Company Of Adventures - Merchant Prince Part 5

79.

80 LABRADOR SMITH.

supply stove-pipes for the barracks of the remaining army volunteers. The HBC submitted a high bid, a.s.suming it would get the business automatically.

A local merchant named James H. Ashdown sent in a much lower quote but lost thc contractwhen Smith convinced army officers the newcomer wasn't equipped to do the job. Once the HBC got the contract, Smith discovered there were no tinsmiths on his staff and ordered Ashdown to do the work under HBC auspices. When Ashdown refused, Smith asked the colonel to force the fellow into line. Wolseley cancelled the IJBCs contract instead and asked Ashdown (who went on to found western Canada's largest wholesale hardware house) to produce the stove-pipes at his original bid. The minor incident reflected the compet.i.tive new world in which the ancient fur-trading company would have to operate.

Smith's initial order of business was to settle accounts outstanding from the Red River Rebellion. It was typical of their corporate ethic that the HBC,s London Pooh-Bahs -.iewed Louis Riel's agonizing struggle on behalf of his people strictly as a bookkeeping entry. The uprising had disturbed the business of the Company, and now it was claiming refunds from the Canadian government for missing fur stocks, lost trading opportunities and six months' interest, at 5 percent, on the delayed transfer payment of E300,000-a total of Y,3 2,5 08, not counting the amounts Smith had paid out in bribes. It took a dozen years to settle the dispute, and the Company received very little cash because Ottawa subtracted the costs of surveying its territory, but the claim hurt the HBC's already poor reputation. "A corporation has no conscience," observed Captain WE Butler, Wolseley's intelligence officer, whose familiarity with the West produced its most evocative early literary portrait, The Great Lone Land.

THE GREAT FIRE CANOES 81.

"From a tvrant or a despot you may hope to win justice; from a roi)ber you may perhaps receive kindness; but a corporation of London merchants represents to my mind more mercenary mendacity, and more cowardly contempt of truth and fair play, than can be found in the human race."

Despite such condemnation, there were some genuine worries about the 11BCs loss of stature. The Company had become vital in the daily lives of the North-West's Indians. Natural gathering places, its trading posts were the natives' only source of the barter goods that made wilderness life more bearable-the g,uns, blankets, axes and other items they had grown to depend on. "The sudden withdrawal of the Company's operation from any part of the Indian country will cause widely spread misery and starvation and the consequent disorders and embarra.s.sment to the Government which spring from such scenes," William Mactavish, Smith's predecessor, had warned, "nor can any other company ... be in a position ... to supply the Indian tribes with the requisite regularity with those necessaries of life at present provided them. This is the secret of the Company domination-its existence is a necessity to the Indian." That was true enough, but the fur trade itself was in a highly volatile state. Felt hats made from Canadian beaver had enjoyed a momentary fashion revival in the 1860s. The headgear took the shape of wide-brimmed adaptations of the "wideawake," a name i . rivented by the humour magazine Punch for a hat that had no nap. But now the new seamless silk toppers were much more in vogue, having been worn by the Prince Consort, the Prince of Wales and President Abraham Lincoln. Although there was continued strong demand for specialty pelts from North America, London's fur industry was turning towards other, less expensive sources, and to nutria, the skin of coypu rats, 82 LABRADOR SMITH.

being harvested in Brazil and Argentina by the million. The most immediate impact on the North-West was the final downgrading of York Factory, which for two centuries had been the flourishing centre of the North American fur trade. By 1875, the headquarters of the HBC's Northern Department had been moved to Fort Garry and the magnificent tidewater depot was reduced to a regional trading post.

That shift drew attention to the staggering realization that a full century after James Watt had perfected his steam engine, the Hudson's Bay Company was still depending on a primitive transportation system of horse- or ox-drawn carts, birchbark canoes and York boats. Apart from die immense manpower expenses, which were mounting now that the M6tis no longer thought of themselves as slaves, use of such primitive technology meant that it took the Company four years to realize returns on invested capital. As one frustrated shareholder exclaimed at the Company's 1871 annual meeting, "Gentlemen, this Company has not been very celebrated for doing things in a hurry. It is really very much like Rip Van Winkle waking tip in the year 1871 and finding out that steam engines and steam boats will be of advantage to the trade."

Right on cue, Donald Smith wrote to William Armit, the HBC's secretary, on November 6, 1871, recommending that the fur trade's cost structure be streamlined by the use of steamboats along the North Saskatchewan River, its main traffic artery. That would radically reduce costs and, ideally, bring the furs out in a season or two instead of four seasons. On top of these benefits, Smith recognized the possibility of perpetuating the Company's monopoly over western Canada, this time by controlling its commercial traffic flows, THE GREAT FIRE CANOES 83.

The Hudson's Bay Company decided to relaunch itself as a prairie shipping line, using a brand-new fleet of what the Indian,; quickly dubbed Fire Canoes.

INCREDIBLE AS IT NOW SEEMS, an awkward but sporadically effective flotilla of sternwheel steamboats for a time supplied the Canadian West. These ships, chugging along at a respectable five knots, became a common sight in what everyone then-and now-a.s.sumed to be a landlocked prairie. They not only carried the materials of the fur trade (two or three trips in the high-water season easily handled the cargoes previously consigned to the large and expensive brigades of carts and fleets of York boats) but quickly branched out into ferrying the necessities of the new civilization being born on the Prairies. Ploughs and scythes, tea and bacon, threshing machines, and the] r accompanying pioneers crowded the decks and cabins.*

The perky vessels' steam whistles could be heard up to Edmonton on the 1,200-mile flow of the North Saskatchewan River; along the South Saskatchewan past Saskatoon to Medicine Hat and beyond; on the a.s.simhome, from Fort Pelly and Fort Ellice to Lake Winnipeg; and up the Red to Fargo in Dakota Territory, which had connections to the railway networks of the northern United Statesj

*Pa.s.senger fares aboard the IIBC boats from Fort Garrv (Winnipeg) to Edmonton were fort~ dollars one wav for cabin s.p.a.ce, twenty dollars for a perch on the open promenade deck. Freight was carricd at four dollars a hundredweight.

tSee the map on page 136 for deoils of the prairie steamboat routes.

84 LABRADOR SMITH.

Steaming down Main Street in the a.s.siniboine during the Red Riverflood of 1897, Emerson, Manitoba

By 1879, seventeen ships, not all owned by the HBC, were regularly employed on prairie rivers. Getting there was all the fun. Constant stops had to be made for cordwood to fire the boilers.* The flat-bottomed sternwheelers, difficult to control under the best of conditions, didn't so much travel the river routes as bounce their way through them. New obstructions were always being encountered, or a b.u.mping acquaintance with old ones was being renewed, Flood times were the worst because the surging waters hid dangerous rocks and made the keelless vessels impossible to steer. Occasionally a bold skipper would take advantage of the high water to

*Finding it could get tricky. The HBCs Lily, desperate for firewood, pulled into the tiny enclave of Red Deer Forks when her crew noticed two N16tis log cabins whose owners were out hunting. In minutes the buildings had been dismantled, their timbers loaded, and the ship was hastily puffing her way along the Saskatchewan.

THE GREAT FIRE CANOES 85.

invent a shortcut. On May 10, 1873, Captain Alexander Griggs was en route to Fort Garry aboard the International, carrying a large liquor consignment for the Hudson's Bay Company. He had to reach the border by midnight or his cargo would be liable for a new tariff. Cursing the day's delays and gazing at the waters spilling over the banks of the Red and flooding the plain, Griggs "coolly turned the boat out of the bed of the river," as reported later in the Mdnitoban, "and made a short cut over the prairie ... thereby reducing the distance very inaterially and gaining the Customs House" in time.*

Summer low water was a much more common problem. Ships' captains, mostly recycled wharf rats from the Mississippi River trade, often ordered crew and pa.s.sengers overboard to help push or warp the vessels through shallow sections. Warping meant literally walking the ship over an obstacle. This was achieved by using four strong spars hinged to double derricks on either side of the bow. When aground, the vessel could lift itself over the obstruction by the manipulation of ropes running through these derricks to turn the poles into stilts. One skipper was exaggerating the shallowness of the river only slightly when he yelled at a settler who was dipping his pail into the a.s.siniboine, "Hey! You put that water back!

" Stuck in the ankle-deep backwaters of the North Saskatchewan above c.u.mberland Lake, Captain Aaron Raymond Russell of the Marquis ordered his crew members overboard with picks and shovels to dam every creek flowing out of the main channel. The extra inches obtained this way made it possible for him to tiptoe his way downstream to deep water.

*Another example of overland navigation was the a.s.siniboine's astonishing sweep down the main street of Emerson, Manitoba, to rescue and bring relief supplies to Red River flood victims in 1897.

86 LABRADOR SMITH.

"We go from one bank to the other," complained Lady Dufferin in August 1877 when she and her husband, the first Governor General of Canada to tour the West, were aboard the Minnesota on their way to inspect the Red River settlement, "crushing and crashing against the trees, which grow down to the waterside; I had just written this when I gave a shriek as I saw my ink-bottle on the point of being swept overboard by an intrusive tree....

The consequence of this curious navigation is that we never really go on for more than three minutes at a time. ... Our stern wheel is often ash.o.r.e, and our captain and pilot must require the patience of saints." Later that day Lady Dufferin saw another ship, the Manitoba, approaching in the dark.

"It looked beautiful," she reported, "with two great bull's-eyes, green and red lamps and other lights on deck, creeping towards us; we stopped and backed into the sh.o.r.e, that it might pa.s.s us. It came close and fired off a cannon and we saw on the deck a large transparency with 'Welcome Lord Dufferin' on it, and two girls dressed in white with flags in their hands; then a voice sang'Canada, Sweet Canada,'and many more voices joined the chorus, and they sang'G.o.d Save the Queen' and 'Rule, Britannia', and cheered for the Governor General as they began to move slowly away disappearing into the darkness."*

During the viceregal visit, Lady Dufferin hammered in the last spike of western Canada's first railway, a

*"0 Canada," with music by Calixa Lavall6e and words by Adolphe-Basile Routhier, was not Aritten until 1880, and not widely sung outside Quebec until the early years ofthe twentieth century. Its use as the national anthem was approved by Parliament in 1967, and itwas officially adopted in 1980 under the National Anthem Act. Lavall6e, who had served as a bandsman with the Union forces in the U.S. Civil War and favoured U.S. annexation ofCanada, spent much ofhis adult life in the United States and died in Boston in 189 1. Routhier was a judge of the Superior THE GREAT FIRE CANOES 87.

primitive four-mile-long, narrow-gauge tramway built by the Hudson's Bay Company where the waters of the Saskatchewan roared down tl~e Cirand Rapids to Lake Winnipeg. The wilderness link provided horse-drawn wagons to handle goods en route between Edmonton and Fort Garry, bypa.s.sing the steep limestone canyon where the river dropped almost a hundred feet in three miles, causing painfully long portages. For a time, using a specially trained white horse, the little railwav actually ran its4 Trains consisted of a car laden with'the merchandise being trans-shipped, followed by an empty carriage. At the height of land, a platform was built the same height as the cars. I laving been taught the drill, the amtnal would pull the two carriages up from one or the other terminus, slip out of its own harness, walk onto the platform and into the empty car, which would then glide down behind the load to the end of steel, banked to provide an automatic brake.

Once this barrier was conquered, the prairie ships grew in size and appointments. Captain Peter McArthur's Nortb West boasted a five-thousand-dollar grand piano and two bridal chambers. First-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers aboard the City of Winnipeg dined in soft leather chairs in a carpeted and chandelicred Grand Saloon. According to the Manitoba Free Press, one of their number was so overcome by the ambience-and presumably the booze-that he

CourtofQuebec from 1873 who later became chief justice of that court and was knighted. In English-speaking Canada, a popular national song for many years was -rhe Maple Leaf Forever," written in 1867 by AJexander Muir, a Toronto teacher. Its emphasis on the Britisliness of Canada tended to rule out its use in French Canada. The English translation of "0 Canada" now in use is a modified form of the words written in 1908 by R. Stanley Weir, an author of legal texts and later judge of the Exchequer Court of Canada.

88 LABRADOR SMITH.

61was trying to waltz across the deck with an umbrella ... for a partner."

Inevitably, the intoxicated pa.s.senger made one uncalculated twirl and "without trying, waltzed off most beautiffilly into the river."

TI [E FIRST STEAMSHIP on the Canadian Prairies was a prototype of the bizarre fleet that was to follow. The Anson Northup, which arrived at Red River from Georgetown, Minnesota, on June 10, 1859, was ninety feet long and twenty-two feet wide, though she had a draft of only fourteen inches. She looked like a log cabin mounted on a washbasin with a toy smokestack stuck in the middle, but she could carry fifty tons of cargo as well as pa.s.sen- gers, and her arrival caused great excitement. "Horses with buckskin riders, oxdrawn two-wheeled carts from the fields, and cautious Indians clad in feathers, leggings, and moccasins streamed to the fort landing," wrote Ted Barris in Fire Canoe, the definitive study of prairie steamboats. "Children thronged at the riverside to see 'an enormous barge, with a watermill on its stern' emerging from the wilderness like a demon churning up water and spitting sparks. The few carriages available rushed to the scene with flounced and furbelowed ladies attended by bearded gentlemen in tall hats-the [HBC] Governor's entourage."

The Hudson's Bay Company reacted by purchasing the Anson Northup through a dummy U.S. company and later bought a slightly larger sister ship, the International, rea.s.serting its transportation monopoly by raising rates to prohibitive levels on goods carried for its compet.i.tors. The monopoly was broken in the spring of 1871 by the sudden appearance on the river of the much larger Selkirk, which could carry 125 pa.s.sengers and 115 tons of freight. Owned by Jj. Hill, the St Paul entrepreneur Donald Smith had met on his way back from settling the Red River Rebellion, the new venture represented THE GREAT FIRE CANOES 89.

enough of a challenge that Smith negotiated a partnership deal that gave the two men control over a new ent.i.ty called the Red River Transportation Company, which secretly granted the I IBC a one-third preferential freight rate. It became so profitable that 80-percent dividends were not uncommon Within four years, grain was being exported by Manitoba farmers, adding further impetus to improve a transportation system that was already han- dling more river traffic than moved along the Mississippi between St Paul and St Louis. When the competing Merchants International Steamboat Line launched the Manitoba, Red River Transportation Company captains proved that subtlety was not their long suit, Acting on orders from Smith, on June 4, 187 5, the skipper of the International rammed the Manitoba abreast of her stacks and sank her.*

The HBC's own shipbuilding adventures verged on slapstick. First to be completed was the Chief Commissioner (named for Smith), launched on May 7, 1872. Her draft turned out to be too great to navigate her intended route along the Saskatchewan, so the ship was rea.s.signed to Lake Winnipeg, where the absence of a keel made her wallow too violently to be of much use. Another HBC ship sank the following summer near Grand Rapids, a day into her maiden voyage. The next project was an expensive (.1~4,000) steel-hulled vessel built at the Clyde shipyards of Alfred Yarrow & Company for rea.s.sembly in North America. The Lily was fast and she was beautifill; but an anonymous marine architect had designed her draft four inches too deep, and the North Saskatchewan's margins for error were so narrow that this was enough to keep her out of practical service. After many

*Jerry Webber, the captain of the Manitoba and other sternwheelers, was known mainly for the fact that he kept a tame raven with red ribbon tied around its wings on his bridge.

90 LABRADOR SMITH.

modifications the Li~y finally fought her way up the South Saskatchewan nearly as far as Medicine Hat, hit a submerged rock, and sank.*

The Company's most durable vessel was the Northcote. Launched in 18 7 4, she was 150 feet long, had a 3 0foot beam, and drew only twenty-two inches-about the same as a loaded York boat. Her boilers and highpressure engines had been brought all the way from Cincinnati and could produce 39.72 horsepower. On her maiden voyage, the Northcote made it to Carlton House after only ten days' steaming, recouping her cost in one trip.

Onjuly 22, 1875, she reached Fort Edmonton with a cargo that had left Fort Garry only thirty-three days earlier, turned around after three days in port, and was back at Grand Rapidi on August 5. Later seasons were less successful because of low water levels and traDs-shipment delays from Fort Garry.

This lack of reliability plus steep insurance premiums and the unwillingness of the Canadian government to

The best-known skipper on the South Saskatchewan was the appropriately named Horatio Hamilton Ross. He built eight ships (including the OHel~ and sank them all. His most famous encounter was with a bridge in Saskatoon, which the local paper correctly described as "the greatest marine disaster in the history of Saskatoon." At the wheel of the 130-foot SS City of Medicine Hat and aware that spring flooding had raised river levels, Ross was navigating carefully under the city's bridges, even removing part of the smokestack to lower the height of his ship's superstructure. But the Medicine llat'~ rudder snagged in some telegraph wires, and the ship was impaled on the 19th Street pedestrian bridge justas a few head of cattle were being herded across. The cattle stampeded, as did their keepers, and, according to an onlooker, eierybody aboard the ship "scrambled up Onto the bridge to safety, except the engineer. Fle popped out of the engine room and jumped into the water.

By the time he reached the river bank, he had drifted a mile downriver, the current was so strong. . . . "

THE GREAT FIRE CANOES 91.

help remove some of the more obvious hazards to navigation gradually cooled the Company's shipping ardour.* The fleet was eventually folded into two independent transportation companies that allowed the HBC preferential freight rates with no need for further capital expenditures. The arrival in Winnipeg on October 8, 1877, of the Selkirk pushing a barge that carried the West's first locomotive signalled the terminal phase of the Prairies' brave steamships.t But the HBCs sternwheeler Nortbcote had one more great adventure in store.

She went to war.

When Louis Riel returned to Canada from his dispiriting American exile in the summer of 1884, the M6tis of northern Saskatchewan enlisted his fervour in what was to be the bloodiest expression of agrarian protest in Canadian history: the North West Rebellion of 1885. Apart

*The premiums were high both because river beds were strewn with rocks that seemed drawn to the flat-bottomed hulls and because the ships' stacks emitted live sparks. Every riverbank farmer knew that if his barn or haystack caught fire, it was far more profitable to let it burn and claim the insurance than attempt to fight the blaze.

tThe engine was the Countess ofDuffe),in, named after the wife of the Governor General who visited Manitoba that year. Five years old when Joseph Whitehead, a pioneer railway construction man, bought her, the locomotive was built at the Baldwin yards in Philadelphia and had been in the service of the Northern Pacific. After arriving in St Boniface, the Countess was put to work by Whitehead building a southbound line along the east side of the Red River to Pembina, where a connection would be made with the U.S.

railroad to St Paul. The little locomotive ended up on the sc.r.a.pheap at Golden, B.C., after working for the Columbia River Lumber Company. In 1908 R.D. Waugh, later mayor of Winnipeg, found her there and persuaded the lumber company to donate her to the Manitoba citv. The CPR hauled her back to Winnipeg and restored her to become a munic.i.p.al historic irtifact.

THE GREAT FIRE CANOES 93.

from acting as princ.i.p.al provisioning agent for the troops dispatched by the Canadian government to quell the uprising, the Hudson's Bay Company's main contribution was to charter the Northcote, at S250 a day, to Major-General Frederick Dobson Middleton, the blimpish, walrusmoustached former commandant of the British military college at Sandhurst, who had been placed in charge of the Canadian militia. Riel and his shrewd field marshal, Gabriel Dumont, were ma.s.sing M6tis warriors and their Indian allies at Batoche, a small farming community on the South Saskatchewan River southwest of Prince Albert, while the Northcote was being used by Middleton's staff to ferry troops across the river at Saskatchewan Landing to help relieve the siege at Battleford.

On April 23, 1885, the ship was a.s.signed the dangerouS task of carrying ammunition into the war zone, towing two barges loaded with ordnance supplies behind her. Middleton's plan to oust the Mkis, snugly dug into their rifle pits at Batoche, called for the Northcote to provide an amphibious second front for his land attack. Aboard the saucepan-bottomed wooden tub was one of North America's ace Indian fighters, Arthur "Gat"

Howard, late of the Connecticut National Guard, who had been seconded to the militia contingent because of his marksmanship with the hand-cranked, multi-barrel Gatling gun. In addition to this rapid-fire weapon, which had never been used in Canada before, the Northcote carried a nine-pound cannon mounted on her weather deck, and thirty-five sharpshooters lined her railings. That a.r.s.enal was formidable enough, but it required armour for protection, not an easy commodity to come by in these parts. The Northcote may or may not have been the first warship to fight an engagement in waters thirty-six inches deep-twice the depth of a children's wading pool. But she was the only man-of-war ever to proceed into combat with a billiard table as armour. On her way THE GREAT FIRE CANOES 95.

downriver, the IIB(' vessel had pa.s.sed the plundered homestead of Gabriel Dumont, and the Northcote's crew protected her gun emplacements with his billiard table and two-inch-thick planks torn from his barn door. The table was reinforced with Dumont's mattress and bags of oats, not to mention his washing machine and his wife's sewing machine.

And so the Nortbcote steamed to war, a floating apparition sure to dismay her friends and comfort her enemies.

Middleton had arranged to rendezvous with the ship at a loop in the river just above Batoche, near Gabriel Durnont's ferry crossing. The plan was to launch a co-ordinated a.s.sault, his land forces marching to the fanfare of their bugle boys, while the Noi-thcote would provide a diversion by sailing towards the centre of the N16tis position to the hoot of its three-note steam whistle.

The Northcote had firepoA er of a kind and armour of a lesser sort, but she had no camouflage. It is not simple to hide a 150-foot ship, chugging through a 3-foot-deep river on the plains of Saskatchewan. Mftis scouts reported on her every lurch downstream, and on the morning of May 9, when she rounded the final bend of the river, her creNv was greeted with concentrated fire from N16tis troops lining the banks. Her captain promptly a.s.sumed his battle station by lying p.r.o.ne on the wheelhouse floor, doing his best to guide the ship's wheel-~vitb several of its spokes shot off-by peeping through a rifle hole. As the Northcote reachecf the ferry terminal at Gabriel's Crossing an hour eariv, Dumont ordered the ferry cables, normally slung hig~ above the river, lowered astern and ahead of the ship, crippling her nianoeuvrability.The forward motion of the vessel when she hit the taut wii-e sheared off the smokestack and most of the pilot-hou,,e, loading spars and steam whistle, 96 LABRADOR SMITH.

disabling the prairie warship but allowing her to drift onto a sandbank below Batoche.

Thus ended the 11BC vessel's Gilbert-and- Sullivan naval engagement, but the doughty and awkward steamboat, having successfully run a five-mile gauntlet of murderous rifle fire, was still more or less afloat.

Certainly her presence had beeri intimidating enough for Louis Riel to pray, "0 my G.o.d, I pray you, in the name ofJesus, Mary, Joseph and St.

John the Baptist, grant that you use the cable of our ferry to upset the steamboat; thatwe may have the provisions, the useful things the boat contains, the arms and the ammunitions."

After the Battle of Batoche, the Northcote was beached at c.u.mberland Lake in a meadow opposite the Pas River, a bullet-scarred hull the only evidence of her brief moment of glory. She (lied nineteen years later, the victim of evangelical zeal. A Catholic priest who discovered that local teenagers were using the Northcote's cabins to flirt away long summer evenings persuaded the HBCs c.u.mberland House manager to give an Indian named Jimmy Greenleaf enough coal oil to torch the proud ship's remains.*

Completion of a railway link between Winnipeg and St Paul in 1878 brought Red River's commercial water traffic to an effective halt, though one ship, the Grand Forks, didn't make her final run until 1909. There were still three vessels operating on the North Saskatchewan