Company Of Adventures - Merchant Prince Part 7

Chal-lesJohn Bry(kes, HRC Land Commissioner, aboitt 1889

with an air of righteous enthusiasm. "His arrival in Winnipeg," observed historians Alan Wilson and R.A. Hotchkiss, was like that of a great adniims trative )uggernaut. Extensive surveys began in prospect of a 'Manitoba Fever'; new administrative, legal, accounting, and advertising machinery emerged; contracts for supplies to Indians and the North West Mounted Police became compet.i.tive; new hotel and milling facilities enhanced the value of 11BC lands; a subsidiary bridge company for the Red and a.s.simboine rivers at Winnipeg was formed; the retail stores were reorganized under new men, not those only 'accustomed to the barter system with the Indians'; PROGRESSION AND BETRAYAL 115.

supervision of barge and steam transport of goods and pa.s.sengers was wrenched from the hands of 'incompetents'; and, finally, executive operations were perinanently moved from Montreal to Winnipeg in November 1880. Within a year the IIBC was recognized as the most reliable source for information on settlement and commerce in Manitoba and the North-West lerritories." This was good news to everyone but Smith, who didn't want aliv successor showing him up. He had refused Brydges the courtesy of a briefing and didn't even pa.s.s on his correspondence files, though the new Commissioner discovered unpaid seven-year-old IIBC tax bills in Smith's desk.

At the same time as the business teinpo in Canada was picking tip under Brydges, a similar transformation was taking place at the Company's head office. With Goschen's return to politics in 1880, the energetic Eden Colvile was appointed C,overnor. He stood out from his twenty-four predecessors in two important respects: he understood something about the fur trade and he had actually visited Canada's North-West.

The son of Andrew Colvile, who had served the I IBC_ for most of three decades as Deputy Governor and Governor in the mid-1800s, the younger Colvile had been sent to Rupert.s Land as a.s.sociate Governor in 1849. Only eight years out of Eton and Cambridge, he had apprenticed brilliantly under Sir George Simpson's direction and became a lifelong HB(' enthusiast. He turned head office into a far niore interventionist agency and was determined to rid the Company of Donald Smith's corrosive influence.

Colvile's love of the Company made him distrust Smith, who had so cav- alierly inishandled his last two appointments, and the British Governor specifically instructed Brydaes to displace the vestiges of Smith's authority and to downgrade the Fur Commissioner, Janies Graharne, so that 116 LABRADOR SMITH.

he could be responsible for the entire North Anierlcan operation.,~ Unlike Smith, who regarded life in Winnipeg as a necessary but melancholy inconvenience, Brydges threw himself into communitY activities, becoming head of the Manitoba Board of Trade, chairman of the Winnipeg General Hospital, head of the local Anglican church's building committee, and president of the Manitoba Club, the exclusive gentlemen's watering-hole incorporated only eight months after the city itself.t Brydges succeeded in altering the local image of the HBC as a distantly run, shadowy presence. His spans across the rivers (inevitably known as "Brydges'

bridges") drew people from east and south of tl~e city to the Company store, and he even persuaded munic.i.p.al politicians to site the terminus of the city's firit streetcar line on HBC property. Between the summers of 1880 and 1883, Winnipeg, by then known as the Bull's Eye of the Dominion or the

*For his part Colvile returned some of thc lost grandeur to the Company by acquiring ;i flotilla of iinpre.~sive ships to sen-e its West Coast operations directlv front Filgland. Pride of the fleet was the graceful tea clipper htimia, then the world's second fastest vessel-next onl~ to the Ariel and faster than the Cutt)'

Sark, or the Thermopylae. Two hundred feet long, she made the 14,000-mile journev from Victoria to London in a record-break ing 104 days. Built in 1866 by Robert Steele at the Steele ' vard on the Clydc, she was d(signed by his brother, Nk'illiani Steele.

Basil Lubbock, the authority on clipper ships, said ofAriel and 7itania: "[Theyj carried ;dl before them in the tea races, besides being the most beautiful and vacht-like iiierchantriien that ever sailed the seas." Flying the Companys pennant for six years, the t.i.tania was I LicIcier than !nost of the I IBC.'s Pacific squadron the Labouchere, Lady Lampson and PaciJIC, which all foundered on the intertidal rocks of the West Coast.

tNo other Canadian pri,~,atc club has symbolized so directly the concentration of economic authority in any province, in ~t.i.tutiona Ii zing its decision-inaking process from the PROGRESSION AND BETRAYAL 117.

Chicago of the North, exploded into a land boom. Some 1,300 lots were sol, I in Winnipeg alone, with other townsites at Portage la Prairie, West Lynne (adjoining and later absorbed by Emerson) and Rat portage (Kenora) filling up equally fist, while in a single year (1882) some 341,588 acres of farmland worth S2,2 3 5,308 were soldsixteen times the previous annual total. "The office now is like a fair," Brydges happlIN reported to London, "and the people stand in a row waiting their turn to reach the counter. It is like the crowd at the entrance to the pit of a London theatre. . ." and two months later, "Bedlain let loose was a inere incident to the scene in our office.... I never saw Winnipt gin such a state of frantic excitement."

The boom quickly degenerated into a speculative frenzy; Winnipeg's streets "were more crowded than Broadw~iy." The initial lake shipment of Manitoba grain was delivered byj,,inics Richardson & Sons in 1883. The I larris Company of Brantford, Ontario, established its first Winnipeg agricultural ]implement dealership in

beginning. Meiul~ership in thc Manitoba Club, occording to W * L. Motion, remained "the "vinbol of success and the Club itself the centre ol the informal exchange of opinion and infor in ation- -access which inarks the 'insider."' if voll were inale, that i.~. F.H. MacUin, an earl) member A ho served for many years as general n(anager of the Winniptg Free Pre.~v, explained during a Club debate on whether or not to admitwomen that he gloried "in the progress women haN e made. I rejoice in the lib erty they enjoy. I would extend that freedom to embrace the grantim, ofevery privilege they Might ask, every wish they inight express, save one, the privilege of admission to the Manitoba Club. I appeal to you, preserve one little spot on this planet where the swish ot'wornen's skirts and the inusic of their voices are not heard. . . . It would prove a great boon to inan * I Of US WhO for an hour or two every now and then want to live the simple I i fe. " X konien inen ibers (and J ews) were final Iv adini tied in 1974,.

though neither group has since taken intiA advantage of the privilege it took only a hundred years to achieve.

PROGRESSION AND BETRAYAL 1 19.

1878 and signed up seventeen agencies across the West. One of the main real-estate investors was Donald Smith. Ile used the knowledge he had gained as the 11BCs Land Commissioner to purchase properties on his own account, even utilizing Bain & Blanchard, the fIBCs Winnipeg legal firin, to negotiate the contracts. Not surprisingly, he chose the lots within the four-mile belt along the a.s.siniboine, then thought to be the most probable route of the CPR being built by a syndicate to which he belonged. He also invested in the new CPR hotel. He not only obtained a $15,000 loan from the Company to purchase the hotel property but also demanded that Brydges turn over to him gratis two of the HBC's most desirable town lots. Brydges refused, and, fearing an end run, wrote to London recommending against the grant.

Preoccupied as lie may have been with his railroading schemes, Smith bad no intention of losing touch with the Hudson's Bay Company's intimate corporate affairs and never ceased expanding his stockholdings. He hired spies inside Brydgess office to keep him informed of the Land Commissioner's correspondence with London and even rented s.p.a.ce in the new Winnipeg real-estate building to keep a per,,onal eye on who came to call on Brydges and for how long. "I am satisfied that there has been a long pendinl,, scheme to wreck the H.B. Co. and buy it up as a wreck," Brydges complained to London about Smith, "and there is much chagrin & disgust that the scheme did not succeed. Mr. Smith has been very outspoken in denouncing the trade operations of the Co as at present conducted, and his friends talk very openly & very publicly in the same A ay. He has talke~ in that sense to me several times but I have simply listened. His course is altogether too sinuous."

Smith resented the confidence Governor Colvile had placed in Brydges, even though he had done little to deserve it himself An honest man enthralled by his 120 LABRADOR SMITH.

mission to breathe new life into the Company while helping to nurture the new West he had come to love, Brydges recognized early how essential it was for the Company to a.s.sume community leadership.* "Anned with ... [a] sense of the Board's confidence, he seldom hesitated to set his niark upon every aspect of the Company's operation concluded historian Alan Wilson. "He operated from instinct and mandate as if lie were Chief Contritissioner, not Land Cortirnis sioner-and as if it were his task to create a new image of the Hudson's Bay Company as a citizen of the Canadian North W~_~st." Even when the Manitoba land boom fizzled and the IlBc had to repossess prop erty worth $900,000, linAges itianaged the negotiations without harining the Conipanys reputation.

The clash between Smith and BrVdges final1v came into the open over the railways clawing their way towards Winnipeg. The Grand Trunk, Brydges's former employer, had been trying hard to discredit the CPR on world money markets, and, despite his vigorous denials, the Land Commissioner got some of the blame. More seriously, Brydges became involved in the controversy over location of the ('I)R, whose engineers favoured crossing the Red Riv,_~r at SeMrk instead of Winnipeg because of spring flooding dangers. Brydges offered the railway twenty acres of prime land for a station and lobbied so strenuously and so successfully on behalf of the Winnipeg route that he permanently alienated not only Smith but also Charles Tupper, then federal Minister of Railways and Ca.n.a.ls, and Sandford Fleming, the railway's chief engineer, who was also a

Brvdges had a romanticism of his own. Ile claimed a link to the old barorov of Chandos, whose holders owned Soodelev Castle, since the 6vil War ot* the 1640s one of the great runis of the English conntryside.

PROGRESSION AND BETRAYAL 121.

director of the HBC.* Brydges supported the strong representations of Winnipeg business leaders against the CPR's branch-line monopoly and recornmended the IIBC grant city land to the Northern Pacific, an American railroad, to offset Canadian Pacifics influence. He gradually found himself with many local friends but just as niany~and much more powerful-distant enernies.

The first hint of Smiths counter-attack was in a private letter Brydges received from Governor Colvile alleging irregularities in some of the Winnipeg land sales. The issue was brought up by Smith at the Company's 1882 shareholders' ineeting, and a committee was struck to investigate the charges-specilically, that Company officials, including Brydges, had personally profited from buying fifty-six Winnipeg lots, eleven of which were later resold for almost the total purchase price. Except for I IBC Deputy Governor Sir John Rose, the committee mernbers-including Sandford Fleming and 11BC Secretary XVilliarn Arinit-were solid Smith partisans, but even thev found nothing to condemn Brydges for except the vague charge of having "erred on the side of prodigality." They recommended that 1IBC land auctions should be

*A Scottish in-unigraiit, Fleming surveyed routes for four pioneer nlilway,,, lithographed the countrys first large-scale surveyor's inaps, designed Cailadas first postage stamp (the three-penny brown, featuring hi~ drawing of a heaver, which turned the aniunal into a national emblem), wrote an interdenominational prayer book, founded the Royal Canadian Inst.i.tute, laid the Pacific cable between Vancouver Island andAustralia, was chancellor of Queens Uiiiversity for thirtv-five vears, and served as an influential HBC director for more than a quarter ofa century. Frustrated by tryinp to run train,., across a country where every town set its own (locks, he invented standard tinie, which divided the earth into twenty-four fixed zones of fifteen longitudinal degrees eacl,. Canadian territory, spanning a quarter of the earth's day, was divided into five turte zones.

122 LABRADOR SMITH.

held only once a month with firm upset prices, and that no Company land be sold within five iniles of the railway right-of-way. Like Smith, Fleming had a double loyalty to the 11BC and CPR, and, like Smith, he usually came down on the side of the railway. "I do not believe in mixing Lip our land sales with anyone else," Brydges objected. "The proposal puts the whole matter in the hands of the C11R." SirJohn Rose',, report totally vindicated Brydges.

The Dept.i.ty Governor had even gone to the trouble of personally examining the cancelled cheques for all the transactions involved. As he wrote to Sir John A. Macdonald, "We ... trace a] I these reports & corn plaints ... to Donald Smith. He has evidently a great eninitv towards [Brydges]. . . ."

None ofthe specific accusations against Brydges were ever substanthited, and he NN as even awarded a cash bonus of tI,500 to compensate for the mental stress he had suffered.

Smith " ouldn't lei up. At the 1883 General Court he revived the accusations as if no investigation had been made, and despite Roses defence of Brydges (which filled thirty pages of transcription) the Land Commissioner remained tinder a cloud. After verbally approving the Company's annual report, most of the shareholders departed the meeting.

These included some of the Committeemen, who a.s.sumed that, as was the custom, their re-election would be routinelv based on the "Governor's list." Instead, Smith got up and proposed his own Committee slate, which included himself and one of his financial allies, the noted barrister Charles Russell, later Lord Russell of Mllowen and Lord Chief Justice of England. A surprised Colvile called for a secret ballot, and when the Notes had been counted, thirteen of the fourteen shareholders still present-evervone but Sinith-supported the (,overnor's list. But if Smith didn't have the numbers, he had the weight. His ballot represented 4,000 shares, far outnumbering the other PROGRESSION AND BETRAYAL 123.

votes. Smith took his seat on the board, and when questioned by The Times about his successful coup dYtdt, he piously declared, "My long connection of 40 years with the Hudson's Bay Company and being, perhaps, the largest registered holder of the shares on the books of the Company, should offer to iny fellow proprietors some guarantees that I am unlikely to take any course prejudicial to their interests."

A more incisive summary of the dubious manoeuvre was the verdict of Shirlee Smith, a close student of the Company's history and until the autumn of 1990 Keeper of the HBC Archives in Winnipeg. "Smith's actions were certainly unethical and probably illegal," she wrote, ". . . but two of his great strengths were strategy and timing. He now had a seat on the London Committee and was thus in a position to have an even greater say in the Land Department." And he did. At the following sharehold- ers'nieeting he championed a resolution appointing two directors (himself and Fleming) to form a subcommittee in charge of supervising Canadian affairs. Smith insisted that Brydges would have to report directly to the new subcommittee as well as to the London board. Poor Brydges must have known the trap was closing on him, but he agreed to go along with the scheme, only to find that Smith never would see him, even when they were both in Winnipeg at the same time-and woul~ then complain that Brydges wasn't accountable enough.

When SirJohn Rose died suddenly in the summer of 1888 while stalking deer on the Scottish estate of the Duke of Portland, Smith's last critic on the HBC board disappeared, and he moved immediately to have himself named Deputy Governor. Within a week of his appointment, Smith returned to his campaign of hara.s.sment, forcing Brydges on the defensive by repeatedly asking him to justify his work and his salary. Sensing disaster, Brydges wrote to his friend Sir John A. Macdonald to 124 LABRADOR SMITH.

complain that Smith's behaviour had "every appearance of a desire to worry me out." But it was too late. On jamiary 17, 1889, a t.i.t ed and exasperated Eden Colvile retireli as mic Governor, and Donald Smith was "elected" in his place. With the retirement of Colvile most management tniditions were cast aside. Never again would an 1111c Governor "take charge of the hanirner" at the Compani 's fur auctions. The very day of the takeover, Brydges was sent a letter dispensing with his set-vices.

Thus ended the feud between the conscientious CharlesJohn Brydgesand the fur trader turned autocrat who, during fifty-one years in the service, had adN anced from muskrat grader at Lachine to Governor of the Conipany of Adventurers. Brydges didn't live long enoUgh to receive his termination notice. On Februar 16, 1889, while inspecting the Winnipeg General Hospital, one of his favourite philanthropies, he died of a heart attack. The correspondence between the two men provides a telling example of Donald Sinith's pettiness.

He was indeed, as the Dictionart, of' National Biograp~y noted in his entry, "A good hater ... resenting the success of other mens ideas."

ANTI f fINTHREE YEARS OF a.s.sUNIING the Governorship, which he was to hold for the next quarter-century, Smith had packed the board," ith money men who would do his bidding. Because he was both Governor and the Company's largest shareholder, the senii-annual meetings became more subdued affairs, particularly since he treated net land revenues as profit, which he distributed annually as dividends. Now that he was in charge, he could apply his thrifn, policies freely on the expense side of the ledger, cutting the budget of the Land Department in half, for example.

PROGRESSION AND BETRAYAL 125.

Smith dismissed the ftir trade as a doomed enterprise run by ill-starred eccentrics too stubborn or too ignorant to accommodate themselves to their fates. Although the proceeds of the fur trade kept the Company alive until the western land boom, that once buoyant commerce had deteriorated drastically since its heyday. Fur prices. .h.i.t a twenty-year low in 1876, but trade was bolstered bv diversification into new varieties. Instead of concentrating on beaver, the Company shipped out twenty-four categories of pelts, including muskrat, marten (Canadian sable), lynx, mink, otter, skunk, ermine, wolverine and seal, and muskox and buffalo robes.

Between 1876 and 1878, fur prices at London auctions declined by half, and wheat surpa.s.sed fur as Manitoba's leading export. Because the Company suf- fered continuing losses in the inid- and late 1870s, the Chief Factors and Traders who depended on dividends for their livelihoods were threatened with having to serve at their own cxpense. They retaliated by organizing themselves into a quasi-union called the Fur Trade party to demand an annual guaranteed minimum divi(lend of Y~200 a share-but quickly grew quiescent when London offered E150. The oldtimers' feeling of abandonment was best ~xpressed by Chief Factor James L. Cotter, descendant of an Irish baronet, who had been a flay man for thirty years, mostly at Moose Factory.* "I ... see no prospect of ever being able to retire on anything beyond a mcre pittance," he wrote to a fellow Factor. "Mv health is delicate, and I could not now go at anything eise in the way of business- so I arn beset with dAculties and anxieties on all hand's.... We work as if

*Cotter:dso took the first picture,; of the Hudson Ba area with a homemade camei a, a tridition carried ori bV his grandson, George Cotter, who is the 14BUs best contemporary docurrientary filni-inaker.

126 LABRADOR SMITH.

HBC tradei Vadingfix, beavei; mink and otber pelts at Fort Chipeu~ van, 1890s

at the pumps of a slinking ship. It is a strained and unhealthy state of mind."

Money was not the only problem. Although the fur trade enjoyed another fifty years of impressive activity, these hardy traders who ~ad so dill',rently inanned and maintained the 11B(A land preserve felt dispossessed. The comforts, sophistications and relatives they had left behind in Scotland, England or the populated parts of Canada had become as disconnected from them as the rapidly changing contours of the once-immutable landscape of Ruperts Land. They had nowhere to turn.

"While competent in i he woods, I was inferior to John, the FI.B. Co.'s niessenger boy, in city life," complained George McTavish, a York Factory Chlef Trader on a visit to ~'ictoria. "Aly greatest fear was that I should display my ignorance, be laughed at and taken advantage of if I asked the price of everyday necessities, say a box of matches. Wheri my ol,1 schoolmate, Arthur Robertson, PROGRESSION AND BETRAYAL 127.

secured a place for me at the festi~ e board of Miss Coates on Fort Street ... I was as a fish out of water. The table talk was unintelligible to me."

Chief Commis,,Ioner James Grahame, who had succeeded Smith in charge of the fur department, was replaced in 1884 bN,Joseph Wrigley, a vaguely connected Norkshire businessman who proved so ineffective that he managed to give ba.n.a.lity a bad name. The first Commissioner with no background in the fur business, he was hired strictly as an overseas agent to enforce London's will. And London's will under Smith's direct1011 dictated that the fur traders be deprived of their 40 percent of the Company's profit. Wrigley promptly called a meeting of all the Chief Factors and Chi~f Traders-the Northern Council-for August 30, 1887, at the Queens Hotel in Winnipeg.

The~ came from as far away as the Arctic Circle and the verdant forests of the Pacific slopes, the historic hovels around Hudson Bay and the modern if still primitive shops of the southern Prairies. There was great excitement as they journeyed to the Company's Canadian headquarters because there were rumours this would be the very last time the Northern Council, which had traditionally ruled their professional lives, was to meet.

The Winnipeg that greeted them was less a frontier settlement grown large than a commercial entrep6t, the hustling metropolis of the West, close to the height of its importance. The Grain Exchange was being organized-later to include the Bawlfs, Bells, Roblins, McMillans, Galis, Mitch.e.l.ls, Atkinsons, Spinks, McBeans, Hastingses, Maulsons, Richardsons, Parrishes-and the new grain families were busy sp.a.w.ning their fortunes.

The thriving community had not only its own private banks (Alloway & Champion was the biggest) and the Wests best bordellos (on Annabella Street) but also a theatre and opera house (at the corner 128 LABRADOR SMITH.

of Notre Dame and Adelaide) and even a telephone exchange (560 subscribers, with a special long-distance hookup to Selkirk, twenty-two miles away).

As they gathered for that final time, an anonymous photographer snapped a group portrait (sbown on )-ight), revealing the fur trader s as large but not fat. They have few double chins, no flabby, swollen bellies-just rib- cages as solid as if held together by barrel hoops. They boast trim beards and wise country eyes. The British poet Stephen Spender once i emarked that for him the division between the past and the present was the French Revolution because he always imagined that before it, everyone wore fancy dress. The photograph catches thatfin de si~cle quality-the quandary of being out of one's place and time, knowing the world is wrong but being unable to change it. At one level, the picture evokes the sombre mood of men attending their own funerals, awkward in their Sunday suits, trying to position their age-dappled hands as if to show how very hard they had toiled. But a second look reveals the,,e hard-etched faces glowing with a touch of swagger, the pride of haN ing practised the continent's ancient commerce and survived.*

The meeting dealt with such mundane probletris as the Northern Department's scale of allowances, which carefully equated rations to rank, so that, for instance, an Ordinary Interpreter would receive three pounds of tea a

*Among those in attendance was Canada's least-heralded explorer, Robert Camp6ell (the big heard to the right of the door-frame), who had explored most of Yukon and once had snowshoed i,000 miles from Fort Simpson on the Nlackenzie River to Crow Wing, Minnesota, on the Mississippi. I le was extraordinaril~ robust arid seems never to have been ill. The day before Campbell died in 1894,at theage of eighty-six, he [)laced his hand on his forehead and declared in a puzzled tone, "I have 'a pain here. I Suppose &tt is what people call a headache." It was his first and his last.

130 LABRADOR SMITH.

year, a Mechanic five pounds, an Apprentice Postmaster eight, a Postmaster ten, an Apprentice Clerk fifteen, a Clerk twenty and a Commissioned Officer thirty. Wrigley confirmed the traders' worst expectations that not only would this be the last Northern Council meeting but that no new commissions would be issued to those who had entered the service after the 1870 land transfer. That meant it was only a matter of time before their partnership with the Company would be dissolved. They would have to give up their 40-percent ownership an~ become bureaucrats instead of proprietors. "This very startling information threw a wet blanket over the entire Service and produced in many cases very unfavourable results in the Company's interest,"

reported N.M.W.J. McKenzie, a junior trader at the time. "The only interest the majority of their servants have had since then was the I r weekly, monthly or annual salary."

Wrigley was replaced within two years of the Winnipeg meeting by a Smith servitor named Clarence Campbell Chipman, a former secretary to Sir Charles Tupper. He closed down posts, hounded veteran traders out of the service, and dropped the apprentice plan that had kept the fur trade fuelled with new energies. "Here was a great scatteration, a breaking up of family ties so to speak," lamented N.M.W.J. McKenzie.

In 1893, Smith--speaking through Chipmanabruptly terminated the vestiges of the Deed Poll and extinguished the former wintering partners' equity positions. Some of the Chief Factors bewailed their fate ("I have waited so long for promotion, and have worked so hard to make and keep affairs prosperous, that I have lost heart and do not care what is done," wrote J.

Ogden Grahame); others became angry ("The fiat has gone forth and Attila is to ravage and destroy the handiwork of the 'Company of Adventurers,"'

fumed Roderick Ross). But they all knew who was to blame.

PROGRESSION AND BETRAYAL 131.

Reduced from patriarchs of the forests to supervised employees, the A interers at last realized how the colleague they had so fervently hoped would champion their cause had bctrayed them. A Factor named Duncan MacArthur summed up their rage when he termed Donald Smith "the prince of humbugs and probably the worst enemy the Company ever had."

CHAPTER 6.

STEAL OF EMPIRE.

Swith vacillated in his support betz,een the Consei-vative anti Libem1pai-ties, equally disloyal to both and trusted by neither.

T1 1E PUZZLE OF DONALD SMITI I'S straining for most of three decades to promote himself within the Hudson's BayC onipany's hie rarchy, risingtoheaditsfurand, later, land operations, then treating these highly coN eted positions as minor annoyances was explained by his obsession with having control of the Company instead of trying to run its fiinctional parts. More to the point, at this midstage in his career Smith was preoccupied with politics and railways, faster and financially much more rewarding paths to power.