no attempt at decoration except for the Coleman lamps and dog chains suspended from the ceiling.

Merchandise was divided into three categories: provisions (flour, cornmeal, jam, baking powder, sugar, tobacco, tea, candles and matches); dry goods (canvas and duffel, tartan shawls, inirrors, toys, yard goods and the utilitarian panties known as "joy-killer bloomers"); and hardware (rifles, ammunition, files, traps, knives, pots, pans, hand-powered sewing machines, and coal oil or kerosene). Since few customers could read, colours were important in

*Later ma.s.s transfers, based on Ottawa's absurd excuse of using the Inuit presence as a symbol of Canadian sovereignty, occurred between Port Burwell and Coral Harbour on Southampton Island and from Port Harrison to Resolute on Cornwallis Island and Grise Fiord on Ellesmere Island, well north of any other habitation.

258 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

arranging the displays: five-pound tins of HBC tobacco were bright red, while the cheaper Ogden's brand came in light green; red-label tea was stronger than the greenlabel tea; red boxes held 12-gauge Imperial shotgun sh.e.l.ls while blue boxes were used for Dominion sh.e.l.ls, yellow boxes for rifle cartridges, and so on.*

Because stores were unheated and even on warm winter days indoor temperatures hovered at a chilly -200F, the Bay men attended them only at trading time and seldom removed their outdoor clothing. They learned to sign counter-slips while wearing hairy caribou-skin mittens and standing in their deerskin boots on dogskin mats. "I'd go in there and stay as long as my feet didn't freeze," recalled Scotty Gall. "It was so cold that nail heads on the inside walls were coated thickwith frost and if there were too many people in the store, you couldn't see anything because of their condensed breath. In those days we seldom dealt with fine articles, mostly trading in bulk items. Because it was too cold to use scissors, we'd premeasure and cut the calico into six-yard lengths." No gla.s.s goods were safe in the frosty environment, and one trader recalled that the approach of winter was heralded by the popping of ketchup bottles. The only vaguely fresh vegetables offered were potatoes, brought in aboard the annual supply ships by the barrelful. The official reason stores weren't heated was that coal (at a hundred dollars a ton) was too expensive; the real reason was that the Company wanted the Inuit out

*These basic stock lists were gradually expanded to include accordions, axes, blankets, ostrich-feather boas, beads, boots, b.u.t.tons, belts, tailor-made cigarettes, dresses, gingham, harmonicas, hats, mitts, needles, fish and mosquito netting, paints, perfumes, prepared and canned foods, snowshoes, soap, Spectacles, sweaters, tents, toboggan boards, towels, tools, twine and waders.

ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 2 59.

trapping foxes instead of relaxing around a welcoming warm stove.

Much like the Indians' stories of dealings with the 14BC, too often the folk memory of the Inuit recalls the trading relationship with the Company as a simple exchange: fox pelts for goods. It was in fact a more complicated transaction, with each side slyly certain it was exploiting the other. The Inuit wondered why the white men wanted the perfectly useless fox and polar bear pelts, since neither could be made into warm or comfortable coats. The Bay men, on the other hand, knew only too well what these "worthless" furs were fetching on the London auction market.

In 1923, for example, a .30 30 Winchester rifle sold for twelve skins, even though "the market value of a rifle was not much more than a single white fox pelt."

The actual swap was relatively uncomplicated.* When an Inuit family arrived to trade, they were lodged in what the HBC managers called their "Eskimo Kitchen," a small room adjoining the staff house where the visitors warmed themselves,and enjoyed a "mug-up" of tea and hardtack.

When the trader felt the family might be ready to go into the store, he would casually inquire whether they had trapped lots of foxes. "The man would answer, in the old Eskimo manner," recalled Duncan Pryde, who served eleven years with the HBC before being elected a member of the NWT Council, 14 always belittling himself and his own efforts. 'Well, I've only got a few skins-really poor-hardly worth bothering to show the trader,' and then as likely as not he would bring out some of the loveliest hides you could ever wish to see. The Eskimos really enjoyed the trading. A man

*This was in sharl) contrast to the complicated ritual of Indian- HBC trading, as described in Company ofAdventurers, hardcover, pages 191-96.

260 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

Les Manning, manager of Coppermine HBC post, trading with Inuit hunter, 1949

and his wife might come in with ten white foxes worth $200 ... and we would know we were in for a long session in that frigid room. They would look all around the store as if they had never seen it before, and they would wander around-not that we minded, but all the time we would be getting colder and colder even though we were dressed like the Eskimos, in a full set of skins."

The Bay men had been schooled in how to detect faults in pelts such as rubbed shoulders in an animal that had suffered from fleas and had scratched itself too vigorously. Fur that was too flat indicated the fox had spent part of the winter in a burrow, instead of running about improving his coat's condition. "These fellows in the early stores worked under very poor conditions, often at night holding a coal-oil lantern in one hand, the pelt in the other," according to Jj. "Woody" Wood. "The ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 261.

customer might owe you a thousand dollars and be your best trapper, so you had to be psychologically very careful about what you said and what credit you gave. But whenever we overpaid for furs, we'd get a hot letter from Winnipeg." After the price was agreed to, trading tokens were placed on the counter and, as goods were chosen, they were withdrawn to make customers aware of how much each purchase was worth and how much they had left to spend.*

The quality of the HBCS early trade goods reflected the Company's monopolistic priorities. "It sold good rifles and traps, the best flour, tea and ammunition-all the items needed for a successful trapping expedition," noted A] Hochbaum, the Manitoba artist-naturalist who became one of the HBC's liveliest critics. "But otherwise there was much junk on the HBCs store shelves-bargain-bas.e.m.e.nt stuff that wouldn't sell in Toronto or Montreal. Why, over the long trek, did they bring in frying pans so thin that food burned, or canvas tents so fragile that the wind whistled through and the insides became wet after only a light rain? Peter Arvelek once told me at Ranl~in Inlet that the frypans were thinner than the beer can lie was holding." It was one of the very few retailing relationships anywhere in which the merchant decided what goods his customers needed and how much they should be charged. The hunters who had been turned into trappers were gradually becoming con-'~, surners in a market economy that allowed them little freedom of choice.

*These tokens, matches or wooden sticks and bra.s.s, copper or later aluminum coins, had no monetary value outside the stores. (In 1926, the HB("s London Governor ruled that cash should be subst.i.tuted for tokens at all HBC posts, but the order was ignored in remote areas and tokens were still being used in Ungava, for example, until the 1960s.) 262 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

Apart front having to trap for a living, the very idea of bartering for the goods they wanted was a new discipliDe for the Inuit. Their tradition allowed everyone to take whatever the reluctant land would yield; the notion of private property, money or material possession lay outside normal thought or discourse. In the pre-HBC period, Inuit society followed a pure form of communism (in the sense of a social order in which property is held in common), with protection and survival of the group (which usually meant family) being far more important than any one man's or woman's wishes. The Inuit were so determined to play down any sense of individualism that they would periodically exchange dwellings. Stich a communal approach was essential on the tundra or when aboard some errant floe where all the available food had to be shared or someone could starve. But once the Company moved in and established its stores, individual possessions became a status symbol, and the basis of Inuit society was compromised. "The new barter economy-furs in exchange for the goods of civilization-made life harder instead of easier, more complicated instead of more simple," wrote Diamond jenness, an early student of native cultures. "The commercial world of the white man had caught the Eskimo in its mesh, destroyed their self-sufficiency and independence, and made them economically its slaves."

THE RELATIONSHIP OF HBC TRADERS with the Inuit had its furtive aspects, too, and no part of that interchange was more carefully hidden from view-or more open to misinterpretation-than the s.e.xual liaisons between them. The Bay men's perceptions of these sensual a.s.signations varied according to their own experiences. "It was the accepted thing to do when I was up there as a kid," recalled Scotty Gall. "You went to the husband and ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 263.

asked for the wife, and you paid him in goods or ammunition and her in so many yards of calico or whatever she wanted." Chesley Russell, on the other hand, who spent from 1921 to 1960 in the HBCs northern service, claims none of it ever happened. "The Eskimos were just as jealous of their women as we are, and never traded off their wives to anybody," he insisted. Certainly, there was much gossip among the Inuit about the Bay men's s.e.xual appet.i.tes.

"They are not only in the North to make money but they're in it for a fast buck and a good piece of action, but they always forget they're dealing with human beings."

Cecil "Husky" Harris, the HBC Factor at Poorfish Lake on the edge of the tundra, had three Inuit wives at the same time and even visited Winnipeg with them all in tow, staying at the Empire, then known as the Hudson's Bay Hotel. "Harris' wives were quite a mixed lot," reported his colleague Sydney A. Keighley. "One was old and ugly, one was young and pretty, and one was very short and very homely. Eventually he decided to limit himself to one wife and he chose to keep the old, ugly one, who was the mother of his three children. Alfred Peterson bought the young, pretty one, and George Yandle bought the short, homely one. I never managed to find out what sort of price he got for them." Gontran de Poncins, the French adventurer who spent the winter of 193 8 at the HBCs King William Island post, remembered asking Paddy Gibson, the local manager: "What would happen if I asked one of these Eskimos for his wife?"

"Very likely he'd let you have her."

"Without a word? Without any~er-bargaining about it?"

"Oh, quite! In the first place, it's done. And then, you see, it's something of an honor. The fact that out of them all you, a white man, picked her, would make the rest 264 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

think more highly of her. And so far as the husband goes, of course he'd expect something in exchange. . . ."

"And suppose I asked for her several days running?"

"That wouldn't upset him. He might say to you, 'Tomorrow: I want her myself tonight.' But chances are that you could have her. And her husband and the rest would sit round in the igloo, laughing and chatting about you. The husband would be congratulated upon having made a rich friend.

Probably he would let the others talk on while he dreamt of the things he'd get out of you."

No Bay man was more explicit in his s.e.xual confessions than Duncan Pryde, whose exploits once prompted him to boast that "every community should have a little Pryde." Stu Hodgson could vouch for that reputation.

"Duncan took on all comers," Hodgson recalled. "One time, I had a party travelling with me and I arranged to pick him up at one of the far northern settlements. I couldn't find him. There were thirteen houses near the beach. Suddenly Duncan came running out of the twelfth and said, 'Wait a minute-I have only one more to go,' and he dashed into the thirteenth. The local missionary came along, wringing his hands, saying, 'Please take him with you.' When we left, I am sure it was the first peaceful night he'd had in three weeks."