Merchant Princes by PETER C. NEWMAN COMPANY OF ADVENTURES VOLUME III Peter C. Newman, the author of a dozen best-selling books that have sold more than two million copies, has spent the past decade on the most ambitious literary project of his career: recreating the history of the Canadian corporate world's oldest and most influential business empire-the Hudson's Bay Company-which once ruled a twelfth of the earth's land surface. Born in Vienna and educated at Upper Canada College, Newman holds a Master's degree in economics from the University of Toronto, has worked underground as a gold miner in northern Quebec, been a magician at Eaton's Toytown, and served as a Captain in the Royal Canadian Naval Reserve. He was editor-in-chief of The Toronto Star, the country's largest newspaper, and editor of Mach,ans, which he successfully transformed into Canada's first weekly news magazine. Peter Newman lives in Deep Cove, British Columbia, where he is currently researching his next book on the Canadian Establishment. Company of Adventurers has been praised as "canny, vivid and critically astute" by The Washington Post, while novelist Hugh MacLennan wrote of' Newman's work: "This is not journalism; this is art." For DOUG BEARDSLEY, the poet; .JIM PAUPST and GEORGE SZASZ, the healers-, and GEORGE WHrrmAN, the knight-errant who helped in bad times. And for my daughter LAUREEN NEWMAN, with love. "The working of A freat institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self-interest, carelessness, and sbeer mistake. Only a residualfraction is thought. -George Santayana Penguin Books PENGUINBOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada MW 3 B2 Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England Penguin Books USA Inc., 3 7 5 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England First published in Viking by Penguin Books Canada Limited, 1991 Published in Penguin Books, 1992 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Copyright @ Power Reporting Limited, 1991 All rights reserved Book design by V. John Lee Design adaptation by Ren6 Demers Map byJonathan Gladstone/J.B. Geographics Production editing by Jane McNulty Printed and bound in Canada Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Newman, Peter C., 1929 Company of adventurers Partial contents: v. 3 Merchant princes. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-14-015820-0 (v. 3) 1. Hudson's Bay Company - History' 2. Northwest, Canadian - History - To 1870*. 3. Fur trade -Canada - History. 1. Title. FC3207.N49 1986 971.2'01C85-098657-5 F1060.N49 1986 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Available. American Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Available. Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or other-wise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. CONTENTS Prologue x PART I LABRADOR SMITH 1 The Man Who Became a Country 3 2 Growing Up Cold 21 3 Bringing Louis Riel to Heel 47 4 The Great Fire Canoeses 79 5 Progression and Betrayalal 99 6 Steal of Empire 133 7 Canada in a Swallow-Tail Coat 179 8 The Reckoning 203 PART II QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE 9 On the Trail of the Arctic Fox 231 10 Killing the Competition279 11 The Nascopie Chronicles 295 12 Northern Gridlock 315 PART III MERCHANT PRINCES 13The Lords and the Good Old Boys 351 14 Trans-Atlantic Blood Feud 381 15 Canadian At Last 423 16 McGiverin's Run 465 PART IV Farewell TO GLORY 17 Young Ken 491 18 Disaster and Deliverance 529 19 Last Lord of the Bay 557 Epilogue 578 Acknowledgements 589 APPENDICES Chronology 602 Resource People 610 Chapter Notes 616 Bibliography 640 Illustration Credits 664 Index 670 PROLOGUE To be a Bay man was like belonging to a religious order that now only bottles brandy but had once touched the hand of God. THE PRIORY AT THE DON BOIS in Essex, northeast of London at the far side of Epping Forest, is more than six centuries old, and feels it. It was, until the lands of the Roman Catholic Church were taken over by the state, occupied by a devout brotherhood of Benedictine monks. Its floors slope towards lopsided windows set three feet deep in stone alcoves; carpets are worn thin from generations of pacing; the air seems stale and heavy, though the visitor senses not so much decay as the weight of history. The onl~ functioning monument to the priory's original purpose is a crypt, below the main vestibule, that leads into an underground passageway connecting the building to the nearby abbey. Every Sunday morning the priory's owner still makes the subterranean journey to read the lesson for local parishioners. The priorys furnishings are a decorator's nightmare of crossed Zulu swords, narwhal tusks, abandoned harps, boulle cabinets, overstuffed sofas (which Queen Victoria might have envied), George Chinnery canvases of early trading sequences in Canton, Shanghai and Hong Kong, plus the obligatory hunting scenes (hounds, foxes, splashes of blood) that decorate almost every upper-class Englishman's hearth. X Xi This is the home of Sir William "Tony 11 Keswick, the Hudson's Bay Company's last merchant adventurer. An imposing presence, Keswick (pronounced Kezzick) turns out to be more than six feet tall, with a ruddy complexion and the commanding air of an Imperial Army brigadier, which lie was. He appears to be the ideal British aristocrat-a cross between a Puncb cover and a bulldog. Although he is eighty-four and his periwinkle eyes have grown watery, he retains an aura of authority.* "Look here," Sir William exclaims by way of introduction, showing me his passport, "I'm the only Englishman who officially lists his occupation as 'Merchant Adventurer.' Gets me into awful trouble crossing borders, particularly in the Orient. 'Merchant' is easy; that means someone prepared to lay his hands on anything. But 'Adventurer'-the customs people have trouble with that. Still, I love being an adventurer-the romance of it, to risk everything, to make things go." Three decades (1943-72) a director of the Hudson's Bay Company and for nearly thirteen years its Governor, Keswick regards his tit-ne with the Canadian trading giant as the highlight of a crowded and audacious life. "I adored the HBC," he sighs. "I'd have done anything for the Company, within reason-or without reason. It was a wonderfully romantic concern, and its people would have cut off their hands to help. We British are fanatically romantic about our history. The magnificent Prince Rupert was the Company's first governor, our great Duke of Marlborough the third. The I keep trying to forget the briefing b) a mutual friend that while Sir Wil liam is indeed a distinguished merchant adventurer, he is also a very careful man. So careful, I was told, that he has buttons on the flies of his trousers-just in case the zipper sticks. second-the Duke of York-gave it up only to become King of England. I've seen the minute book in which the Duke apologizes for not being at the next board meeting because he has just taken on the throne. I mean, that's absolutely honey to a Briton. You'd pay a dollar more for your twenty -dollar share if you could get that thrown in-even if it has no practical merit!" Keswick's claim to being a merchant adventurer is not entirely based on his time with the HBC. In 1886, his Scottish grandfather took over the firm founded by Dr William Jardine, who with his partner, James Matheson, had in 1832 established Jardine, Matheson, the company of piratical Far Eastern traders and opium dealers that became the far Pacific's most princely hong, and later the model forJames Clavell's Noble House and Taipan. The Keswichs have run it ever since, and Sir William himself was a director and chairman of Matheson's, the London affiliate, for thirty-two years. WETALK INTO THE AYFFRNOON, and several cups of tea have grown cold between us when Keswick starts rambling on about his great heroes-Hannibal, the Carthaginian general whose army used elephants to cross the Alps, and Sir Edward Peacock, the Canadianborn financial Merlin with whom he sat on the board of the t4BC-then briefly switches to his favourite villains: Moses and Cromwell. "They were such negative boysalways telling us not to do things." *Not only a romantic but a nuschicvous romantic, Sir XNilliam named hi,, middle son John Chippendale Keswick because the boy was conceived in ~i Chippendale bed. The husband of Lady Sarah Ramsay and a successful merchant adventurer in his own right (he is chairman of l4ambros Bank), the vounger Keswick is still known as Chip. Xill I bring the conversation around to the Hudson's Bay Company and remind him that I have come to see The Chair. No outsider has ever seen it. Keswick hesitates, then motions me to follow. We climb to a small room on the priory's top floor. Sturdy and slightly oversized with a straigiit back, The Chair has a large upholstered seat. We stand very still, looking at it and at one another. On The Chair's seat, Keswick has reproduced in perfect needlepoint the Governor's Flag of the Hudson's Bay Company, with its intricate design that includes a fox, four beavers and twin elk rearing up on their hind legs. I can't resist looking at the former Governor's hands. They are ham-like, his fingers so thick that he cannot close them in repose; the joints are swollen and bent by arthritis. Embroidering that seat must have been excruciatingly awkward and required angelic patience, ~1 quality not usually associated with merchant adventurers. Keswick breaks the silence. "I'd never done anything like this before, but found gros-point needlework very soothing," he says. "One can think while working, with no ulterior motive ... I used to do it after hunting, have tea, then come up here ... Took me a year ... Soothing, what?" We both know he's fibbing. There are easier hobbies to soothe the soul But not the soul of this Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, one of its greatest, who was so upset about leaving his post (because he chose not to preside over the Company's departure from England) that he spent most of a year stitching this chair, working out his sorrow and his frustration. "I was and am in love with the old Company," he admits, as he leads me downstairs. "I don't know why one is so sentimental, really." We part. "You're talking to a fanatical son of a gun," he shrugs. Xiv I would never have guessed. Keswick turns away, and says to nobody in particular: "Takes a hell of a lot of killing, the Hudson's Bay and shuts the door firmly behind me. TIIEMEMORY OF THAF BRITTLE AFrFRN00N atTheydon Priory stuck with me during the writing of this third and final volume of my Hudson's Bay history. Tony Keswick's enduring passion for the Company was by no means unique. Some of its bachelor officers willed it their savings; one woman executive confided to me that she loved the HBC more than either of her husbands. Even the gruniblers, fed tip with their long, slow lives in some dreary posting, would vo,~N that thev were damn well going to "retire early"-after only thirty-eight years in the service. , Fhe one emotion the IiBC never engendered was neutrality. In Canadas North, many Inuit and Indians insisted its initials should really stand for the Hungry Belly Company, while their women denounced it as the Horny Boys'Club. No one touched by the Hudson's Bay Company's Darwinian will to survive remained una~-fected. To be a Bay man was like belonging to a religious order that now only bottles brandy-but had once touched the hand of God. BY 1870, "IFIENTHIS VOLUME BEGINS, the IIBCs feudal empire was starting to unravel, its halcyon days buried with Sir George Simpson, the Company's great instrument of thrust and thunder, who had served as its viceroy from 1821 to 1860. It was under his Napoleonic direction, exercised from the belly of a birchbark canoe, that the I IBC reached its apogee, spreading its mandate across a private empire that encompassed a twelfth of X-V the earth's land surface.* In 1870, the Company's landholdings were sold to the newly confederated Dominion of Canada for Y,300,000 plus title to seven million acres, its trading monopoly having been disrupted by the influx of settlers eager to till the rich soils of the Canadian plains. Following a brief interregnum, the HBC came under the spell of Donald Alexander Smith, the acquisitive Labrador fur trader who settled the first Riel Rebellion and eventually rose not only to preside over the FIBC, the Bank of Montreal and Royal Trust but also became the dominant financier of the Canadian Pacific Railway and the man who hammered in its last spike. Having lost one empire, the Hudson's Bay Company moved to consolidate another, establishing its dominant influence over Canada's Arctic, organizing the trade in fox pelts, and eventually manning more than two hundred posts in the Canadian North. In western Canada, the retail trade was channelled into half a dozen downtown department stores that eventually became the nucleus of a mammoth merchandising operation, currently composed of 540 outlets with 38 million square feet of space, selling goods worth $5 billion a year. There were other ventures, too, such as the HBCs entry into merchant shipping during the First World War, when nearly three hundred vessels flew the Company's flag, running the gauntlet with essential food supplies and ammunition to France and Tsarist Russia, a third of them sunk by torpedoes en route. Between 1920 and 1970, when the Company's charter was finally transferred to Canada, turf wars raged between the HBCs patrician British Governors and the Canadian Committee's Winnipeg-based Good Old Boys. At times the internal struggle was more important For a chronicle of Simpsons reign, see Caesars of the Wilderness, Chapters 9, 10, 14. Xvi to these memo-warriors than trying to modernize the Company, but the HBC did expand into oil as well as urban real estate. It captured control of such significant retail chains as Zellers, Fields and Simpsons. In 1979, Kenneth Thomson purchased three-quarters of HBCs issued shares-more than anyone else had ever held-for $641 million cash. The second half of this book deals with the HBCs boardroom politics, as vicious and fascinating an endgame as was ever played out in the wild fur country. Under its new owner, the Bay lost more money than it had netted in the three previous centuries and came very close to foundering. The drama of that downfall and subsequent resurrection, revealed here for the first time, concludes the HBC story and this book. This volume's final section features the first intimate profiles of Lord Thomson-Canada's wealthiest individual-and his son and heir, David, who easily rank among the world's, not just Canada's, most fascinating capitalists. IN THE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS that follow the main text, I have briefly touched on some of the research trails I followed to complete this book-mainly in the stillness of the Canadian Arctic and the buzz of the City, London's financial district, where the Company was born. I particularly remember being at Moose Factory, near the bottom of James Bay. First scouted in 1671 by Pierre Radisson, it seemed to be populated by ghosts. I spent most of my time in the Company cemetery, walking among the tombstones and the crosses, twisted into crazy angles by the permafrost. It was beginning to snow a little and as I stood in front of a tilted marker that proclaimed, "Sacred to the Memory of Peter McKenzie of Assynt Scotland, a Chief Trader in the Service of the Honourable Company," I sensed the spiritual presence Xvii of the fur traders who had lived and died here. I felt them silently staring at me, their faces like those haunting slashes of pigment Vincent van Gogh used to portray the Borinage miners: flat eyes, prominent cheekbones, looks that betraved not a glimmer of duplicity but deep accu- sation. T~ey were dead men from a dead culture, their deeds and misdeeds long ago consigned to the dustbin where Canadians store their history. They were dead men, but thev wanted to know why their lives had prompted so little attention, why their names had been ignored even in that crowded corner of obscurity reserved for Canada's heroes. They had, after all, done everything that was expected of them and more. But the phantoms quickly vanished, and I walked back through a gathering snowstorm to the Hudson's Bay store. There I spotted a twenty-dollar bill, with a note attached to it: "This is to cover the cost of 2 knives stolen from your store 13 years ago." That night I joined a burr of Bay men, trading yarns. They were drinking to remember the good old days, then drinking some more to forget them. These were the men who would gladly have sold the Bay blankets off their beds to maintain the Company's reputation.They missed the fur trade because it had been less a business than a way of life, an escape from the restrictive codes of civilization. Now it was finished, and so were they. Somebody mentioned George Simpson McTavish, an HBC Factor who had spent forty years at the Company's most isolated posts. To break his seclusion, he had domesticated a mouse and discussed in great earnestness each day's events with the friendly rodent. McTavish always travelled with a loaded pistol, not as a defence against attack, but to shoot himself in case he broke a leg on the trail and couldn't get back to his post. That's lonely. Nothing ever happened to McTavish, except that the mouse died, but I couldn't get him out Xviii of my mind, trekking across some screaming), stretch of wilderness, wondering when he might have to put the gun in his mouth. Canada's back country, where the original HBc held sway, was populated by many such "ordinary" men and women. They spent tiieir lives in that obscure killingground of the soul the poet Al Purdy called "north of summer." Concealment of emotion was their chief article of faith-and nobody ever waved goodbye. Thinking and writing about these "ordinary men" I had grown to admire so much, my memory twigged to a line in Shakespeare's Henry 1,~ after the battle of Agincourt, when the King requests a list of the English dead. "Edward the Duke of York, the Earl of Suffolk, Sir Richard Ketly, Davy Gain, Esquire; none else of name," replies the King's herald. "None else of name "-history's most devastating epitaph-yet it fits most ofthe hard cases who lived and died here, on the margin ofthe known world, in the service of the Company of Adventurers. Defining the gravitational pull of that benighted Company has been my obsession over the past decade. In the pages that follow, I have tried to explain that fatal attraction-to chronicle how the Company's quirky behaviour played such an essential role in determining Canada's history, geography and national character. PART I LABRADOR SMITH CHAPTER 1 THE MAN WHO BECAME A COUNTRY ""o I ' s Smith? What is Smith?... Hzhy, Smitb is not a name, but an occupation!" -Thomas Wilson IF THEY REMEMBER HIM ATALL, most Canadians retain only a vague folk memory of Donald Alexander Smith as the centrepiece of their country's most famous historical photograph. He is that bearded gentleman in the stovepipe hat awkwardly hammering home the last spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway at Cralgellachie, a hastily erected caboose-town in Eagle Pass of the Monashee Mountains on November 7, 1885. But from there the fuzzy public memory ends. He had, after all, been neither head of the CPR (that was George Stephen) nor the railways builder (William Van Horne), and the reason for his prominence during that improvised ceremony was as mysterious at the time as it appears in retrospect. Typically, he said not a word at this most memorable of his life's occasions; he Just bashed in that big nail. Although he spent considerable energy cultivating the myth of being an eniginatic presence in crowded landscapes of his own choosing (or even making), in retrospect, there was nothing very profound or mystical 3 4 LABRADOR SMITH about Smith-or the faith he worshipped: his own pocketbook. The institution he served during an astounding seventy-five-year association was the Hudson's Bay Company, which he transformed from a haphazardly linked collection of wilderness outposts into a profitable commercial enterprise. In terms of modern Canadian history, Smith was there at the creation. His roster of accomplishments, self-serving as they ma~ have been, distinguishes him as a giant among the decision-makers who transformed Canada from colony to nation. Preferring to dominate events from behind the scenes rather than directly confront rivals, Smith staged a dazzling sequence of commercial and political toups d'itat that made him the richest and most powerful Canadian of his day. He became the role model for his peers. Smith won every available public honour, including two university chancellorships, the close confidence of four Canadian prime ministers (each of whom he betrayed), the friendship of two British monarchs, a knighthood and a barony for which he chose the tongue-paralyzing title: "Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal, of Glencoe, co. Argyll, and of Mount Roval, Quebec, Canada." No one felt neutral about Smith. "As a Canadian," proclaimed the Very Reverend Daniel M. Gordon, viceChancellor of Queen's University, "I am grateful to God for the large service He has enabled Lord Strathcona to render for Canada." In contrast WT.R. Preston, then chief Liberal organizer for Ontario and a close observer of his methods, wrote: "The Smith syndicate was entirely responsible for using [the] Canadian Parliament for the most improper purposes that ever became operative among a free people." Smith's catlike career enjoyed endless reincarnations. Each move irrevocablv led to another opening, with THE MAN WHO BECAME A COUNTRY 5 Smith propelling himself from one opportunity to the next without a touch of diffidence or back-ward glance: The last of the great historic,il figures associated with governance of the FIBC, Smith spent most of three mindnumbing decades as one of the Company's Labrador fur traders before being anointed last Chief Commissioner, first Land Commissioner, and, for a tense quarter of a cen- tury, London-based Governor. The first apprentice -clerk to attain such exalted rank, Smith turned out to be an indifferent administrator, but he (lid move the Company away from its genesis in bartering aninial pelts to real estate, transportation and the beginnings of retailing. He thus ensured the HB(,,, survival after the Company lost its trading monopoly when the Dominion of Canada purchased the original land grants in 1870. Smith was fully as significant a figure in the HBC's history -as that great Caesar of the Wilderness, Sir George Simpson, who had governed the operating arm of the Company during four adventurous decades from his express birchbark canoe. For forty-two ' years a director of the Bank of IVIontreal, as well as its second-largest shareholder, and for seventeen years its president, Smith turned the Bank into Canada's most profitable and North America's safest financial insti tution. At the same time, he treated the Montreal as a private financing instrument for his various ventures Canadian history's fattest piggy bank. A director of the CPR and member of its executive coinmittee for thirty-iwo years, Smith took little interest in its building or operation. But as anchorman of the road's private- and public-sector financing, Smith had the fiscal perseverance that allowed completion of the Confedera- tion-ftilfilling project. Patriotic as it may have -appeared, this effort did not force Smith to stray too far out of chatacter. As one of the railway's main shareholders, he benefited mightily from the stock's extravagant long-term rise. Alembers of' his syndicate purchased CPR treasury stock for their own accounts at twenty-five cents on the dollar and grabbed control of the Canada North-West 6 LABRADOR SMITH Land Company, which sold 2,200,000 acres of the Crown land granted the CPR as a construction incentive. Smith's most successful railroading venture had nothing to do with the grandeur of the (PR. Along with three partners, he invested a borrowed $250,000 in the bankrupt St Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railway, which, following a decade of stock manipulation and minimum con- struction, increased in value to a cool $60 million. Even considering the guttt,~r ethics of late nineteenth -centu ry railway promotion, acquisition of the St Paul earned pride of place as the most shameless of swindles. Along the way, Smith became founding president of the Royal Trust Company, now one of Canada's largest trusts. He co-owned a textile mill at Cornwall, Ontario, and a rolling-stock manufacturing plant in Montreal; his will documented many other discreet but significant holdings. Smith's political influence equalled the impressive impact of his commercial activities. His crucially timed intervention settled Louis Riel's Red River Rebeliion; his personal vote defeated Sir John A. Macdonald's second Canadian administration; he served eighteen years in the House of Commons, much of that time as the powerful pro-consul for western Canada-known in Parliament as Minister for the Hudson's Bay Company. Some of Smith's inore positive legacies included recoinmendations that led to formation in 1873 of the North West Mounted Police, predecessor of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and to the founding of Canada's reserve army. Convinced that it was a sin for a Scot to die rich, he became one of the most generous and creative philanthropists of his age, helping establish Montreal's Royal Victoria Hospital and significantly expanding McGill Universiq,. He won the admiration of a grateful British Empire by personally donating a regiment of Canada's best horsemen to help fight the Boer War and by funding the start of Lord Baden-Powell's Boy Scout movement. He gave away more than $20 million and left many benevolent Canadian and imperial legacies, including funds THE MAN WHO BECAME A COUNTRY 7 for a leper colony and plans for the so-called All-Red Transportation and Telegraph route that was supposed to circle the globe. The first HBC executive to evaluate correctly the agricultural potential oftbe fur country, Smith foresaw that much of the Prairies would become fertile farmland. To position the H BC (and himself) as recipients of the revenues from sale of those acres, Smith became one of the principal promoters ofirnmigration responsible for settling the West. Smith spent eiqhteen years as Canada's High Conimissioner to the United Kingdom, quickly becoming as influential in Britain as he had been in Canada. He bankrolled and became chairman of Burmah Oil and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the innovative energy firms that later spawned the giant British Petroleum. At the personal behest of Winston Churchill, then first Lord of the Admiralty, Smith's companies guaranteed security of oil supply for the Royal Navy as it prepared for the First World War. It hardly seems possible that any man could have engaged in so much activitv in a single lifetime, since until the relatively advanced age of forty-nine Smith was fully occupied by the mundane business of trading furs with Indians in a remote corner of Labrador, then Justifiably known as "the world's jumping-off place." Part of the explanation for Smith's long roster of achievements was the extraordinary stretch of his life. Donald Smith was born in 182 0, the year of George III's death, and arrived in Canada within months of Queen Victoria's accession, while the odd soldier who had fought under Wolfe or Montcalm on the Plains ofAbraham still tottered along the streets of Quebec. He died in his ninety-fourth year on the eve of the First World War. His crowded lifetime spanned Canada's evolution from wilderness to urbanization. He headed west when 8 LABRADOR SMITH the buffalo still roamed the plains, and died just before tanks rolled into the fiulds of France. It was an astonishing life of significant tenures: 75 years with the HBC 42 years with the Bank of Montreal 32 years with the CPR 2 3 years with the St Paul Railway 18 years as Canada's I ligh Conitnissioner in London 18 vears in the Parliainent of Canada 15 years as president of Royal Trust 6 years as chairman of Burmah Oil and Anglo-Persian Oil 4 years in the Manitoba Legislature. Smith of course held most of these positions simultancously. He had the knack of switching from one business to ,mother, from vet another enterprise to politics and back again, wi&ut any derailment of con- secutive thought or action. In 1905, for example, he was at one and the same time Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, president of the Bank of Montreal, director and executive committee member of the Canadian Pacific Railwoy, president of Royal Trust, Canada's High Commissioner to Britain, chairman of Burmah Oil and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, all the while remaining a major influence in Canadian and British public affair,, and masterminding recruiting efforts in Furope to populate the Prairies. Not that 1905 was a particularly busy year-and he was eightyfive at the time. Smith's compulsion to increase his wealth and expand his power when he already possessed a surfeit of both baffled and disiurbed his supporters and critics alike. His contemporaries shared a sense of disquieting inevitabilit~ about Smith's amazing career. Considerable as they were, his accomplishments seemed less man-made than imposed by a force of nature. He was THE MAN WHO BECAME A COUNTRY 9 like the first rain of a monsoon season: nothing much could stop or pacify him. Thomas Wilson, one of his many political opponents, best summed up the puzzle of Smith's obsession when he demanded, during a Manitoba by-election campaign: "Who is Smith? "'hat is Smith? Is the palladium of our destinies to be entrusted to a Smith? What has a Smith done that he should seek to grasp the Ark of the Covenant with the one hand and with the other wrestle for the sceptre of ihe Almighty? Smith! Why, Smith is not a name, but an occupation!" UNLIKE'rHE CHRONICLES of most public individuals, Donald Alexander Smith's life and times were impossible to separate. He so frequently advanced his career along with whatever historical forces he happened to be commanding or diverting at the time that he eventually stopped differentiating between his personal ambitions and the national Interest. In his mental calculations these diverse objectives could be joined in a singular path: his own. That intuitive leap had curious consequences. It meant that while at the beginning of his career Smith was driven by the same devils that push anv selfrespecting swashbuckler, he eventually came to see himself as an instrument of the national will, convinced that his personal success and the nation's destiny were inextricably linked. He failed to recognize any conflict of interest between the public good and his private benefit. According to this self-imposed credo, the consequences of his decisions could flow either way, there seldom being any difference in the spelling of the name of their ultimate beneficiary. At first glance, this monumentally self-centred view of the world appears to collide with the fact that during 10 LABRADOR SMITH most of his life Smith ,ought to advance the estate and well-being of the Hudson's Bay Company. Not necessarily. For many years Smith was the largest individual shareholder of the Company, so there was in this, as in his other endeavours, little absence ofcommon cause. Not only (lid Smith hypnotize himself into following such dubious logic but others began to believe it too. McGill historian John Macnaughton wrote of Smith in his later years: "That old man was Canada. In him, the whole history of our country, from the minktrap and birch-bark canoe, down to the grain-elevator and ocean-liner, lived and breathed and moved and walked about. ..." Smith's egotistical approach was not unusual for his day. "C,od helps those who help themselves" was less an anachronistic clich6 than an eleventh commandmerit. The inyth, perpetuated in the simple-minded Horatio Alger books of the late nineteenth century (reallv one book rewritten a hundred times over), that thrift* and hard work secured wealth, which in turn guaranteed virtue and godliness, had ignited the jinbitions of a generation. Since it was clearly God's design that the virtuous become wealthy, to gain riches meant gaining Divine Sanction. Anything to be nearer, my God, to Thee. Having thus created his own fiscal universe and -a selfsustaining ethic to go with it, Smith seemed genuinely puzzled when he was accused of bribery and corruption. He wished to be remembered as a man who had never sinned and indeed had been intrinsically incapable of sinning. Yet he virtually invented insider trading, and double-crossed both his political allies and one-time HBC comrades in the field. He regarded his House of Comnions seat as a patriotic trust and refused to accept his Member',, salary. But lie was tossed out of Parliament for bribing voters, and the success of his syndicates THE MAN WHO BECAME A COUNTRY 11 depended directly on bribing politicians. As the British social historian Jan Morris noted, "All his life Smith was attended by a detectable aura of double-dealing ... he was ... without many principles but admirably resourceful." Even in an age when the slightest evidence of business ethics was considered a sign of dotage, Smith's juggling of loyalties was breathtaking in its scope and audacity, outrageous in its absence of accountability or sound auditing practices. "Apart from their illegibility, Smith's letters reveal a man pre-occupied with politics, railways, steamboats, furs, and lands-in that order," concluded Alan Wilson, who studied Smith's surviving correspondence. "Many of his reports would appall a modern business practitioner by their lack of sufficient data, of attention to detail and sufficiently regular review... For one who had close relations with some of Canada's leading bankers, he had a curious distaste for accountancy in his own administration." That careless approach to detail was hardly startling. When the burden of a nation's future rests upon one's shoulders, who has time for balance-sheet trifles? The notion of an individual personifying a civilization now seems bizarre in any context outside an insane asylum. Yet in Victorian times the idea was not that preposterous. Those who, like Smith, subscribed to the efficacy of the British Empire-and it then ruled a quarter of the world-saw the expanding arc of their authority as a means of elevating mankind. Smith believed that immigrants hailing from anywhere in the British Isles were endowed with a very special mission. It was perhaps best described by the Earl of Carnarvon, a Secretary of State for the Colonies, who mused that in the far reaches of the Empire there were "races struggling to emerge into civilization.... To them it is our part to give wise laws, good government, and a well-ordered 12 LABRADOR SMITH finance.... This is the true strength and meaning of imperialism." The concepts of parliamentary government, the value of gentlemen's clubs, fiscal stability, free trade, chivalry, Rudyard Kipling and the supremacy of the Royal Navy were all part of Smiths gospel. Canadian reaction to his imperi,ilistic sernions was divided into predictably opposing N lewpoints. Canadian nationalists of the time-a minority, then as now-believed this message was nonsense, that their burgeoning new country could find strength and identity only by cutting its cross-Atlantic apron-strings. The young nation's business and political Establishments preached just as fiercely that the only way for Canada to attain interna- tional stature was to expand the British link by gaining influence within the empire's highest councils. Despite his Scottish origins and Presbyterian roots, Smith was an acknowledged leader of the second faction, behaving like a born-again Anglophile yet being fiercely (if somewhat patronizingly) proud of his rarefied brand of Canadiamsru. Constantly cultivating the reclusion of a great man in the service of an all-consuming mission, Smith was stubbornly uncommunicative in an age when business tycoons pranced across front pages, dispensing avuncular advice and dropping marginally relevant comirients. Smith stayed inum. He knew how to wait and he had a nose for power. Whatever nefarious fiction (or truth) might be written or repeated about him, he realized how valuable it was to allow legends to marinate undisturbed-that however useful a reply might be, silence was even better. He destroyed nearly all his early papers and was seldom interviewed. He managed almost always to take the credit for his achievements without beat-] ng the burden of his failures. "There were always others willing to accept the responsibility," THE MAN WHO BECAME A COUNTRY 13 noted WTR. Preston. "He developed his power in this direction into a science. He never allowed himself to show resentment. So far as possible he avoided arousing thoughts of reprisals in the hearts of his opponents. However the end might justify the means, the reason for the means was not in evidence-his hand was never visible." Portentous and solemn, terminally obscurantist in his manner of speech, Smith, as one contemporary observer put it, kept "his own counsel, his sixpences, the Sabbath, and everything else he could lay his hands on." George Stephen, first president of the CPR and his closest business associate for forty-eight years, once confided to a friend about Smith: "What a strange creature he is, so Indianlike in his love of mystery and secretiveness." Smith was obsessive about not committing incriminating facts to paper. Even though he and Stephen spent most of a halfcentury cutting the youthful Dominion's important business deals, nearly went bankrupt together, and ultimately fathered Montreal's essential philanthropies, Smith wrote Stephen few letters, preferring to discuss important issues personally, even if it meant crossing the Atlantic to do so. Because the first three decades of his career were spent in the Labiador wilderness, cut off from the events in which he longed to play a part, Smith developed a need for self-assertion that never left him. But instead of signalling what he was doing through public displays or pronouncements, lie simply acted and allowed others to catch up with him if they could. His formative years, insulated from the kind of lively discourse that prepared men for the anterooms of power, led Smith to distrust words, written or spoken. He developed a sense of boldness that required no validation from others. If there was one quality that characterized everything he said and did, it was aversion to 14 LABRADOR SMITH North ff~st River, in the Labrador wilderness, where Smithspent more than Mlellty Yf'drs of his early career revealing his innermost feelings. "Ile loved the solitude of a crowd, a privacy of mild light, from which he shone benevolently on all alike and upon no one in particular," wrote Professor Macnaughton, who also noted that "his really fine manners" were "more impenetrable and isolating in their lubricant defensiveness than crocodile's, scales." Smith's appearance helped create the air of some enigmatic Old Testament prophet who spoke in public so seldom that his occasional pronouncements were given more weight than they deserved. His imperturbable composure served him well during financial negotiations. Because Smith was photographed only after lie left Labrador, the record of his physical aspect is almost entirely that ol'his later years-grey-bearded, tall and slight, elegant yet wiry, all bone and gristle at a THE MAN WHO BECAME A COUNTRY 15 time when distended bellies were regarded as a sign of affluence. His body language was a lexicon of military precision, but his most marked physical features were those bristling eyebrows, hiding eyes of feral flint. His sight had been injured early by snow blindness and the intensity of his gaze lent his glance a telescopic effect. One of his characteristic gestures was to turn his hands outward, showing the insides of his wrists, then to lean forward in a semi--bow that granted others in the room permission to speak-without having uttered a word himself. Whenever he did condescend to say something, there was little hcad-nodding for emphasis and nary a quiver in his meticulously trimmed beard. He lacked any flash of wit or mischief and left the task of abusing his enemies to underlings. His solemn mimner and demand for unquestioning obedience had their roots in instincts Smith acquired during his sojourn in Labrador. It was there that he learned to husband his energies and ration his emotions; survival often required both. Compliance with orders was equally important because dereliction of duty, however minor, could place human life at risk. The stern code of behaviour implanted during those formative years never left him. Work, to Smith, was less an occupation than a compulsion; his operational code was the maxim: `16 rest is to rust." THE KEY TO UNDERSTANDING Donald Alexander Smith is the Scottishness of the rnan-Scottish to the marrow of his soul, despite his English airs and Cana- dian domicile. Like all good Scots, he knew how to maximize the authority of pursed lips and disapproving glances, how to p.irlay endurance into salvation, and, above all, how to fight. 16 LABRADOR SMITH The Scottish clans had always been fighters-against the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Danes, the AngloNormans, the English-and, when there was no one else to fight, one another.* Scottish soldiers served as mercenaries of French kings, German princes and Scandinavian knights, and provided the human cannon fodder used in the defence of the wilder margins of the British Empire. "Scotland's history," the noted military writerjohn Keegan has observed, "is bloody with battles ... and her national heroes ... are men of the sword. The military ingredient of Scottish life goes deeper than that. For to the Scots ... war has been something of a national industry." That bellicose nature was a useful trait Smith and his fellow Highlanders enlisted in the service of the Hudson's Bay Company. Sparse of speech but swift in action, they had temperaments perfectly suited to the fur trade-the meld of perseverance and selfsufficiency, of endurance and courage that Donald Smith epitomized so perfectly. It was their gravity of demeanour and curiously rolling gait, their gloomv cast of countenance and habit of being close with money and emotions-their determination that even moments of pleasure or splendour must appear accidental-that was the Scottish way.f Scotsmen like Smith embraced *Of the Scottish clan wars, Andrew Strome CarmichaelGalloway, Bannerman to the 30th Chief of the name, has noted that there were MacDonalds and Campbells who hated one another in the west; Armstrongs and Carmichaels who hated one another in the south; Mackays and Gunns who hated one another in the north; Lindsays and Ogilvies who hated one another in the east; MacGregors in the centre whom everybody hated, and Douglases who hated evervbody everywhere. t "The Scots," observed R.B. Cunninghame Graham, one of their wittier essayists, "fornicate gravely but without conviction." THE MAN WHO BECAME A COUNTRY 17 the burden of hard work as Calvinism's earthly path to salvation. They were theological hybrids-Presbyterian Jesuits who believed that a fixed dose of piety could be exchanged for a prescribed sprinkling of grace.*- With all that self -righteousness burning inside him, Smith could never forgive himself for having taken up with Isabella Hardisty, then another man's wife. It had happened in Labrador under perfectly understandable circumstances, and his own marriage to Isabella lasted sixty-one vears, but the whispers never let up. As late as 1888, two decades after Smith had left the North, Sir Henry Tyler, president of the Grand Trunk Rail- way, confided to Lady Tyler that Smith's "wife is said to have another husband." Smith grew so desperate to quell such rumours that at nearly every important juncture of his career, he remarried Isabella-no fewer than four times. An equally serious source of guilt was Smith's sly betrayal of his fellow fur traders. Although he had been one of their number for most of three decades -and they had entrusted him with their savings and with repre- senting their case for better working conditions to the London board, Smith instead struck a deal that allowed the Company to acquire for next to nothing the traders' legitimate 40-percent share of profits. The once proud partners were reduced to ill-paid employees, shut out *Scottish puritanisin knew few linuts. Canadian novelist Hugh MacLennan recalled that Sir William Dawson, the renowned Scottish -educated peologist who became principal of McGill University in 1855, once led fifty-seven other members of the congregation out of the Presbeterian church on Montreal's Stanlev Street when the minister dared install an organ. The choir had previously used only a tuning-fork to pitch their hyms, and Dawson was convinced that the new musical instrulnent would sully the austcre purity of the service. THE MAN WHO BECAME A COUNTRY 19 THE MAN WHO BECAME A C from revenues generated by sale of the land they and their predecessors had claimed and protected for two centuries. All in all, Donald Alexander Smith may have been the most intriguing rogue in Canadian commercial historya distinction that covers a lot of territory. Certainly, he was the most successful. CHAPTER 2 GROWING UP COLD 'A nian wbo bas been fi-ozen and roasted b - 1, turns ez er), year must be the tougbei-fior it, ifbe survi. le it at all. -Donald A. Sinith DONALD SMITH'S PEREMPTORY ARROGANCE was particularly galling to those aware of his inconspicuous beginnings. He wai born on August 6, 1820, at Forres, a storied Scottish trading town in that brooding countryside where Shakespeare's Macbeth and Banquo encountered the prophetic trio of witches. One of three sons and three daughters, lie was much less influenced by his father, a shopkeeper clinging to solvency with alcoholic indecision, than by his mother, &irbara Stuart, the feisty and admirable Highland danie who brought up the family.* "Her voice was low, and she disliked loud noises," her son rcmembered. "She set great store by courtesy and good manners, and our bonnets were always off in her presence. She insisted on scrupulous cleanliness in house, person, and apparel, and herself set an example of perfect neatness in dress." Among other things, she taught young Donald to recite metrical versions of the Psalms then popular in Scotland, one of *Alexander Smith, i he father, was a brother of George Stephen's mother; Barbara Stuart was a Grant on her mother's side, distantly related to Ci,thbert Grant, the Nletis leaderwho staged the massacre at Seven ~ )aks. (See Caesa)-s oj'tbe Wilderness, Chapter 7.) 21 22 LABRADOR SMITH which he repeated "without error, pause or confusion" on his deathbed. While his elder brother attended the University of Aberdeen and studied medicine at Edinburgh (he became a doctor on the northwest frontier with the East India Company and a major in the Army Medical Corps), young Donald was articled to Robert Watson, Town Clerk of Forres. He spent most of his time hand-copying documents, but apprenticing to succeed Watson was far too humdrum a prospect to enlist his energies or talents. He was much more excited by the arrival on retirement leave of his mother's brother John Stuart, a doughty former Nor'Wester who had been second-incommand during Simon Fraser's daring exploration of the Fraser River in 1808 and later served as a Chief Factor with the HBC. Stuart promised to recommend the youngster to George Simpson, the IfBC's all-powerful overseas Governor, and Donald set out on foot from Forres to Aberdeen, where he caught a London-bound schooner. Armed with his uncle's letters of introduction to Simpson and other influential Montrealers, Smith sailed for North America on May 16, 1838, aboard the Royal William, a 500-ton timber-trade windjammer. just before leaving, Smith wrote to his mother, breathlessly enumerating the wonders of the British capital: "I have already visited the West End of town, walking all the way from the Mansion House, where the Lord Mayor resides, to Hyde Park, where the aristocracy are to be seen riding and driving. . . . Here the trees and flowers are a good month in advance of ours in Scotland, or at least in Forres. Had I been in the Park an hour later or earlier, I should have been rewarded by the spectacle of Her Majesty. The Queen and the Duchess of Kent, her mother, drive every day, I am told; so I shall hope to enjoy the privilege." GROWING UP COLD 23 Donald Smith in 1838 Much of Smith's fifty-day voyage was spent studying the only reference book aboard, Francis Evans's The Emigrant's Directory and Guide, which stuffily advised: "Canada is a country where immigrants should not expect to eat the bread of idleness, but where they may expect what is more worthy to be demonstrated as happiness-the comfortable fruits of industry." Smith landed in Montreal at a time when nationalist stirrings had reached their culmination in the Papineau rebellion, and his vessel passed the steamer Canada, carrying the last of the Patriotes of the 1837 uprising to Bermudan exile. British North America then had a population of 1.2 million, with most of the lands north and west of what is now Ontario belonging to "The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Tradeing into Hudsons Bay." Montreal was a crude bush settlement numbering scarcely 30,000 inhabitants, its only patch of sidewalk being in front of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. On dry 24 LABRADOR SMITH days, blinding limesto ne- powdered wind eddies made walking difficult, while rain turned the streets of the hilly town into mudslides that made getting about all but impossible. McGill College consisted of a medical fac- ulty staffed by only two part-time professors. Smith walked upriver to Lachine, where Simpson administered the Hudson's Bay Company's 170 trading posts, scattered not only across the Prairies to the Pacific but also down to the Oregon Country, through half a dozen future American states, south to San Francisco, and as far west as Hawaii. The young Scot was hired at "Y,20 and found" a year and assigned to counting muskrat skins in the Company warehouse.* The initial drudgery in the Lachine warehouse was a useful lesson for Smith in learning how to differentiate the various qualities of pelts, and he soon graduated from muskrat to grading beaver, marten, mink and otter, learning to judge the value of a silver fox by the number *At the time, apprentice-clerks worked five-year terms at a gradually increasing salary that culminated at E50 in the final twelve months. If their i ecords were acceptable, they could then sign up for another five years at Y.75. A third contract with a.10 00 maximum was offered to the best of them, followed, after a total of at least fifteen years of loyal and efficient service, bv a chance to be promoted to a Chief Trader's and, eventually, Chief Factor's commission. These two ranks were eligible for shares in the Company's annual profits that ranged as high as E2,000. Retired commissioned officers received half-pay for seven years. All HBC personnel were granted free board but had to buy such basic goods as soap and boots from Company stores, at a onethird discount. They were responsible for providing their own bedding and room furniture. Typical yearly food rations consisted of 240 pounds of flour, 20 pounds of tea, 120 pounds of sugar, 10 pounds of raisins, and 5 pounds of coffee or cocoa per person. Their annual liquor allowance was two gallons each of sherry, port, brandy, runi, Scotch whisky, and all the linie juice they could drink. GROWING UP COLD 25 Montreal iii 1838, the year Smith arrived of white hairs in its glossy patina. Buoyed by his uncle's introductions, he spent a memorable evening mingling with some of Montreal's leading citizens, including his host, the international financier Edward Ellice, HBC Arctic explorer Peter Warren Dease, Duncan Finlayson, then about to leave for his new assignment as Governor of Assiniboia at Fort Garry, and Peter McGill, chairman of the Champlain and St Lawrence Rail-road and president of the Bank of Montreal. The Forres apprentice would leave Lachine soon afterwards and not return to Montreal permanently for another thirty years, but the memory of the sweet adrenalin of social acceptance he had experienced that brief, magic evening never left him. The circumstances of Smith's departure remain mysterious. One version involves Frances Simpson, the Governor's vivacious wife, twenty-six years younger than a husband who spent most of his time away on inspection tours. According to a fellow apprentice, the lonely Mrs Simpson, who "took a friendly interest in the 'indentured young gentlemen'. . . was attracted by the simplicity and gentle address of the new-comer's manners." 26 LABRADOR SMITH Thev seem to have enjoyed an innocent flirtation, the odd 1)oating excursion on Lake St Louis and several cups of tea. Harmless it may have been, but the Governor was not amused. lie called Smith into his office soon after his return and was heard shouting that lie was not about to endure "any upstart, quill-driving apprentices dangling about a parlour reserved to the nobility and gentry." Smith was abruptly banished to the Company's career purgatory, the King's Posts district at Tadoussac. Owned by the French Crown before 1760 and mainly by British monarchs thereafter, the seven tiny trading locations had been leased in 18 3 0 by the HBC, which also rented the more easterly Seigniory of Mingan. Trade was slow because most of the territory had been beavered out and the Company did not enjoy the monopoly there it had elsewhere. Assignment to the region was regarded as an unwelcome alternative to being fired. Tadoussac itself was one of the oldest trading points in North America; this was where Jacques Cartier had obtained his furs in 1515. Summers," ere cool and damp, the winters bitterly windy; nothing disturbed the rugged, sterile geography-certainly not the huddle of huts in the hollow of a mountain without even the presumption of a stockade, near the confluence of the broad St Lawrence and the deep Saguenay. That was the Tadoussac of Smith's initial assignment. He spent seven of his most unhappy and unproductive years in the area, trading principally for fox, marten and sable pelts with the Montagnais Indians, who paddled down annually from the Quebec-Labrador plateau. "You would have to travel the whole world over to find a greater contrast to the Scotch than these same Indians," the young trader wrote home. "If civilisation consists in frugality and foresight, then the Montagnais are far worse than dogs, who at least have sense enough to bury a bone against an evil day. In some of their lodges even before winter has properly GROWING UP COLD 27 begun their rations have come to an end. Everything about the place has been swallowed that can be swallowed, and starvation stares them in the face. They stalk in the tracks of a solitary caribou, and in their excitement forget their own hunger, but this does not make their families forget theirs. The caribou eludes them. They wander farther afield and at length bring down a bear. They cut him up and return to find their families dying or dead, which is what happened last month near Manwan Lake." Smith tried to keep his spirits up by reading such classics as Plutarchs Lives and Benjamin Franklin's Correspondence, but often he found himself scanning every line of outdated copies of the Montreal Gazette and Quebec Mercury left behind by travellers. At this point he also suffered a strange "second sight" experience, dreaming that Margaret, his favourite sister, on a sickbed in Forres, was muttering "Donald! Oh, Donald" with her dying breath. Letters that reached him later revealed she had indeed died, of smallpox, on January 12, 1841, at the very hour, allowing for difference in longitude, of Smith's nightmare. Eventually placed in charge of Mingan, the most remote of the Kings Posts (opposite North Point on Anticosti Island) and an even more dreary locale than Tadoussac, Smith incurred the wrath of Simpson, who arrived for a surprise inspection in the summer of 1845. The post's account books, which to Simpson were the Company's secular bibles, were far from satisfactory. Following his visit, the Governor sent the young clerk this devastating assessment: "Your counting house department appeared to me, in a very slovenly condition, so much so that I could make very little of any document that came under my notice. Your schemes of outfits were really curiously perplexing, and such as I trust I may never see again, while letters, invoices and accounts were to be 28 LABRADOR SMITH found tossing about as wastepaper in almost every room in the house ... if you were but to give a few hours a week to the arrangement of your papers your business would be in a very different state to that in which I found it." Smith hoped to redeem himself by submitting a neater set of accounts the following season, but on September 29, 1846, his house burned down. Ile had been briefly away on an errand, and one ofhis assistants had salvaged most of his belongings. With the Company records destroyed, Smith turned so despondent that he descended into a highly uncharacteristic public display of anger and frustration. According to eyewitnesses, he danced around the still-burning pyre of the tiny post, feeding the flames with his clothes and private papers, cackling incoherently: "Let them go, too, if the Com- pany's goods have gone!" The following winter he suffered from snow blindness and feared he might become permanently sightless without medical attention. Not bothering to wait for official permission, he boarded the HBOS Montrealbound supply ship Marren and reported his condition to Simpson. The Governor immediately ordered an eye examination. When the attending physician found no clinical problem, Simpson accused his clerk of malingering, then interrupted his catalogue of Smith's perfidies in mid-flight to offer him another chance. It was not a typical Simpson gambit. Smith had now been with the Company most of a decade. He was Smith's successors at the various King's Posts where he had kept the books had similar complaints, and the originals in the HBC Archives are scrawled with frustrated notations such as "Hang Donald S.!" or "Damn Donald Smith, I cannot make head or tail ofthis!" But there is evidence that Smith, rather than being care- less, was beginning to exercise his penchant for secrecy and that the accounts were kept in a code to which he alone had the key. GROWING UP COLD 29 twenty-eight and bad done little to distinguish himself Yet Simpson must have sensed a potential in the intense but sensitive young Scot that Smith himself probably didn't recognize. At the time, the HBC was busy trying to revive its Labrador district, partly to counter competing freebooters moving in from Newfoundland and also to prevent nomadic Indians from evading their Company debts as they migrated from one post to the next. Simpson's business acumen was attracted by that mammoth, frigid Labrador peninsula for precisely the reason no sane man wanted to go there. For its latitude, it was the coldest place on earth. Mercury froze in ther mometers. Snow fell early and deep; it stayed so long that winter stretched over nine months. To survive in that harsh climate, animals had to grow extra thick, tight pelts that fetched premium prices at the HBCs London auc tion house. As early as 1828, a Company trader named William Hendry bad sailed up the Ungava coast from Moose Factory injames Bay as far as Richmond Gulf and explored an overland route into Ungava Bay. Two years later, Nicol Firdayson established Fort Chimo about thirty miles above where the Koksoak River flows into Ungava Bay. There he waited twenty months for the local Naskapi to appear. When they finally did, Finlayson described them as "the most suspicious and faithless set of Indians I ever had to deal with ... they must be sharply dealt with before they are properly domesticated." The primitive tribe, then numbering less than three hundred, suffered from having no internal political structure--no chiefs, no social organization large ' r than the family, no ritual ceremonies to facilitate trade, no formal alliances with any other groups. They were subsistence hunters, living off migrating caribou, and it was mainly their addiction to the HBC,s rum and tobacco that prompted them to become trappers. As trade expanded, Simpson opened Fort Nascopie on the 30 LABRADOR SMITH northwest arni of Lake Petitsikapau (near present-day Schefferville) and purchased from some Quebec inerchants their post at North West River on Esquimaux Bay (now known as Lake Melville) about halfway up the eastern Labrador coast. just before Smith come to Lachine with his eye problem, word had reached Simpson that Chief Trader William Nourse, then in charge of that faraway region, had been incapacitated and badly needed medical attention. The Governor directed the "malingering" Smith to leave immediately at the head of an emergency winter relief party to North West River. A_lthough he had come out of the bush seeking solace for bruised eyes and for an even more seriously damaged ego, Smith now found himself with a challenging option. The bristle of his Scottish nature had been touched: if Simpson was mean enough to issue such an order, Donald Smith was too proud not to obey it. Accompanied by a young HBC clerk named James Grant and three Iroquois boatmen, Smith accomplished the thousand-mile journey in record time, almost starving to death along the wav and being lost for extended periods in snowstorms. It was the toughest physical ordeal of his life. Years later lie refused to dwell on the details, though it is known that two additional Indian guides hired along the way starved to death. Once in Labrador, Smith found Nourse paralysed, the victim of a serious stroke. While Grant stationed himself at North West River, Smith took temporary charge of the smaller but more strategically located post at nearby Rigolet. The North West River station (near modern-day Goose Bay airport) was tucked into a clearing on the shore of a I 10-mile-deep salt-water gash in the frowning eminence of the unexplored Labrador coast, with mountain ranges rolling out of both horizons. Rigolet sat nearer the Atlantic, at the mouth of the rocky gorge that joined Hamilton Inlet to Esquimaux Bay. The GROWING UP COLD 31 unpredictable riptides of those treacherous narrows had already claimed many an over-confident vessel, including the British maii-of-war Cleopatra. Smith placed the gravely il I Nourse aboard the annual supply ship, and by September his successor, Chief Trader Richard flardisty, had arrived from Montreal. Smith was promptly relegated to his earlier i ank of clerk, though he was delighted to welcome his new superior and especially his accompanying family. Hardisty, who had served in Wellington's army as an ordnance officer in the Peninsular campaign and the Battle of Waterloo, came to Labrador accompanied by his Mixed Flood wife (Margaret Sutherland) and their lively daughters, Isabella, Mary and Charlotte.* While the Hardisty family moved inland to live at North West River, Smith remained at Rigolet. Under his direction, the little station becanic more than the mother post's maritime outlet. Ile met head-on the marauding free traders who were attempting to lure the Naskapi to their shore trading posts, ranging far back into the fur country to finalize his trades and claim defacto exclusivity over a territory outside the HBCs Charter. Though he could move fast on snowshoes, Smith acquired few of the proficiencies of frontier life. He was a terrible shot, attempting to down birds by firing without first taking the trouble to aim, and there is a record of his bagging a lone wolf, which he noted proudly in a letter to *Each of Richard H ardisty's six sons joined the HBC, with varv- ing degrees of career success. The best known of the sextet w"as his namesake Richard, who rose to the rank of Inspecting Chief Factor and in 1888 was appointed the first senator for the old Northwest 'I~rritories, representing the district of Alberta. Richard's granddaughter Isabella, known as Belle, marriedJames Lougheed, himself named to the Senate for the Northwest Territories in 1889 and knighted in 1916. One of Senator Lougheed's grandsons, Peter f,ougheed, was the longtime premier of Alberta. 32 LABRADOR SMITH his mother. Ile never learned to ride, though he introduced the first horses to Labrador, and could not properly handle a canoe. He very nearly drowned when a kayak he was attempting to paddle overturned after only a few yards. "I went straight home and took a glass of wine," he later recalled, confessing, "the only time, by the way, I ever tasted liquor by myself." Yet he could be brave, too, and when the Marten, sailing out of Rigolet, ran aground, he personally commanded the rescue boats that saved cargo and passengers-though not the captain, who committed suicide rather than face the wrath of the HBC Governor. By the autumn of 1850, Smith was writing letters directly to Simpson, not exactly disparaging Hardisty's efforts but clearly impl-ving that the Company might expect better returns from the district if a younger Chief Trader from, say, Forres, were in charge. For his part, Hardisty seemed genuinely impressed with Smith, recommending him to Simpson at every turn. These exchanges produced results in 1851, when Hardisty requested permission to leave Labrador on furlough the following year. As soon as it was agreed that Smith would temporarily replace the older man (though still in his rank of clerk), he grew bolder in his criticisms. He wrote to Simpson that Hardisty was much more suited to a great inland post than to the actively competitive Labrador situation and criticized the Chief Trader for not seizing the local commerce more energetically. Ile openly attacked Hardisty's slackness in the face of increasingly vicious competition and criticized his plans for diverting staff and funds to improve some of the local Company posts. None of this backbiting seemed to disturb Hardisty. "He is all fire, and indefatigable in his endeavours to promote the interests of the Company," he wrote to Simpson about Smith, "and having a thorough knowledge of the business carried on in this district, I consider him in every respect competent to succeed n te. . . . " GROWING UP COLD 33 On JuIv 8, 1852, only four years after arriving in Labrador, Smith was formally promoted to commissioned rank and placed in charge of the Esquirnaux Bay District. "I have much confidence in your energy and desire to turn the business to good account," Simpson wrote, adding an important codicil, "but trust you will adopt a greater degree of regularity and system than characterized your management at Mingan. You no doubt remember that on my visit to that place while you were in charge, I had occasion to note what appeared to me a want of method and punctuality in your household arrangements, as well as in the shipping office business. I now revert to this matter in the most friendly spirit with a view to putting you on your guard against a repetition of such a ground of complaint which in your present more important chirge might be productive of greater injury. . . ." Smith took the admonition under advisemerit and moved out of the barren clapboard hut at Rigolet to the inuch grander Chief Trader's residence at North West River, which boasted a winter fireplace and a surnmer veranda. The senior Hardistys departed alone. Their youngest (laughter, Charlotte, had recently died, while Mary had wed an 1-1 BC clerk named Joseph McPherson and moved away to Kibokok, a small post northwest of Rigolet. Isabella, who was twenty-three when she first arrived in Labrador, had shortly afterwards married James Grant, Smith's companion on the long overland trek from Montreal. Because there were no clergy in that empty place, the ceremony was performed by the bride's father. He had no official authority to do so since he was neither a clergyman nor sanctioned to perform marriages by his I IBC commission because Labrador lay outside the Com- p' C anys harter teriltory. Such country marriages were routinely performed by anyone or no one, requiring only the consent of the couple involved. James and Isabella 34 LABRADOR SMITH had a son named James Hardisty Grant in 1850 but shortly afterwards separated when, as Donald Smith explained, Isabella's hu.,iband exercised "no command of his passions." just before Richard Hardisty left Labrador, Isabella and Smith decided to marry an~ went through an informal ceremony on March 9, 1853. The presiding official at that wedding was none other than the groom himself Smith later claimed that he had been appointed a lay preacher by the Governor of Newfoundland and thereby had properly sanctioned Isabella's first real wedding (to himself), making an ostentatious fuss about the illegitimacy of her previous match. The following year saw the arrival of Margaret Charlotte, Isabella and Donald's only child. To everyone's embarrassment, including his own, James Grant remained at the post another two years. Smith did his best to undermine his rival's career, complaining to Simpson that young Grant "has [very] much to learn before becoming an experienced trader, his long resi- dence at North West River having been anything but advantageous to him, as while there he had little or nothing to do with the trade, and literally got no insight into the manner of keeping accounts which beyond a blotter or an invoice, he was rarely, if ever, permitted to see." In the same letter he lied to the Governor about his own romantic involvement: "It is just possible these remarks might lead to the supposition that I myself have been an unsuccessful suitor, but the case is so far otherwise that up to the present time I have not been so presumptious [sic] as to aspire to the hand of any fair lady." *James Grant left Labrador and the HBCin 1855, movedtoNew York, remarried, and became a successful stockbroker. His son with Isabella used Smiths name and was mentioned in Smith's will, but when the familv left Labrador, he lived apart from their household. GROWING UP COLD 35 It took Smith seven years to acknowledge his marriage in correspondence with Simpson. Even then he referred to having wed a "Miss Hardisty" rather than any "Mrs Grant." Although it was a routine event in the bush ethic of the time, the episode was magnified and made infinitely more wicked by the rub of Donald Sun th's Presbyterian conscience-a flexible instrument that failed to censor some of his far more questionable pecu- niary ploys. DURING 111STWFNTY YEARS in Labrador, Smith developed the cold insensibility that allowed him to betray political and business associates at will. The pressures that made him one of the most frigid, class-conscious aristocrats of his era had their origins here in Smith's lonely treks through the boreal wilds of Labrador, apparently forgotten by the glittering world he had barely glimpsed before his exile. He never admitted that there might have been a dramatic event to blame for his bitter turn of spirit. All he would say was that Labrador had toughened him. ("A man who has been frozen and roasted by turns every year must be the tougher for it, if he survive it at all.") The Naskapi who traded in Smith's territory experienced grave difficulty adapting their lives and seasonal cycles to the white man's requirements. Their main source of food was the enormous herds of caribou migrating semi-annually across their turf. The Naskapi had to stalk the animals through deep snow, which required infinite patience and great skill-until, of course, the local IFIBC posts supplied them with guns and powder. These made the hunt relatively simple: so simple, in fact, that the old skills were quickly lost, and the hunters soon could not survive without weapons. Their independence had been broken. "Because the HBC 36 LABRADOR SMITH Naskapi women and children at the turn of the century controlled the supply ofammunition," the late Dr Alan Cooke of the Hochelaga Institute pointed out, "the Naskapis were obliged to spend part of their time trapping furs, mainly marten, whether or not they preferred to hunt caribou. When they abandoned their traditional techniques of hunting caribou for the new technology of guns and ammunition, they gave themselves into the traders' hands. There was no return." The Naskapi were further endangered because the marten-trapping and cariboti-hunting seasons coincided. The marten is One of the few woods animals that carries almost no edible meat, so the Indians were caught in a vicious circle: they could hunt caribou-their sustaining food supply~-with guns and ammunition that GROWING UP COLD 37 the traders would provide only if they turned in good marten skins. But they couldn't keep themselves alive long enough to trap the pelts because that diverted them from pursuing the caribou. This dilemma could be avoided if the local I IBC trader was understanding and advanced them the necessary ammunition, assuming that over several seasons he would come out ahead. (One such Company clerk, f lenry Connolly, himself part Indian, did just that and found himself reprimanded for having been too generous in his allotments.) During the winter of 1843, three families of Naskapi numbering twenty souls starved to death within sight of the HBCs Fort Nascopie, then managed by Donald Henderson. Three winters later, three dozen more Naskapi died, and in the winter of 1848 there was mass starvation in the area. Most of this was caused by Henderson's denial of enough ammunition to the local hunters. Henderson eventually left the service; but word of the dl,,aster had spread, and Simpson demanded an explanation. As Alan Cooke observed: "Indians starving to death was, of course, regrettable, but the loss of hunters in a sparsely populated region that produced valuable furs was a serious matter. . . . During the space of six years, a 'proud' and 'independent' population of 276 persons had been reduced to about 166, with what hardship, miserv and sorrow, and with what effects on family and social life no one today can imagine or understand." These tragic events at Fort Nascopie had taken place before Smith's arrival, but there is evidence that he was directly involved in the subsequent famines of the mid1850s, the worst of them all. For one thing, it was welldocumented knowledge within the service that "no matter how poor the post might be, Donald Smith always showed a balance on the right side of the ledger." At this time he A as trying to make the best possible impression 38 LABRADOR SMITH on Sir George Simpson and his principals in London by maximizing fur returns at any cost. During the 1857 deliberations of a British Parliamentary Select Committee studying the HBC, a letter was tabled that former Chief Trader William Kennedy had received from a Company clerk atMingan. "Starvation has, I learn, committed great havoc amongyour old friends, the Nascopies, numbers of whom met their death from want last winter; whole camps of them were found dead, without one survivor to tell the tale of their sufferings; others sustained life in a way most revolting, as [sic] using as food the dead bodies of their companions; some even bled their children to death, and sustained life with their bodies!" In another undated note, Kennedys correspondent stated that "a great number of Indians starved to death last winter, and-says it was-s fault in not giving them enough ammunition." Since these blanks appeared in the Committee's final report, Smith's name was not officially linked with this harrowing episode, but he was in charge of the region at the time, and because of the very tight control he maintained over trade expenditures, it is not unreasonable to assume that the famine, which wiped out so many lives, was his direct responsibility. Smith's own reminiscences of Labrador mention few specific Indians; the natives were simply there, like trees or the wind. As the HBCs Chief Trader, he was North West River's community leader and that often meant medical duties as well. I le achieved modest success treating wounds with a pulp made from the boiled inner bark of juniper trees, a method authenticated by Lord Lister, who introduced the principles of antiseptics to surgery in 1865.* *Fifty years later, Smith, now Lord Strathcona, delivered a lecture on his primitive but effective techniques to medical students at Middlesex Hospital in London. GROWING UP COLD 39 At night, the vast Labrador stillness was interrupted only by the hoot of a hungry owl, the subdued velp of a dreaming dog or, during spring breakup, the thud and groan of heaving ice. Smith stayed up late, writing to his mother, reporting on each days events even though his letters could be sent out only once a year via the HBCs supply ship. That vessel also brought Smith annually from London issues of The 'Times, which he carefully perused over breakfast-each newspaper exactly one year after publication. On Sundays he held religious services with his household, FIBC staff, and a dozen or two Indians as the congregation. "To-day we all assembled for prayers in Mrs. Smith's parlour-every mother's son scrubbed and brushed up to the nth-even old Sam, who looked positively saint-like with a far-away expression, although he was probably only counting the flies which were buzzing on the window pane," one of Smith's clerks later recalled. "We sang three hymns, I coming out particularly strong in the Doxology." To provide his family with a proper diet, Smith sent to the Orkney Islands for hardy seed grains, poultry, and cattle and to Quebec for horses, sheep, goats, and an ox. On seven painstakingly cleared acres, fertilized by fish offal, he grew cucumbers, pumpkins, potatoes, and peas, ripening more fragile fruits and vegetables in a large greenhouse. Charles Hallock, afterwards head of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, was exploring "bleak and barren Labrador" when he happened on Smith's farm. "Then the astonished ear is greeted with the lowing of cattle and the bleating of sheep . . . " he wrote of his visit in Harper's New Monthly Magazine. "In the rear of the agent's house are veritable barns, from whose open windows hangs fragrant new-mown hay; and a noisy cackle within is ominous of fresh-laid eggs.... Donald Alexander Smith, the intelligent agent of the post, is a practical farmer, and, by continued care and the 40 LABRADOR SMITH employment of proper fertilizing agents, succeeds in forcing to maturity, within the short summer Season, most of the vegetables and grains produced in warmer latitudes." To complete the tableau, Smith built a twomile track from his house to the farm-Labrador's first road. In summer he would take Isabella for sundown outings aboard his ox-drawn carriage. North West River hosted another distinguished visitor in 1860, Captain (later Admiral) Sir Leopold _McChntock, then in command of HNIS RuIldog, a Royal Navy survey ship, who had gained prominence during the search for the Franklin Expedition. His log provides one of the few physical descriptions of the Labrador Chief Trader at this point in his life: "Smith ... was about forty years old, some five feet ten inches high, with long sandy hair, a bushy red beard, and very thick, red eyebrows. He was dressed in a black, swallow-tail coat, not at all according to the fashion of the country, and wore a white linen shirt.... His talk showed him to be a man of superior intelligence." McClintock in later years told Smith that he had foreseen at the time of the visit "Labrador won't hold this man. . . ." , 16 prove his worth to Simpson, Smith not only reported unprecedented fur-trade returns but began diversifying the distric0s sources of revenue, expanding into a salmon fishery (and eventually cannery), exporting barrels of seal oil, and even sending out rock samples for geological tests. "I believe," he predicted, "that there are inincrals here which will one day astonish the world." The most beneficial consequence to Smith of these activities was that the fishery, which involved shipping the Sinipson ignored the ro(ks, but Sinith proved to be correct. The area he pinpointed as ha~ ingvaluable inineralization laterproved to contain a huge iron-ore body, as Nvell as lesser quantities of fitaniuni, lead, zinc, nickel, asbestos, coluinbiurn and uraniuiri. GROWING UP COLD 41 iced or canned salmon to England, gave him an excuse for corresponding directly with HBC headquarters in London, bypassing his aging benefactor, Sir George Simpson. The Company eventually formalized this arrangement by separating Labrador from its Lachine administration, so that Smith now reported to London on all his activities. In one of his last letters, Simpson warned his ambitious prot6g6 against being heavyhanded trying to impress his British superiors: "When you want to bring any point strongly under notice, it will have a better chance by putting it in a few clear and appropriate words than by spinning out the theme so as to make it look important by the space it occupies on paper." Smith ignored that advice and his letters grew embarrassingly verbose. As soon as he felt a promotion might be in the works, Smith did what lie would always do in later life: he remarried Isabella. This particular wedding, performed either by an itinerant missionary or a visiting sea captain, must ~ave been staged so that Smith could not only salve his conscience but also specifically refer to the sanctioned ceremony in his London correspondence. He was appointed Chief Factor shortly afterwards at the age of forty-four, and in 1864 decided to take his first home furlough in twenty-six years. After visiting his mother, who was now almost blind, he hurried to London and spent the balance of his leave trying to ingratiate himself with the bigwigs at the HBCs Fenchurch Street head office. He met the Governor, Sir Edmund Walker Head, his deputy, Curtis Miranda Lampson, Eden Colvile, a future Governor, and most of the other important Committeemen. "Smith, the officer in charge of our Esquimaux Bay District," Colvile reported to Lampson, " . . . gives a good account of our affairs in that region, where he has been stationed for many years. As he is just the sort of man you would like to meet, shrewd 42 LABRADOR SMITH and well-informed upon every topic relating to that terra incognita of the British Empire, I have asked him to dine with us on the 14th." Lampson, in turn, had been predictably charined by the visitor who from now on was a marked man in the Company's hiture planning. There was one small hitch. As was their custom, on the eve of the departure of the supply ship (which would carry Smith home), the Company directors proposed hearty toasts to the well-being of its Commissioned Officers. But when he was called on to reply, Smith had vanished. Overcome by a fit of shyness, the Labrador trader (who had known be would be requested to speak and had prepared his notes) could not face the distinguished gathering, afraid that he might somehow blot his copybook. It was the first public evidence of Smith's well-deserved reputation as a clamshell. Smith was back in North West River by August 1865, but the visit had transformed him. f le now knew there was still a chance for him to participate in the great events of his time. Despite his geographical isolation, Smith's reading of the Company's prospects was amazingly accurate. Perhaps because he had never been there and had no vested interest in the HBCs main fields of operation in the West, lie could clearly see that the future would not run with the buffalo hunters or fur-trade canoes but with the oxcarts and ploughs of settlers come to claim new lives in the new land. "I myself am becoming convinced that before many decades are past," he wrote to a friend at the time,"the world will see a great change in the country north of Lake Superior and in the Red River country when the Company's licence expires or its Charter is modified. . . . You will understand that 1, as a Labrador man, cannot be expected to sympathize altogether with the prejudice against settlers and railways entertained by many of the western commissioned officers. At all events, it is probable that settlement of GROWING UP COLD 43 the country from Fort William Westward to the Red River, and even a considerable distance beyond, will eventually take place and with damaging effect to the fur trade generally." Within a year, the newly self-confident Smith had decided to visit Boston, New York and Montreal. Ostensibly, his trip was to view the sights of the city he had left twenty-seven years earlier. "The object I most wanted to see. . . " he explained, "was the Victoria Bridge, which is truly one of the wonders of the world, and gives Montreal an unbroken railway communication of I 100 miles. . . . " In reality, he was seeking belated acceptance in the milieu he felt had suddenly become accessible to him. The most important part of his trip, at least in retrospect, was a call on his cousin George Stephen. The son of a Banffshire carpenter, Stephen had emigrated from Scotland at twenty-one to become a clerk in his cousin's Montreal drapery business, in which he eventually purchased a controlling interest. He studied banking and had become associated with some of Montreal's leading entrepreneurs. The cousins' initial meeting was hardly propitious. The Smith family had gone shopping, and Donald had purchased a gaudy crimson carpet-bag for his Labrador journeys. Later, ~e wouldn't discuss his encounter with Stephen, but when Isabella was asked whether his cousin had been happy to see Smith, she burst out: "Really, why should Mr. Stephen be glad to see country cousins like us-all the way from Labrador? I wish ... [my husband] had waited until he had met Mr. Stephen before buying that red carpet-bag. But he wouldn't let me carry it and the rest of us waited outside." Still, Stephen did condescend to introduce his country cousin to friends at the Bank of Montreal and leading members of the city's shipping circles. All the talk was about domestic electricity, still considered a risky innovation, William Gladstone's surprising eloquence in the 44 LABRADOR SMITH British House of Commons, Alfred Tennyson's latest verses and the prospects for Canada under Confederation, then only a year away. Smith reluctantly reuurned to North West River, but mentally he had already left Labrador behind. Simpson had died in 1860, and his successor, Alexander Girant Dallas, had transferred the Company's North American headquarters to Red River, closer to its main field operations. Since Smith was already in charge of the Labrador District, all that remained in Lachine was direction of the relatively minor Montreal District, which included the King's Posts along the St Lawrence as well as trading forts up the Ottawa and Mattawa rivers. After the retirement on June 1, 1869, of the Montreal District's Chief Factor, F.M. Hopkins, "Labrador Smith," as he had become known in the Company's setvice, was appointed to the job. And so Donald Alexander Smith came out of the wilderness at last. He was forty-nine years old, his skin permanently blackened by two decades of snow tans, his nerves as taut as those of a sprinter about to start his championship turn. Montreal by then had a population of about 100,000, its streets had been paved and its harbour dredged, and the city (North America's tenth largest) was becoming an important rail and steamship terininus. Smith fitted in as if he had never left. "I called today to pay my respects . . . " reported a startled HBC Factor shortly after Smith's arrival, "and was surprised to find him so affable and assuming, with no trace of the ruggedness you would associate with the wilderness. You'd think lie had spent all his life at the Court of St James instead of Labrador. . . ." One reason Smith was treated as an equal by members of the city's financial elite was that in a modest way he was already one of thern. During most of his time in Labrador he had GROWING UP COLD 45 Donald Smitb in 1871 put away virtually his entire HBC earnings (arriving in Montreal with a grub-stake of $50,000), but starting in 1853 with the purchase of two shares, he had also quietly been accumulating stock in the Bank of Montreal. Coincidentally, George Stephen had been doing the same thing, and within the next four years the two cousins would become the Bank of Montreal's secondlargest shareholders. Overnight, Smith seemed to be launched on the urban business career that had been his long-postponed dream. Then a confluence of circumstances intervened and hurled him into the vortex of a strange rebellion gathering momentum halfway across the continent. CHAPTER 3 BRINGING LOUIS RIEL TO HEEL Louis Riel remains the perfect mai-tyr of the prototypical Canadian tragedy: a zeell-meaning yet deluded inystic who died prematurely by pretending to be sane. 'nm cotjNTRY miosF, iIIS'rom Smith was about to affect still seemed more an idea than a reality. Canada in 1869 consisted of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec and Ontario (the latter two iiiinus their present northern areas), plus the huge but nearly enipty western territories then in the process of being acquired from the Hudson's Bay Company.* After protracted negotiations, the Canadian government had agreed to purchase Prince Rupert's original land grant for 000,000 ($1,460,000) through a loan guaranteed by the Treasury of the United Kingdom. In addition to receiving cash, the I IBC was granted unhindered trading privileges and 45,000 acres around its 120 trading posts as well as the right to claim, during the ensuing fifty years, one-twentieth of the fertile land (about seven million acres) between Lake Winnipeg and the Rocky Mountains. The transfer that would extinguish the 1IBCs long-coveted monopoly rights was to take cffect on December 1, 1869. In the decade after Confederation, most of the 3.6 million citizens of the new Dominion scratched for a For de ta i Is, see Caewrv oj'tbe 47ihlerncu, hardcove r, pa ges 3 61- 74. 47 48 LABRADOR SMITH living in rural isolation; only 390 square miles were occupied by two dozen embryonic towns and cities. Montreal was the largest at 100,000 people, with Quebec and Toronto competing for second place at about 60,000 each. Across the broad continent west of the Lakehead, there was almost nothing. "The plains were as thousands of years of geological and climatic change had made them," wrote XV.L. Morton, the bard of western Canadian historians. "The grasses flowed, the prairie fires ran in the wind; the buffalo grazed like cloud shadows in the plain; the buffalo hunt raised a flurry of dust in the diamond summer light; the rivers sought the distant sea unchecked; surnmer made green, autumn bronze, winter white, spring gray. . . What had been wrought . . . lay unchanged until it became the setting for the last frontier." Because the HBC had for two centuries kept nearly everyone who was not a Company employee out of its domain, the new Canadian West remained in the public mind a territory not far removed from those mysterious hunks of geography labelled on ancient charts "Here Be Dragons." Returning missionaries and the odd free spirit had brought out fragmentary reports of the lands contours and habitability, but it was the American, not the Canadian, West that attracted most settlers. The larger population base of the United States, its better climate and the mood of egalitarianism that characterized the self-confident republic made it a good place to start new lives. The notion of upward mobility still seemed foreign in Canada, which remained trapped in perpetuating vestiges of the British class system. Canada's West was isolated more because of the absence of transportation facilities than as the result of geography. There were only three means of entry: by ship to York Factory thi-ough Hudson Bay; by Red River cart northward from the headwaters of the Mississippi BRINGING LOUIS RIEL TO HEEL 49 River in Minnesota; or by canoe along the historic furtrade routes from the Upper end of the Great Lakes. Local HBC post managers had from the beginning been encouraged to live off the land, but except for the tracts of cultivation at Red River and a tiny spread at Cumberland House, the pioneer trading post opened by Samuel Hearne in 1774, only a few kitchen gardens had taken root. That began to change with the report by John Palliser, a Dublin-born explorer and buffalo hunter who was commissioned bY the Royal Geographical Society to report on the region's potential. fie not only defined a fertile land crescentacross the prairie and noted deposits of coal and other minerals but also explored six passes through the Rockies for possible future railway construction. His optimism was somewhat tempered by the conclusion that no railway could be built across the treacherous bogs north of Lake Superior-, the Red River settlement would have to be provisioned from the United States, via Chicago and St Paul.* By the late 1860s, Red River's inhabitants, including the offspring of the dispossessed crofters from the Scottish clearances, had iurned the fifty-mile area around the I I BC postat Fort Garry, near the junction of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, into a relatively prosperous, if insular, community of about ten thousand souls. Half were proud buffalo hunters descended from the mixed marriages of voyageurs and HBC clerks with Cree, Saulteaux, Blackfoot, Chipewyan, Dogrib and Slavey women. Their spiritual centre was the grey stone cathedral in the parish of St Boniface, presided over by the shrewd Roman Catholic bishop, Alexandre -Antonin Iach&. The tiny village of Winnipeg at the edge of the IIBC fort had grown into a miniature business centre, with half a dozen saloons, *For the founding 4 Lord Selkirk's colony, see Caesars of'the Wildevness, hardcover, pages 137--89. 50 LABRADOR SMITH hotels and stores, supplied by the Red River cart brigades that maintained the linkbetween Fort Garry and St Paul.* Red River's hermetically sealed world revolved around the Hudson's Bay Company's Canadian headquarters at Fort Garry, its busy compound enclosing the Governor's residence, storehouses, clerks' and officers' quarters, sales and trading shops, the powder house and a scatter of outbuildings. Here in summer came the Indian canoe flotillas, loaded to the gunwales with pelts. The trading chiefs-big men with deliberate limb movements and the rhythmic lope of hunters-would hump the fur packs through the fort gates, eager to acquire guns, blankets, copper kettles, and the increasing range of household goods brought over by the 11BC from England. Most summer (lays, Red River carts would be pulling in from St Paul or pulling out, their ungreased wooden wheels screeching in the sunlight, to supply the HB(:',s outposts along the North Saskatchewan River all the way to Fort Edmonton. They would return three months later bulging with the inland fur harvest. Inside the fort, where each arrival and departure was accompanied by the yelps of a swirling chorus of mongrels, the walls had been painted scarlet, yellow and orange to offset the monotony of nature's blues and greens. Local courts sat here, as did the district's admin istrators, ruling for half a century through an insipid body known as the Council of Assiniboia, headed bv the resident HBC G ,overnor, its roster padded by tame ~'om pany appointees. James Ross, an English Mixed Blood who had gone east and graduated from the University of *The first saloon was opened in 1859 by "Dutch George" Emmerling, who arrived with a barrel of whisky and sold the diluted rotgut at sixpen(e a shot. The sleazy emporium was eventually purchased by Robert Atkinson Davis who promoted it as "a haven of warmth, rest and billiards." Davis reluctantly quit the saloon business in 1874 to become Manitoba's fifth premier. BRINGING LOUIS RIEL TO HEEL 51 Toronto before returning to Red River, complained sourly about "the incubus of the Company's monopolythe peculiar government under which we z,egetate-it cools our ardour-destroys our energies-annihilates our very desires for improvement." Even William Alactavish, the HBC's incumbent Governor, declared himself disgusted with "the greedy London directory" and the "arrogant Dominion Government," since neither had exercised the courtesy of informing him directly about the impending changes of circumstance. Although negotiations agreeing to terms that would surrender the 11BC lands and monopoly had been concluded in London on April 9, 1869, by November of that year Mactavish had still not received notification of the transfer. In the absence of reliable information, rumours swept the I tBC compound, so that Mactavish's already difficult position became untenable.* The Edinburgh-born Alactavish had Joined the Company as an apprentice in 1833. He was trained mainly at York Factory and worked his way up through the accounting department with few operational commands until he was promoted to the HBCs highest overseas office. A dreamy yet disenchanted Highlander, Mactavish was an amateur phrenologist who believed that a person's character could be read by the shape of his or her skull. Ile had accepted the governorship of Assiniboia under protest and later lamented he would *liesaid little publicly about the impending transfer, whichwould terminate his authoritv, and his official journal is equally reticent on the subject. Mactavish expressed his real feelings in a letter to his brother, Chief Factor Dugald Mactavish, in Montreal. I will not speak of our dignity," he wrote, "but it is more than flesh and blood can bear that we who have conducted the governitient of this country for ycars, with a view to the welfare and best interests ofall classes of the inhabitants, should be sun-iniarily ejected from office, as if A e were the commonest usurping scoundrels." 52 LABRADOR SMITH rather have served as "a stoker in hell." His unhappy tenure was made all the more agonizing by the fact that he was suffering from advanced tuberculosis and had to expend most of his waning vitality fighting the awful lassitude inflicted by the disease. As a result, no matter what the provocation, no matter how seriously the Company's authority was challenged, Mactavish retreated into a stupor of inactivity and apparent indifference. Yet had Mactavish been the most enlightened and energetic of men, neither he nor any other Bay official could have turned back the gathering storm at Red River. The tiny settlement, with little of the required infrastructure to provide channels for common cause, housed almost as many factions as families. A small but vocal Canadian Party led b~ Dr John Christian Schultz, a militant Protestant and publisher of the local paper, the Nor'Wester, demanded union with the Dominion; equally loud were the proponents of immediate annexation to the United States. There were Irishmen fulimnating against everything British, Highlanders trving to replicate their ancient clannish ways, even importing nightingales to make themselves feel at home, and agents of Napoleon III* vainly resurrecting wispy dreams of French empire along the vanished trails of the coureurs de bois. The best-organized Red River grouping was that of the M&Is. They were united by concern for the buffalo herds, their main source of income and pride, which had been relentlessly gunned down and dangerously thinned out. The magnificent beasts were often shot solely for their tongues, that commodity when pick-led having *The French Emperor had dispatched Norbert Gay, an army captain, to Red River to "report on the situation," because a majorit~ ofits population was Y'rench-speaking and its political future seerueduncertain. Although Gaydid little spymg, he helped train the \16tis buffalo hunters into a formidabic fighting force. BRINGING LOUIS RIEL TO HEEL 53 Mftisat camp on the prairie, 1858 become a delicacy in fashionable European restaurants. The advance of agriculture and decline of the fur tradethe main market for buffalo meat in the form of pemmican-threatened their livelihood. They were restless and they were angry. They had opened up this country and now saw little future on their home turf Their temperament was much too volatile to turn in their guns for the restraints of urban domesticity. Since they recognized that evolving circumstances would neither restore their past nor validate their future, the N16tis decided to draw on their French and Indian roots to fashion a peculiar world of their own-a new nation, their nation, on the edge of civilization. TROUBLE CAME FIRST in the form of Colonel John Stoughton Dennis, a United Empire Loyalist and cavalry veteran commissioned by William McDougall, Minister of Public Works in SirJohn A. Macdonald's first administration, to chart the new territory. He arrived at Red River unannounced in August of 1869, four months before the transfei was due to take place, charged with making a survey so that the unoccupied Red River lands 54 LABRADOR SMITH could be subdivided in a radically new pattern. The land had traditionally been laid out according to the Quebec seigneury style, with long, narrow rectangular lots fronting on the Red and the Assiniboine. Most of the farms occupied about four hundred feet of riverbank, then arched two miles or so through fields and woodlands to the drier prairie soil, where "hay privi- leges" were shared with neighbours. Ownership was based on original HBC and Selkirk grants or, more often, squatters' rights. Following instructions from McDougall, Colonel Dennis and his military surveyors began to lay out square townships designed for large-scale grain production from ploughed land. As practical as that may have sounded to Ottawa bureaucrats busy preparing the way for occupancy by ambitious newcomers from Ontario, the system ran directly counter to the M6tis way of life and farming requirements. On October 11, a survey party led by Captain Adam Clark Webb unexpectedly arrived at the hay privilege of Andr6 Nault. The distraught M6tis sent a messenger to fetch his cousin, Louis Riel, who came at the gallop with fifteen unarmed but defiant companions. An elegant and remarkably selfpossessed gent with a high forehead overhung by clusters of black curly hair, Riel theatrically placed his foot on Captain Webb's measuring chain and solemnly declared: "You go no farther." The surveyors eventually went away and nine days later the M6tis formed a committee, based on the old buffalo-hunt governments, with the twenty-five-year-old Riel as secretary. He quickly emerged as the group's real leader. At this point, onto the stage of western Canadian history stumbled William McDougall, former minister of public works, now designated first lieutenant-governor of the Northwest Territories. Picked for the Red River assignment mainly because Macdonald considered him BRINGING LOUIS RIEL TO HEEL 55 pompous and inflexible enough "to keep those wild people quiet," McDougall was one of the Prime Minister's more serious miscalculations. Known as Wandering Willie because he had served so many political faiths, McDougall turned out to be as stupid as he was pompous-not an easy accomplishment. When McDougall's caravan, consisting of sixty carts loaded with his official entourage, relatives, fox-hunting dogs and an ornate viceregal throne of state, arrived at the customs house in Dakota Territory on October 30, McDougall was handed a note from Le Comit6 National des M6tis de la Rivl&re Rouge, refusing them entry into Rupert's Land. Three days later, an unarmed Riel, riding at the head of more than 120 armed followers, seized Fort Garrv, explaining to a compliant Mactavish that his purpose was to prevent bloodshed and guard the fort against unspecified dangers. Although the HBC Governor was confined to quarters, there seemed to be rernarkably little hostility between him and the rebel leader. McDougall later accused the Company of opening the fort gates to the M6tis and welcoming the invaders. Viewing the escalating pace of events with increasing alarm from Ottawa, Sir John A. Macdonald hastily dispatched two messages. The first went through the correct political channels to the 11BC in London, pointing out that since McDougall was being denied entry to Red River, the land purchase would have to be postponed until peaceful possession could be assured and advising the Company not to expect its Y,300,000 payment until the official transfer could take place. His second letter was to McDougall, telling him to stay put. "I hope," cautioned the Prime Minister, "no consideration will induce you to leave your post-that is, to return to Canada just now. Such a course would cover yourself and your party with ridicule, which would extend to the whole Dominion." 56 LABRADOR SMITH EIncamped on the American side of the border and unaware of the postponement, McDougall was determined that the transfer date as he knew it would not go unnoticed. On the afternoon of December 1, he drew up a bogus royal proclamation. "Victoria, by the grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Queen," it began, then appointed, of all people, 44our trusty and well-beloved William McDougall" to hold supreme governmental authority over the disputed territories. That night, in one of the great comic turns of Canadian history, McDougall had his carriage driven through a twenty-below blizzard into Canada. He was accompanied by seven puzzled functionaries and two pointer dogs casting curious glances to left and right as they approached the ceremonial moment. Then, having reached the courtyard of an abandoned HBC post, McDougall ostentatiously positioned himself in a proper Nelsonian stance and, while one of his minions unfurled a Union Jack and another held a guttering lantern, sonorously read his proclamation to the empty prairie sky. He stood there, the parchment in his mittened hands, baying at the polar moon. The winds blew, the dogs howled, the functionaries snickered into their beards-and McDougall basked in the glow of his selfanointed glory. The absurd deed done, the nocturnal caravan, led by the pair of bounding pointers, quickly headed back to the warmth and safety of its temporary American quarters, satisfied with a long night's work well (lone. It had indeed been an occasion to remember: the night the Honourable William McDougall finally stepped over the slippery line between pomposity and idiocy. McDougall's document carried the weight of no authority. He had none of his own and had counterfeited the Queen's imprimatur. His impetuous act turned the federal government into the object of frontier hilarity. BRINGING LOUIS RIEL TO HEEL 57 Alftisfamily with Red River cart on Main Street, Winnipeg None of this bothered the Ottawa emissary (thereafter known as "Silly Wandering Willie"), who actually expected Macdonald to reward him for his "prompt display of vigour [that] will inspire all inhabitants of the Territory with respect for your Representative, and compel the traitors to cry, 'God Save the Queen."' The Prime Minister ignored McDougall's bluster, angrily denounced him for having "done his utmost to destrov our chance of an amicable settlement with these wil~ people," and recalled him to Ottawa. Before leaving, McDougall appointed the surveyor, Colonel Dennis, as his "Lieutenant and Conservator of the Peace" and ordered him to clear the rebels out of Fort Garry-in effect inviting Dennis to launch a civil war. McDougall also dispatched copies of his worthless proclamation to Fort Garry, so that Mactavish and the Hudson's Bay Company would be officially aware they had just been deposed. The HB( Governor, his chest on fire with advanced tuberculosis, was beyond caring. He spent most days sitting alone at his deserted council table, coughing and staring into space. 58 LABRADOR SMITH Red River did have an effective government, and Louis Riel was at its head. When the M6tis leader called a community meeting to establish the terms of his provisional administration, F nglish -speaking delegates asked Mactavish whether he still considered the HBC to be Red River's prevail ing author] ty. The gravely i 11 Governor advised them that McDougall's mission, however foolishly conceived, would soon terminate his powers, and that since he was "a dead man," they had better construct a government to maintain peace.* Riel named himself President of the Provisional Government of Rupert's Land and the North-West (then the world's second-largest republic)and raised over Fort Garry the new M6tis flag (a golden fleur-de-lis and a green shamrock on a white ground).t To emphasize his authority, Riel transferred the new Government House furniture that had been prepared for McDougall's arrival to another part of the fort, which became his office as chief of state. The rebellion, if that's what it was, had been achieved with force but no bloodshed. With the subtlety of a seasoned politician, Riel had drawn enough consensus from the diverse elements of the colony to govern Red River. While the Canadian government dithered, American annexationists were quick to realize the potential of the *John Bruce, a local magistrate and president of the National Committee, later testified that Mactavish had told him McDougall and his successors should be resisted because Canada's taking possession of the territory was "an injustice to the people and to the officers of the llu~son's Bay Company, since the Government had given them no part of the Y.300,000 paid for their country." t'rhe fleur-de-lis was the proud standard of Samuel de Champlain, the Father of New France. The shamrock was added to recognize the treasurer of the M6tis Governing Council, a professional Irishman named "' B. O'Donoghue, who taught matheinatics at St Boni Cace College. BRINGING LOUIS RIEL TO HEEL 59 situation, offering Riel. flattering entreaties and generous cash donations if lie would throw in his republic's lot with the Stars and Stripes. Insignificant as Red River was, Washington politicians recognized it as the ideal entry point for a takeover of Canada's West-and eventually the entire continent. "The tendency of North American events is plainly towards the consolidation into one great nation," chirped the New York Sun. "From the Polar Sca to the Isthmus of Darien, there will in time be only one national government-that of the United States. Who among us can say that ours is not a glorious destiny or reflect without exultation that he is an American citizen?" Macdonald understood these sentiments all too well, lamenting that while he would gladly neglect the West for the next half-century, if Englishmen didn't go there, Yankees would. Something had to be done fast to bring Riel's upstart republic to heel. SUCCESS BY INA-DN ERTENCE did not figure prominently in Labrador Smiths cunningly conceived career path, but at this pivotal moment in Canadian history Sirjohn A. Macdonald's ignorance intervened to place the still- obscure fur trader at centre stage. Sir George Simpson, who for most of forty years had operated the Hudson's Bay Company as a private preserve out of his headquarters at Lachine, just west of Montreal, had such an enormous personal impact on Canadian public life that Macdonald quite naturally assumed the secretive Company was still run out of Montreal, even if he no longer knew who was in charge. That had not been true since Alexander Grant Dallas, Simpson's successor, had moved the headquarters to Red River in 1860 and had himself been succeeded by William Mactavish four years later. Ensconced in Montreal for less than a year, Smith had Company rank only of district manager, and his department wa~ the HB(,S smallest and least typical, taking in 60 LABRADOR SMITH eastern Canada and Labrador. The Prime Minister had never met or heard of Smith, but it was a normal reflex for him to call on the highest accessible HBC official to help settle troubles on the western front in what was, after all, still Company territory-particularly since he had been recommended by George Stephen. Smith, who had never even visited a Company post west of Lachine, was the last man on earth to try to set Macdonald straight. As he later explained, it was no part of his duty 61to volunteer to correct any man's opinion or delusion unless it were in the general interest." Summoned to Otta-wa on November 2 9, 1869, Smith was closely questioned by Macdonald on the difference in attitudes between the HBCs London head office, anxious to complete the transfer and get its money, and local Company officers reported to be encouraging the insurrection. Not averse to involving himself in a situation he knew nothing about, Smith laid much of the blame on the government for not securing Governor Mactavish's co-operation before dispatching McDougall to the territor-y. To counter claims that the HBC was helping the rebels, he insisted that adjustment of the present difficulty would be of great advantage to both the C ompany and its field officers, then delivered a patriotic sally he must have known would please the Prime Minister. "If no settlement occurs," said he, "there will be no transfer, and if there is no transfer of the territory,, law and order and property will be at the inercy of the most lawless members of the community until the Americans step in and annex it." Macdonald interrupted to ask Smith whether he would go to Fort Garry and help settle the dispute, and later the same day sent a memorandum to Joseph Howe, the cabinet minister in charge of the Red River negotiations, praising Smith: "I am now strongly of opinion that we should make instant use of D.A. Smith. In the chat I BRINGING LOUIS RIEL TO HEEL 61 had with him to-day he took high ground, declared himself a staunch Canadian and lost no opportunity of emphasizing his own complete impartiality as well as the desire of the Company to effect a speedy settlement of this unhappy business. If the Hudson's Bay officers are implicated in fomenting the disturbance, Smith can, from his position, discourage them. . .." Smith was shortly afterwards appointed Dominion Commissioner to Inquire into the North West Rebellion and charged with endeavouring to arrange some system of concerted action in the pacification of the country. The term "pacification" correctly identified his real mission. He was to use the moral suasion of the royal proclamations he carried with him plus whatever bribes might be necessary to create a political movement that would oppose and, if possible, overthrow Riel, laying the groundwork for future negotiations, not with any puppet administration but directly between the citizens of Red River and the Canadian government. Smith left Ottawa on December 13, accompanied by a brother-inlaw, Richard Hardisty, and Dr Charles Tupper, one of the Fathers of Confederation and former premier of Nova Scotia, now a prominent Tory Member of Parliament. Tupper (after 1879 Sir Charles) came along ostensibly to inquire into the whereabouts of his son-in-law, Captain D.R. Cameron, who was serving on McDougall'.s staff, but was probably included by Macdonald as his personal spy. The party took the fastest route available-by train to Toronto, Chicago, St Paul, and the end of steel at Breckenridge, Minnesota (the last miles aboard the St Paul and Pacific Railway), then bN, stage and canvas-covered sleigh to the C anadian border. They met McDougall on his way back to Ottawa and were briefed on the horrors of Red River. But what Smith recalled most vividly about that trip was the fertile land along the tracks of the St Paul and Pacific, the 62 LABRADOR SMITH bankrupt railroad originally chartered to reach Oregon on the Pacific Coast. For Tupper, one of the more curious moments of the journey was Smith's unexpected attack of megalomania. Tbe fur trader, less than a week after taking on his government assignment (and less than two weeks after.inybody in Ottawa even knew his name), demanded to be named a member of the august Privy Council, then Canada's highest civilian bonour. When Tupper pointed out that, if sanctioned, this should have been done before they had left Ottawa, Smith stopped at the next telegraph post and wired the suggestion to Sir John A. Macdonald, who just as quickly turned him down. The trio fought their way across the frigid plain towards Red River, stopping to rest and warni up at Fort Abercrombie, where the landlord took them to his shed. Six woodland caribou were standing there, like horses in stalls, frozen stiff, and the Abercrombie cook hacked off a hindquarter for the travellers. After leaving his royal proclamations at an IIBC trading post along the way, Smith arrived at Red River on December 27. lie was received civilly enough by Riel, but when asked to promise he would not try to upset the provisional government's legality, Smith declined and was detained for most of the next two months in a cramped room at Fort Garry. Allowed an unlimited flow of visitors and using his well-connected brother-in-law to recruit the right people, he persuaded several of the settlement's moderates to support Ottawa's intentions of integrating Red River with the growing Dominion. When persuasion failed, Smith had at his disposal several thousand dollars to bribe wavering M6tis, credits to hand out at I IBC stores for winter supplies, and jobs as tripmen for next summer's canoe and cart brigades. Realizing that his support was beginning to drain away, Riel demanded that Smith demonstrate the legitimacy of his BRINGING LOUIS RIEL TO HEEL 63 mission by showing him the royal proclamations. Smith dispatched Hardisry to fetch the documents. M6tis raiders tried to stop him, but some of the Smith converts escorted Hardisty to the fort, spreading the word that there was among them a fully accredited representative of the Canadian government and Queen Victoria with important news foi Red River citizens. Riel could not refuse Smith's demand that everyone be brought together the next morning to hear his message. JANUARY 19,1870, DAWNED SULLFN AND COLD, the sun hugging the horizon as if hesitant to venture into such frigid surroundings. It was twenty below zero Fahrenlicit, and the wind snarled across the flat landscape, oblit- crating most point~ of reference with snow. The good burghers of Red River came, more than a thousand strong, to hear the Ottawa emissary. They arrived aboard horse-drawn sleds swathed in buffalo robes, on snowshoes or by puffing dog trains front the outer settlements and gathered in a field inside the fort. They lit small fires, stamping circles in the snow to keep the blood flowing, and, as the temperature dropped, tucked mittened hands inside their 11BC blanket capotes for extra bodywarmth-or indulged in some liquid glow. The steam of their breathing had almost obscured the enclosure by the time Riel and Smith climbed onto a hastily erected platform to begin the historic proceedings. For five hours Smith read aloud from various documents, his words faithfully translated by Riel, including the text of the original commission to the misguided McDougall, proving that the Prime Minister's original emissary had acted entirely on his own. Smith read the lengthy proclamation from Sir John Young, reiterating the Governor General's wordy pledge that the "Imperial Government has no intention of acting otherwise, or 64 LABRADOR SMITH permitting others to act otherwise than in perfect good faith towards the inhabitants of the Red River district of the North-West .... The people may rely upon it that respect and protection will be extended towards the dif- ferent religious persuasions; that titles of every description of property will be carefully guarded; and that all the franchises which have existed, and which the people may prove themselves qualified to exercise, shall be duly continued or liberally conferred." Except for the occasional mild tiff between Smith and Riel about which papers should be promulgated, the mutual respect that seemed to flow between the two men impressed members of the audience. By mid-afternoon, the sun was settling into the southwest, and the cold had become intolerable; the small boys who had been collecting wood to keep the fires aglow were too chilled to continue. The meeting was adjourned to ten o'clock the next morning. On the following (lay, lectured at for another five hours, the crowd-except for the M6tis riflemen patrolling its edges-started to swing towards Smith. It wasn't so much anything specific lie said or promised as the cumulative effect of his documents, their carefully drafted and often stilted phrases demonstrating the fact that central Canadian politicians really did care about Red River's welfare. Alid it was Smith himself, looking fully his fifty years, the leathered skin reflecting his two decades in Labrador's primitive fur trade, who made his arguments persuasive. I le told them, as if it were a hardwrung confession, thai he was married to a Hardisty whose mother had been a Red River Sutherland, and that his own mother was a Grant, related to the great M6t]s leader, Cuthbert Grant. He seemed somehow incorruptible in his dour Scottishness, the tiny beard-icicles bobbing to the rhythm of his earnest pledges. He kept reading all those long documents, with their highsounding cadences, transmitting the subliminal message BRINGING LOUIS RIEL TO HEEL 65 that anyone taking this much trouble to sound officious had to mean it. He read a personal greeting froin Queen Victoria (delivered through Lord Granville, the Colonial Secretary) assuring his listeners they would enjoy the same status as British subjects in any other part of Canada. At the end of that interminable second day, Smith set aside the dreary documents and spoke from the heart. "I am here to-day in the interests of Canada," he intoned, "but only in so far as they are in accordance with the interests of this country.... As to the Hudson's Bay Company, my connection with that body is, I suppose, generally known; but I will say that if it could do any possible good to this country I would, at this moment, resign my position in that Company. I sincerely hope that my humble efforts may, in some measure, contribute to bring about, peaceably, union and entire accord among all classes of the people of this country." Not eloquent, exactly, but after ten hours of mindnumbing proclamations, at least genuine, and Smith was cheered for his effort. A chastened Riel now took the stage and moved that a convention of twenty M6tis and the same number of English-speaking representatives meet to consider Smith's commission and draw up a list of rights for submission to Ottawa. When a listener objected that his statement cast doubt on the legality of Smith's documents, Riel replied matter-of-factly that the Bay man's commission was valid and that it should be implemented. Riel's agreement to set up a constituent assembly outside the sponsorship of his own purview meant that Smith had achieved precisely the breakthrough Sir John A. Macdonald had recognized as the crucial element in any solution: that Canada be able to negotiate directly with representatives of Red River instead of Riel's unelected and radical provisional government. 'rhree delegates to the Ottawa talks were eventually elected and a Bill of Rights framed under 66 LABRADOR SMITH which the people of Red River were willing to become part of Canada. Riel was chosen-by representatives of the entire community this time-to continue as head of the provisional government. As a sign of good faith, he later released most of the Fort Garry prisoners, including FIBC Governor William Mactavish, who left for his ancestral hearth in Scotland.* A few days before Smith was due to leave for Ottawa to report on his mission, Red River's fragile tranquillity was shattered by a series of bizarre blunders. A hundred English-speaking malcontents from Portage la Prairie, west of Red River, marched towards Fort Garry determined to hang Riel. Norbert Parisien, a youngM6tis they had taken prisoner, escaped, snatching a double-barrelled shotgun, and started ru nning across the frozen Red River. When Parisien encountered a popular young settler named HughJohn Sutherland, who happened to be passing by, he shot him in the chest. His pursuers, seeing the mortally wounded Sutherland, recaptured Parisien and kicked him to death. Members of the rowdy, now bloodied gang, including a boisterous Irish Protestant drifter named Thomas Scott, were arrested by Riel's riflemen. Not much was known about the twenty-eight-year-old Scott because there wasn't that much to know. He was one of those marginal frontier characters who substituted racial and religious prejudice for personal motivation and had spent the past year cursing and harassing the M6tis. Once in the Fort Garry jail, Scott jeered at the guards, insulted their religion, called them cowards, and at one point physically attacked Riel. The situation deteriorated to the point where Scott's guards could no longer maintain discipline and bluntly told Riel they would shoot bim if he didn't execute Scott. The M6tis leader's more *Alactavish reached Liverpool on July 21, 1870, and died two days later. BRINGING LOUIS RIEL TO HEEL 67 militant followers were already angry that he had ordered the release of so many other prisoners, and Riel had to find a way of quickly reasserting his authority. Scott was brought before a court martial, found guilty of insubordination and sentenced to death. VVhen Smith pleaded with Riel not to spoil his bloodless record with a senseless execution, the Wils leader shrugged and replied, "We must make Canada respect us." At noon on March 4, 1870, the Reverend George Young, a local Methodist pastor, led the terrified Scott to a ditch outside the fort. His hands were bound, he was blindfolded, and a firing squad of six M6t1s shot the trembling Irishman in the chest. When Scott was heard moaning, Fran~ols Guillemette, one of the executioners, pulled out a revolver and at close range put a bullet through his left ear; it came blasting out through his mouth. Refused burial at Red River's Presbyterian cemetery, Scotts body was placed in a rough coffin and taken to a shed, where, according to George Young, five hours after the execution he was heard still pitifully moaning, "Oh, let me out of this. My God, how I suffer! " Riel dispatched two guards to deliver a coup de 9rdce. Scott was buried inside a deep hole in Fort Garry's stone battlements, but a year later when his remains were being disinterred for transfer to a proper graveyard, diggers found his coffin empty - except for the rope that had been used to tie ]its hands at the execution. According to one report, just before the original burial, Scott's body was removed from the coffin by a M6t]s guard named Elz6ar Goulet, weighted down with chains, and dropped through a fishing-hole in the Red River ice. "The secret of Thomas Scott's burial will likely never come out . . . " Alexandre Nault, whose father was one of' Scott's executioners, told the Winnipeg 7~ibune in 1961 on his eighty-seventh birthday. "An oath was taken never to tell." 68 LABRADOR SMITH Scott's lively ghost harmed no one more grievously than Louis Riel.* The many shots that killed the Irish renegade destroyed any chance of peaceful transfer of the 1113C lands. Dr Schultz, leader of Red River's rabid pro-Canadian party, toured Orange Ontario brandishing a rope that he claimed had bound Scott's hands during the execution and a via] of the martyr's blood.t Schultz and others whipped tip public outrage, demanding revenge on those the Globe in Toronto labelled as desperate, depraved, devilish Papists. In Quebec, Riel and his praetorian guard of M6tis were raised to the status of folk heroes-champions and victims-of French Canada's crusade against Anglo-Saxon bigotry. It was one of the many ironies of the situation that only, five days after Scott's execution, Bishop Tach6 arrived in Red River bearing word from Sir John A. Macdonald of a general amnesty and the promise of welcoming Red River into Confederation as a province, to be called Manitoba. Riel immediately released all remaining prisoners and prepared to join Confederation. The trio of Red River delegates-a priest, a magistrate and a store clerk-left for Ottawa to negotiate the terms of what became the Manitoba Act, passed into law on Mav 12, 1870. It included nearly all of Riel's demands, such as guarantees for the French language and Catholic rellgion, and set aside 1.4 million acres for the N16tis, preserving their precious river lots. *After Louis Riel was hanged for treason in Regilli on November 16, 1885, One of the jurors at his trial admitted, "We tried R~iel for treason, and he was hanged for the murder of Thomas Scott." tVolunteers must have provided refills, since Schultz freelv sprinkled blood on the handkcrchiefs of tearful women at the climax of his melodramatic lectures. 70 LABRADOR SMITH DONALD SMITH DEPAR FED RED RrVER a changed man. No longer the obscure fur trader, he was hailed as the heroic peacemaker of the North-West. His report on the events of the past three months recommended, among other reforms, recruitment of a permanent paramilitary force to maintain law and order in the North-West. Smith's future was assured. It was whispered that even Benjamin Disraeli, the British Prime Minister, kept a copy of Smith's submission on his desk to show visitors how such documents should be drafted. On his wav back to Montreal, Smith had a memorable : h James Jerome Hill, a one-eyed St Paul encounter wit entrepreneur (born at Rock-wood, Ontario), who was on his way to assess Red River as a location for future business opportunities. Hill had arrived in the Minnesota capital as a teenager and immediately became part of the steamboat scene, at first providing fuel, then becoming a partner in some of the operations. Nn aggressive and unpleasant deal-maker, he tended to intimidate people with the stern look of his one good eye, the other having been lost in a youthful archery accident. Hill and Smith had heard of one another by reputation and it didn't take them long to find a common interest. The two men shared a wilderness meal and spent the night in a tent, trading dreams, discussing the need for a railway to link Red River with the civilized world. Back in his 11BC office, Smith was besieged by cablegrams from London soliciting his counsel on the Company's future affairs. Treated as the HBCs overseas chief operating officer, he was shortly afterwards promoted to President of the Northern Department (a new title for William Mactavish's former position) and transferred to Fort Garry. Smith's most urgent priority was to meet with his northwestern Chief Factors and Chief Traders, gathering in lai ejuly at Norway House near the upper end of Lake Winnipeg. This was to be the last of BRINGING LOUIS RIEL TO HEEL 71 the great Northern Council meetings to be held at Norway House, initiated by George Simpson half a century earlier. It was here, seated around the great oak table where they had traded so many quips and empires, that the Hudson's Bay Company's seasoned veterans first met their new viceroy. The understandable hesitation of pledging loyalty to this awkward stranger who had mysteriously been promoted over their heads gave way to respect as Smith conducted the meeting with the same resolute dignity that had marked his debut as an orator at Red River. In the end, the 1113C lield hands empowered him to represent them in negotiations with London for their rightful share of the Y,3 00,000 transfer fee. After the ineeting, Smith went by canoe to Fort Alexander, a post on the southeast side of Lake Winnipeg ninety miles from Fort Garry, originally built in 1792. T~ere he impatiently awaited arrival of the troops Sir John A. Macdonald had dispatched to claim the North-West. To appease the onti-Riel backlash and assert Canada's authority, the Prime Minister sent an army detachment to Red River under the command of Colonel Garnet Wolseley, a prematurely stuffy Anglo-Irish officer then serving as Depuq Q uarterniaster- General in British North America. The contingent, numbering 2,213 officers and men (a quarter of them British regulars) and 700 voyageurs, was officially described as a "benevolent constabulary," but its prevailing mood was that of a punitive military expedition. The sentiment was appropriately caught in Wolseley's private journal. "Hope Riel will have bolted," he confided to Its pages, "for although I should like to hang him from the highest tree in the place, I have such a horror of rebels and vermin of his kidney that my treatment of him might not be approved by the civil powers." A vintage hawk who, as a viscount and field marshal, would later command the British Army, Wolseley loaded the soldiers and their equipment 72 LABRADOR SMITH aboard 140 boats and heaved them across the mudpie labyrinths west of the Lakehead. The Manitoba historian Reverend R.G. MacBeth was being restrained when he described the task as "more suitable for aquatic animals than for human beings." The agony of strong-arming the heavy equipment across forty-seven punishing portages lasted ninety-six days, and at times the lead and last boats were as much as 150 miles apart. After Smith joined the Wolseley troops on their way through Fort Alexander, thev marched in battle formation towards Fort Garry. Pleased with the passage of the Manitoba Act and still brimming with Victorian ardour, Riel had planned to welcome the British troops in elegant fashion. Elaborate arrangements were made for bonfires and salutes on the south bank of the Assinibolne, with Riel himself presiding at the turnover ceremony at the head of a hundred crack M6tis cavalrymen. Expecting to benefit from the general amnesty granted by Ottawa, the M6tis leader had even drilled a guard of honour for Wolseley's inspection when the British colonel reached Fort Garry. For once, he seemed alone in his faith. Reports began to arrive that many of the Canadian volunteers were Ontario Orangemen boasting they would avenge Thomas Scott's execution by lynching the papists and watching them squirm. That was enough for most of Riel's lieutenants, who began drifting away, mumbling excuses about going home to check on relatives. By sunrise, only Ricl and O'Donoghue were left in the fort, pacing its echoing battlements, peering through the rain, trying to decide which way to turn. They lowered the brave M6tis flag, suspecting it would never fly again. Wolseley's 60th Royal Rifles could easily be spotted stumbling unprotected through the mud, and Riel must have glanced at Fort Garry's thirteen silent cannon with something close to regret. The two BRINGING LOUIS RIEL TO HEEL 73 men escaped through the fort's front gate barely ahead of the troops, scurried to the river, which they crossed on a raft hastily fashioned out of fence posts tied with their sashes. Riel cut the cable of a nearby ferry to prevent pursuit, but he needn't have bothered. Colonel Wolseley was too busy strutting around the fort, firing roval salutes, raising the Union Jack, boasting how he had routed the "banditti." Deprived of their quarry after the hardship of their long march, the troops took out their frustrations on the local M6tis, looting their homes, raping their daughters (including seventeenyear-old Laurette Goulet, the child of a Riel supporter, who died after being assaulted by four drunken soldiers), and murdering most of the provisional government's ministers. Flz6ar Goulet, a member of Scott's court martial, was chased into the Assiniboine and stoned until he sank and drowned. Another of the men who determined Scott's fate was left for dead on the American side of the border, while a third, Fran~ois G uillemette, was shot.* Riel himself had initially escaped to the United States but soon returned, still anxious to assist in Manitoba's transfer to Canada, and even helped organize the M6tis to counter an abortive invasion by a band of Femans from the States. Macdonald didn't want Riel arrested because that would have played badly in Ouebec. But he didn't want him casually strolling around Red River, either, because Ontario's Orangemen still had a price of $5,000 on his head. Resorting to the political ethic of his day, the Prime Minister eventually sent a bribe of $1,000 Nmbrose L6pine, Aho presided at both the trial and the execution, Aas convicted of murder in 1875 and sentenced to be hanged.The Governor General, the Farl of Dufferin, commuted his sentence, and L6pine died in 192 ; at the age of eighty-three in rural Saskatche%k an. 74 LABRADOR SMITH (supplemented byY,600 from Smith) through Archbishop Tach6 to get Riel out of the country. On February 23, 1872, he was unceremoniously escorted outside his "country" under police protection. .knd so the Red River Rebellion ended in both victory and defeat, its objectives achieved, its founding spirits shot or disowned. Ironically, Red River's ostensible liberators had inflicted far more moral and physical damage than the rebels themselves. Most of the regular troops departed five days after they arrived; it was the last British military operation in North America. As the HBCA presiding officer, Smith stayed on to head a reconstituted C ompany government that ruled Red River until McDougall's permanent successor arrived. The new lieutenant-governor of Manitoba and the Northwest Territories was a sensible Maritime lawyer-politician named Adams G. Archibald, who had been Macdonald's first Secretary of State and now would negotiate the first two treaties with the Indians of the North-West. "I yield up to you my responsibilities with pleasure," said Smith. "I really do not anticipate much pleasure on my own account," said Archibald. With that insipid exchange the Hudson's Bay Company finally surrendered its bountiful monopoly over the largest empire ever ruled by a commercial enterprise. A DFTAILED ANATOMY of the Red River Rebellion and the North-West uprising that followed in 1885 is beyond the scope of this book-except as Louis Riel was manipulated by and influenced the Hudson's Bay Company. His tragic s,,iga, particularly the 1885 trial for treason, when he refused to hide behind a justified plea BRINGING LOUIS RIEL TO HEEL 75 of insanity that might have saved his life, is Canada's most enduring myth. A compelling rebel in a nation of cloying conformists, Louis Riel remains the perfect martyr of the prototypical Canadian tragedy: a well- meaning yet deluded mystic who died prematurely by pretending to be sane. Riel's dominani characteristic was his sense of ambiguity. Caught between M6tis nationalism and Victorian loyalty, he could never let go of either emotion, trapped in a polarization of his own making. He was constantly trying to overthrow an entrenched Anglo-Saxon hegemony in order, as he paradoxically kept insisting, to gain "our just rights as British subjects." In one moving address after passage of the Manitoba Act, the M6tis leader was glowing with bonhomie as he praised his followers for bowing to the Oueen-the same Queen whose forces were at that very moment marching west to destroy him. "I congratulate the people of the North- West," he said, "...on having trust enough in the C rown of England to believe that ultimately they would obtain their rights " The man's fundamental dichotomy was symbolized even by his dress: during eight months as President of the North-West Republic, Riel received visitors wearing hand-sewn buffalo-hunt moccasinsand a formal Victorian frock coat. Had it not been for Scott's execution, Riel would have been elected the province's first legal premier and could justifiably have claimed to be the Father of Manitoba. But in Canada, civic nionuments are erected to functionaries, not rebels. Riel's resistance had salvaged the French element in Canada's North-West and in the process bestowed on the M6tis a degree of self-confidence and self-assertion they had never before possessed. Riel has inspired idolatrv and contempt in equal measure, being condemned f)y English Canadians as a 76 LABRADOR SMITH traitor who deserved to be hanged, while Quebeckers still worship him as a victim of Anglo-Saxon racial and religious prejudice.* Hartwell Bowsfield, a York University historian, best iummed up the heroic revolutionary's contradictions: "He was a man of intelligence and authority who was mentally unstable; a reasonable protester against legnimate grievances who turned fanatic and dictatorial; a gentle man whose name became associated with violence even though he himself never took up arms; a simple man of great personal appeal who developed grandiose pretensions as a spiritual and political leader, a visionary and an erratic religious mystic who inspired unquestioning faith in the N16tis people." That faith was unrequited because Louis Riel's conflict was as ancient-and as contemporary-as Canada itself. a clash between the semi-articulated col- kctive demands of the Wtis and the stubbornly held individual rights of English Canadians. *Honor6 Mercier climbed to power in Quebec on Riel's execution. Ironically, in 1990 the bridge namedafter Mercier became the focal point in Indian- French disputes. Mercier used Riel to get at the Conservatives in Quebec and at the Tories in Ottawa. Where did it get his descendants? CHAPTER4 THE GREAT FIRE CANOES C]ANOES The Northcote may or ma - 1, not have been the - first warship to fight an engagement in waters thirty-six inches deep-rwice the depth of a children's wading pool. But she was the only man-ol-war ever to proceed into combat with a billiard table as armour. DONALD SMITH RULED 'rFIE NORT11-WEST for only eight days-and his main public edict was to close the saloons at night- but he was the perfect transitional figure between the Hudson's Bay Company's two cen turies of sullen monopoly and its transformation into a dominant but vulnerable commercial enterprise. He dlif fered from every other senior Bay man in the territory because his heart was not in the West; his Labrador bac~- ground made it easy for him to deal unernotionally with the new circumstances. He came to the job with enhanced credibility through his diplornatic triumph at Red River, moved by restless aspirations for his own and the Company's advancement that had not been in evidence among the 11BC , s overseas managers since Sir George Simpson's day. The first sign of the Company's reduced status appeared when Colonel Wolseley called for tenders to 79 80 LABRADOR SMITH supply stove-pipes for the barracks of the remaining army volunteers. The HBC submitted a high bid, assuming 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 competitive 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 embarrassment 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-assumed 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 Assimhome, 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 *Passenger fares aboard the IIBC boats from Fort Garrv (Winnipeg) to Edmonton were fort~ dollars one wav for cabin space, 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 Assiniboine 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 bumping 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 passengers 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 Assiniboine, "Hey! You put that water back! " Stuck in the ankle-deep backwaters of the North Saskatchewan above Cumberland 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 Assiniboine'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 ashore, 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 shore, that it might pass 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'God 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, bypassing 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-class passengers 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 passenger 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 passen- 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, reasserting its transportation monopoly by raising rates to prohibitive levels on goods carried for its competitors. 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 passengers 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 entity 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 reassigned 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 reassembly 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 scrapheap 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 municipal historic irtifact. THE GREAT FIRE CANOES 93 from acting as principal 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 massing 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 assigned 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 arsenal 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 passed 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 assault, 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 assumed his battle station by lying prone 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 God, 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 Cumberland 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 Cumberland 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 *According to'l~d Barris, the Northcote's bell 11 now beckons a con- gregation to the Duck Lake Anglican (hutch each Sunday; while a hundred miles away the Gardiner Presbyterian Church-now Fred Light's tiny museum in the old town of Battleford-houses the Northcote's three-tone steam whistle. And three feet of Northcote deck plank functions as a ... cribbage board in one Pi ince Albert living room." THE GREAT FIRE CANOES 97 as late as 1887, anti the North Tf cst ran a tramp service along the river for another dozen years.* One by one the ships disappeared. Their final resting place was seldom at dockside. They died where they had lived, at river bends or at the edge of rapids. They were left to sink where they had rammed their final rock or crunched into their last riverbank. Eventually, their superstructures disintegrated into driftwood, and their rusting remains were blanketed by the shifting sands and weeping willows. *Only the Keenora, converted from steam to diesel during her career and restored by the Marine A luseum of Manitoba, now survives. Of the scores of passenger steamers of the inland waterwavs of the West, only four sternwheelers-the Klondike and Keno in Yukon and the Aloyie and Sicamous in British Columbia-remain.  CHAPTER 5 PROGRESSION AND BETRAYAL "Fine promises butter no parsnips. HB(' traderjanies Lockhart TRAVERSING THe STILL UNOCCUPIED WEST by stearnboat and canoe, on foot and snowshoe, aboard sleighs and buckboards, Donald Smith spent most of a decade after the Red RiNer Rebellion and the subsequent surrender of the Hl,(",s monopoly holding the Company together long enough to transform its core business from fur trading to real estate. Apart from laying down a dras- tically altered operational code in line with the HBCs new competitive environment, Smith's main concern was to deal with the increasingly strident demands of the Company's wintering partners for their share of the Canadian government's Y,300,000 cash down payment on Rupert's Land, According to the 1821 and 1834 Deed Polls, which set down the rules of their engagement, Chief Factors and Chief Traders were not employees but partners. To them belonged 40 percent of the Company's equity, divided on a share basis according to rank, and they were thus entitled to the same proportion of its net profit.This was not sorne form of earnings incentive; the dividends plus a modest subsistence allowance represented their sole Mcon-te. Having suffered through many 99 100 LABRADOR SMITH downturns in fur prices, they seemed entitled to participate in the Company's cash windfalls.They argued convincingly that Rupert's Land was available for sale mainly because they and their predecessors had legitimized an~ expanded Charles 11's original land grant through right of occupation. They felt particularly deserving because the transfer to Canada, which had destroyed the monopoly that made the fur trade so profitable, was bound to endanger their livelihood. At least one favourable court judgment had upheld the basis of their claim. When the Company's headquarters building on Fenchurch Street was sold at a profit five years earlier, London's Chancery Court had ruled the wintering partners were entitled to two-fifths of the proceeds, since the original purchase price had been paid out of the fur trade's gross income. Using that precedent, the overseas officers also claimed two-fifths of the $450,000 the Company had recently been awarded for giving up its Oregon territories to the United States. When these points were raised by his Chief Factors and Chief Traders at the Northern Council meeting held at Norway House in the summer of 1870, Smith promised to make their case in London. Even if he was a stranger, the field men thought they recognized in the man they appropriately nicknamed "Labrador Smith" a colleague who had connections with the powerful and who could salvage their estates. "Our immediate destiny is in your hands," one of the Chief Factors pleaded with him. "You know our life-you know flow arduous our labours are. In nearly every instance they involved long servitude, separation from friends and relations, many hardships which we feel more sensitively as time wears away ... These might be, as they often are, borne cheerfully even for a long period, were the prospects of retire- merit on an adequate competency in sight; but failing this hope, they are almost insupportable." PROGRESSION AND BETRAYAL 101 Sir Stafford Northcote, who was named 1113C Governor when the Earl of Kimberley resigned to become Lord Privy Seal in the Gladstone government, balked at sharing theE300,OOO award, insisting that the value of the wild land had not been improved by the fur traders' activities. In fact, Northcote enjoyed little nianoeuvring room. For the first time in its long history, the Hudson's Bay Company was no longer controlled by the London Committee. Since the sale to the International Financial Society in 1863 there were no more "sleeping partners" who could be counted on to vote automatically with the directors on the conduct of the fur trade.* Instead, the stock was actively traded on the London Exchange, and annual meetings were swayed by whatever coalition of shareholders emerged on any particular issue. These new-style investors, hard City men with long pedigrees but little sense of history, felt no allegiance to the traditions of the Company; their only concern was to increase stock yields. During some of the early years -.ifter the end of the Company's monopoly, net revenues had been so paltry that winding up the Hl3c and splitting up its assets seemed entirely appropriate-but no one was quite certain how such an ancient royally chartered enterprise could be extinguished. Smith spent the summer of 1871 in London advancing his officers' claims. Even as he was arguing their case, he was haunted by that train ride he had taken eighteen months earlier on his way to Red River, through the fertile farmlands lining the railway tracks north and west of St Paul. With the flBC about to receive title from Canada to seven million acres of what was the northward extension ofthat rich soil, he was convinced ofsomething most of his Chief Factors only vaguely suspected: that furry *For details of this transaction, see Caesars of the Wilderness, hardcover, pages 369-373. 102 LABRADOR SMITH animals would not be the main source of the Company's profits much longer. He realized that where buffalo roamed, cattle would one day graze, and had ascertained that much of the land about to come into the Company's possession was favoured with two more hours of sunshine a day during the wheat-inaturing season than other farming areas. But that wa,; only the beginning of Smith's vision. He knew that to switch the prairie economy from fur to grain would require large-capacity transportation-a railway network, initially (town to St Paul, Minnesota, and eventually right to the Pacific. Reverting to character, Smith merged his own aspirations with the country's future and turned the combination into a personal mission. He became determined that in some as yet unpredictable way hewould participate in construction of a railway across the Canadian West. Although he was only two years out of Labrador, circumstances had conspired to place Smith at the vortex of a historic transformation. Despite his very recent promotion, he suddenly commanded enormous leverage within the councils of the HBC. The Red River incident had made him all but indispensable in rearranging the Company's overseas affairs. He had proved during his long Labrador stewardship to be a capable fur trader, worthy of the Company's confidence. In his dealings with Riel he had gained the respect of Canada's Prime Minister, the confidence of the North-West's settlers, and the trust of the HBCs officers. Having accomplished all this so quickly, Smith began to sense that his destiny was not on the gumbo streets of Fort Garry or even in the relatively sophisticated offices and curtained salons of Montreal. It was in London, among the patricians of Empire transacting the world's important commerce, that he wanted eventually to claim his roost. As a first step, Smith set out to ingratiate himself with the Hudson's Bay Company's directors, especially PROGRESSION AND BETRAYAL 103 Governor Northcote, a seasoned political juggler who had honed his skills as secretary to Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, President of the Board of Trade and Secretary of State for India. He intended to show Northcote and the HBC Committeemen that he was reallv one of them, that he had the Company's best long-term interests at heart rather than the dispensable concerns of the wintering partners. He did this by suggesting a workable compromise to resolve the fur traders' demands that they share in the government's E300,000 payout. Northcote later won shareholder approval for the scheme, which provided the winterers with a one-time payment ofY,107,055, It also guaranteed continuation of their 40-percent equity position and perpetuated their 40-percent share of trading profits. In return, they had to sign a new Deed Poll that specifically exempted them from proceeds of future HBC land sales. Having expected little, most of the fur traders were pleased with the suggestion, particularly the cash, since the service then had virtually no pension provisions. When he returned to Montreal, Smith was feasted by the outback veterans, who presented him with a silver serving set worth Y,500. Only a few of the more astute characters realized that Smith had signed their professional death warrants. By giving up future land profits, the onetime lords of the forests had been rendered powerless and poor. The appropriately grateful London board showed its appreciation by immediately promoting Smith to Commissioner at a generous annual Y,2,000, and a year later to Chief Commissioner, with a healthy salary increase. The Factors held desultory discussions about resigning to establish a new independent fur-trading company and several retired on the spot. Among those who quit in disgust was Chief Trader Roderick McKenzie. "If we had insisted in participating in the sale of lands there might 104 LABRADOR SMITH be some hopes of a certain remuneration for our services, which under the present r6gime with all the expense is very doubtful," he wrote to a colleague in the Peace River country. Another senior trader, James Lockhart, noted: "It is all very well for Donald A. Smith, with his Y,2,000 secure annually, to puff the new arrangements. But 'fine promises butter no parsnil)s,' and you will all find yourselves fooled. . . . For your sake and the sakes of a few other true friends of mine still in the service, I hope things may turn out all right, but I do not expect it, and would advise you to do as others have done, i.e. send back their commissions with the note, 'Declined with thanks."' Still, under pressure from Smith, most of the traders signed the fateful Deed Poll. Northcote, by then Lord Iddesleigh, returned to British politics in 1874, becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer and later Foreign Secretary in Lord Salisbury's second ministry. He was succeeded in the 11BC Governor's office by George Joachim Goschen, later first Viscount Goschen, who had attained a Bank of England directorship at the age of twenty-seven and had more recently served as first Lord of the Admiralty in the Gladstone government. Instead of trying to offset bad times by branching out into retail stores or aggressively pursuing government contracts, the HBC under Goschen withdrew into a form of suspended animation. He tried sporadically to revitalize the fur trade; but initial progress in land sales was slow, and revenues dipped so steeply that HBC stock prices in London slipped from 0 8 to E 12. One of his few positive contributions was to strengthen the 11BC board by recruiting Sir John Rose, partner in the London merchant banking house of Morton, Rose & Company, who had served as finance minister in Macdonald's first Canadian government and had since become the country's unofficial ambassador to London's financial district. PROGRESSION AND BETRAYAL 105 The trio of patrician govern ors-Kim berley, Northcote and Goschen-who ran the Hudson's Bay Company between 1868 and 1880 raised its social profile but accomplished little else. The Company's unostentatious headquarters in a former silk warehouse of the East India Company on Lime Street had only a tiny permanent staff that was made up of the corporate secretary, an accountant, a warehouse keeper, a few shipping clerks and some fur graders. Governors presided over fur auctions two or three times a year but measured annual time spent on I]BC affairs in hours rather than days. The head office's budget, which in 1870 barely exceeded El 3,000, had dropped by Y,2,000 thirty years later. Once a month or so the Committeemen would meet in the Governor's office to debate policies and prepare for the semi-annual gathering of shareholders (still quaintly referred to as General Courts of' Proprietors), held at the London Tavern or the Ciq Terminus Hotel. Even when these assemblies were stormy, the election of directors was customarily confined to approving candidates from the Governor's house list, and most Committeemen contributed little beyond their physical presence. INTO THIS VOID SFEPPED Donald Sinith, the freshly nunted head of the HBCs North American operations. The fur department, which had been without strong leadership since the death of Sir George Simpson in 1860, had suffered during the decade of neglect, and badly needed Smith's brand of energy and dedication. Curiously, it didn't get it. Smith's heart was no longer in the fur trade. Since leaving Labrador he had participated in grander events and had expanded his personal agenda in too many new directions to be drawn back into daily concern with the messy business of buying pungent pelts and selling them on a reluctant market. He did manage 106 LABRADOR SMITH to keep the fur trade going, but he continued having trouble with its mundane bookkeeping details (as he had had while a youthful clerk), failed to maintain his inspectiort timetable to outlying districts, and allowed the HBC infrastructure to slide into dilapidation. "The Chief Commissioner cares nothing and hopes nothing from the fur trade," complained Chief Trader Lockhart. Despite his preoccupation with more weighty issues of state-politics and railways-Smith's position at the head of the I IBCs Canadian operations required him to live and work at Red River, which had been incorporated as Winnipeg in 1873. In the spring of that year Smith purchased Silver Heights, a comfortable mansion in the St James district, where he could spend time with his wife, Isabella, between trips to Montreal, Ottawa, London and St Paul. Captivated by the potential of real-estate speculation, Smith resigned his fur-trade posting in the spring of 1874 to become the Companys first Land Commissioner and moved his main office to Montreal. He was succeeded as head of the fur trade bv a cheerful nonentity named Jarnes A. Grahame, a Chief Factor then in charge of Victoria and the Western Department's sub-commissioner. His main historical legacy seems to be that his beard was even longer than Smith's. When he switched responsibilities to what was then the more junior posting, Smith made certain he preserved his valuable privilege of reporting directly to London. In a circular letter to Chief Factors and Traders announcing his decision, Smith added a telling post- script: "It may not be out of place for me here to add that I shall informally give my attention to the personal interests of my friends connected with the service who have investments with 'private cash' in my hands. This latter, as you are aware, having throughout been entirely PROGRESSION AND BETRAYAL 107 independent of my relations to the Company as their Commissioner. ..." Here was the first hint of Donald Smith's most daring gamble-and the source of his betrayal of his onetime fur-trade colleagues. lie had not only deluded them into giving up their share of the HBCs land sales profits but he also intended to buy control of the Company right out from under them-using their inoney to do it. The scheme that made this possible had originated with Sir George Simpson. As overseas Governor, he had helped the Company's thrifq, backwoods Factors invest their earnings. He eventually controlled a large block of funds, adding to his clientele such churchmen as Alexandre-Antonin '566 and Henry Budd, and the famous plainsman James McKay. As early as 1848, when Smith was still in Labrador, he had started buying shares in the Bank of Montreal and later in the Hudson's Bay Company. His reputation for shrewd money decisions attracted fellow Factors, who turned to him for investment management after Simpson's death. By the early 1870s, Smith was running thirty-seven trusts with considerable financial leverage-a fact the Bank of Montreal recognized in naming him a director. Whenever one of his investors retired or wanted to withdraw from the money pool, Smith would pay out the capital and agreed-upon 3-percent annual return, but purchase the shares for his own account. He eventually became first president and chief shareholder of the Royal Trust Company, specifically established to handle these transactions, which were quickly making him very rich. Smith used these funds-plus his generous credit lines at the Montreal-to purchase large blocks of HBC stock at depressed prices when termination of the Company's monopoly triggered a market 108 LABRADOR SMITH panic. Smith, who was all too aware of the HBC's underlying land values, could thus pick up stock at E9. (Within his lifetime those shares would become worth more than Y 13 0 each- -an increase of 1, 3 00 percent. *) These strategically timed purchases and his subsequent dealings in illic stock confirmed Smith as Canada's father of insider tradiDg. Granted, there were no laws against using privileged information to play the stock market in those days, but Smith abused the system mercilessly-and deliberately didn't share his knowledge with the ftir traders whose financial destinies had been entrusted to him.t "MIERE EVFRY AIAN'S A LIAR-that's where the West begins!" That anonymous boast, quoted by Prairies historian Grant NlacEwan, caught the exuberant spirit and somewhat less glorious reality of history's greatest voluntary migration. The movement of new settlers into the West didn't really begin on a mass basis until the last half-decade of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth centuries, but the people who eventually *That capital gain does not take into account the Companys generous dividend payouts. Between 1872 and 1911 the HBCs entire capital stock was repaid to shareholders six times over in special bonuses. To maximize returns on the profits generated once the real estate started to move, the nominal par value of shares was reduced and the difference paid out in cash directly to shareholders. in the fifteen years after surrender of the IIBCs monopoly, for example, HBC shares were written down from E20 to.Cl 3, with E700,000 distributed to stockholders. tAt about this time Smith also purchased major equity interests in the Paton Manufacturing Company of Sherbrooke, Quebec, a spinning and weaving mill, and the Cold Brook Rolling Mills Company of Saintjohn, New Brunswick. PROGRESSION AND BETRAYAL 109 occupied fifty-eight million acres of the Canadian plains were driven by a common motive. What lured them was less rumours of fortune than the personal freedom they might gain. Here, as ploughs creased the startled land, came the supreme blessing of a new start. Men and women could till the good earth and make fresh lives without having to face an entrenched aristocracy, established church or preordained political order. All they had to pledge was their youth, strength and endurance-and it certainly wasn't easy, freedom or no. Settlement of the land was painfully slow. It was delayed by absence of railway transportation, an economic depression triggered by the collapse of American financier Jay Cooke's debt-burdened Northern Pacific Railway, the casual gait of government surveyors and the HBC's determination to get a better deal. Under the orig inal Deed of Surrender, the Company could retain about 45,000 acres around its major posts and had the right to claim, over fifty years, one-twentieth of any township within the Prairies' "Fertile Belt"-the desirable agri cultural tracts enclosed by the American border, the Rockies, the North Saskatchewan River, and (on the east) Lake Winnipeg and Lake of the Woods. That amounted to a valuable seven million acres, but no one seemed certain how the HBC 9 s actual acreage within each township should be chosen. The Dominion Land Act had established a survey system based on the American model, with each township divided into thirty-six square sections of 640 acres each (plus road allowance) to ensure that farms would be large enough for commercial wheat production. Originally the HBC lands were to be chosen by lot or chance, but Smith prevailed on the government to allocate the same pattern of sections in each township. Purchasers of HBC land were allowed fairly generous terms: a down payment of one-eighth the market price, 110 LABRADOR SMITH with the balance payable in seven annual Instalments at 7-percent interest. (A similar arrangement spread over five years applied to town lots.) In a typical ten-year period (1879-89), the fmc sold 514,009 acres and had to repossess all but 195,150 acres when breaking the land broke the farmers instead.* Although Smith had lobbied for the job as HBC Land Commissioner, his record in that office was no more impressive than his time as head of the fur trade-and for the same reason. His interests had grown too diverse. He was too deeply immersed in railway nianipulation and politics to devote his prime energies to being the Company's chief real-estate agent. Typically, the Hudson's Bay Company sat on its land, allowing prospective buyers to make bids but doing very little to promote sales. No effort was made to lure railway builders towards its territory, and London even turned down the opportunity of acting as paymaster, on Ottawa's behalf, for the newly created North West Mounted Police. During Smith's temire, little farmland was sold. He did open -.i land office in Winnipeg, though he himself stayed mostly in Montreal, and successfully auctioned off town lots in Winnipeg and Portage la Prairie. The urban plots, measuring fifty feet by a *16 the 11BC went Sections 8 and 26 in everv fifth township, and in all other townships all of Section 8 plus & southern half and northwest quarter of Se(tion 26. Of the remaining sections, two (29 and 11) were set aside as educational endowments, and all eN en-numbered secrions were reserved for homesteads, available to heads of families for a nominal ten dollars plus the requirement of carrying out specific improvements. The odd-numbered sec6 . ons were reserved for later sale at one dollar an acre, witha limit ofone to a customer. Mien the CPR clainied its land grants, the odd-numbered sections four deep on either side of the tracks became railway property PROGRESSION AND BETRAYAL 111 hundred, were sold at the equivalent rate of $7,000 an acre.:~ An enduring mystery of this interregnurn in his career is why, as the l1BCs senior representative in North America, Smith didn't even attempt to convince his British principals that they should take advantage of the I 113c's primacy in the North-West. Although he was right at the centre of the action, in charge of the I 113Cs most future-oriented dcpartnient, he (lid little to expand the Company's revenue base and nothing to involve the f i13C in railway construction. Smith put up a small hotel at Portage la Prairie, built a few grist mills, and began operating a ferry service across the Assimboine at Fort E'llice--and that was the full extent of the HBC's diversification during his stewardship. Asleep at the edge of the rapidly awakening new territories, the 1113c land department under Smith's direction gave up its head start by default and lapsed into a period of ill-tempered hibernation. It was typical of the [IB(:,s mentality that while great opportunitics were being lost, the Company was concerning itself mainly with such fusty detail as setting rates on the Fort Ellice ferry. Crossing tariffs were minutely differentiated at twenty cents for a cart with one horse or ox and thirty cents for the same vehicle drawn by two animals. Foot passengers were charged a straight eight cents. As the Canadian historian Michael Bliss astutely noted in his epic history of Canadian business, Noi-theiW E17tC'rP7-i.W, "If ever an organization had a head start on *The HUpresented fift ' y acres to tile new Government ofN1311- itoba as sites for office buildings. The first sale froiri the HBC's 500-acre Fort Gai ry Resen-e was to the Canadian Pacific I lotel Company for S8.,8 per lot; the first land sale, 640 acres riear Fmer~on, Manitoba, was to William AlcKechnie for six dollars an acre, or $3,840 112 LABRADOR SMITH the commerce of an area it was surely the Hudson's Bay Company in the lands that became western Canada. If the Company of Adventurers of the 1860s and 1870s had been as shrewd and supple as its founders had been two centuries earlier, it would have diversified and adjusted its organization to exploit the new order being brought about by Canadian expansion. It would have dominated, if not monopolized, trade and development in the new West. It would have been a leader in transportationone of the Company's historic strengths." Bliss is right. Although the CPR wa~ built by a syndicate in which Smith was a dominant influence, there is no record in the HBc archives of any suggestion by him that the Company become involved in railways. The inevitable and hardly surprising conclusion is that, once again, Smith applied his self-serving code to the situation and chose the CPR instead of the 11BC as his favoured instrument. 'I he railway, at least in those years, must have seemed to him an attractive personal invest- rrient with the possibility of unlimited perks for early shareholders; the 11BC, on the other hand, was only ]its employer, and it would be another decade before Smith would hold enough sto(k to control its policies. For more than forty years he lived with a deepening conflict of interest between the two organizations-at first in terms of which group would build the railway and later in terms of whose land he would try harder to sell. This meant appraising the conflicting geographies of the two conipanics: the HBCs infrastructure glued to the rivers that had once been highways for the fur trade while the new population centres followed the ribbons of steel. When he eventually became the dominant shareholder of both, Smith was free to balance the land-sales policies of the CPR and 11BC, which at least in their time frarnes were conipletuentarv rather than cornpetitive. Interested in building up traffic along its new tracks, the Canadian PROGRESSION AND BETRAYAL 113 Pacific was anxious to sell Its land sooner than the Hudson's Bay Company, which regarded real estate as part of the price for surrendering its monopoly and was determined to obtain top dollar, no matter how long it had to wait. Certainly it was no accident that by 1914, tile year of Smith's death, onlv one of the fifteen prairie towiis with HR. department* stores (Fort Qu'Appelle) ,A as not served by CPR trains. It took five years for Smith to lose his patience with the land business. When he finally decided to resign In 1879, his departure was applauded by the London board, fed up wiih his inability to keep the books straight. "Looking to the small amount of work connected with tht accounts of the Land Department it was hoped that the details would have been promptly and regularly rendered," m3c Secretarv William Armit had scolded, "but as the Committee are again disappointed in this re~,pect, they direct me to state that a minute was passed directing your special attention to the matter and calling upon \ou to render the accounts in questioii regulai ly." Smith had grown exasperated by tile slmA pace and bureaucratic nature of the Land Department. Real-estate sales seemed to be in remission until the advent of the railroads, and title transfers of the few acres that were sold could be handled by clerks. Smith was by now itiore of a railroader than a Bay man and for the next four years occupied no official post with the Company. It was a sign of the times that lie was succeeded as Land Commissioner by a rallwayman, Charles John Brydges, who had been general manager of the Grand Trunk and general superintendent of government railways under Alexander Mackenzie's administration. A confidant of leading Cana&ui politicians, a good friend of Sir John lZose, who was about to be appointed the I IBCA Deputy Governor, Brydges carried himself 114 LABRADOR SMITH 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 competitive; new hotel and milling facilities enhanced the value of 11BC lands; a subsidiary bridge company for the Red and Assimboine 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 passengers 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 pass 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 Associate 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 municipal 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 Titania 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 ~titutiona 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 Assiniboine, 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 space 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 assume 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 Canals, 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 Institute, 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 Deptity 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 assumed 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 harassment, 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 tit 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 ASSUNIING 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 hit 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 surpassed 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 banality 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, Mitchells, Atkinsons, Spinks, McBeans, Hastingses, Maulsons, Richardsons, Parrishes-and the new grain families were busy spawning 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. In contrast to most of his contemporaries, who sought wealth as an avenue to political influence, Smith recognized that in the primitive environment of his time it was injinitely easier to parlay political connections into lucrative private ventures, often supported by the public purse. "For forty years his personality stands out in every political crisis in the Dominion," noted WTR. Preston, one of Smith's many political foes. "He has had far more to do with the defeat and victory of political parties since Confederation than all other influences combined.... On many imporiant occasions Parliament, without being aware of the fact, simply registered his decrees." Smith's view ot'public life paralleled his approach to business. He believed political parties were no different 133 134 LABRADOR SMITH from commercial corporations-handy conveyances to be boarded and abandoned at will, according to which one best served his personal purposes at any given moment. Smith was aware of no conflicts of interest in his adroit manoeuvrings between the private and public sectors because his interests never conflicted, they were, one and all, designed to advance his fame and his fortune. "His philosophical disposition to accept the inevitable never deserted him," noted Preston. "His standard of political honour was not high, but it served." Smith vacillated in his support between the Conservative and Liberal parties, equally disloyal to both and trusted by neither. He once complained that he would not consign ownership of his grandmother's toothbrush to the ordinary politician-even if his own record proved the understatement of that taunt. The buccaneering that characterizes developing economies found its most virulent expression in Canadian railway promotion. By 191 i, when major construction ran out of steam, Canada had 40,000 miles of rails, built with government cash, subventions or bond guarantees worth more than $1.3 bill1ion-plus the giveaway of 65,000 square miles including some of the finest wheat-growing land on earth. Yet despite these extravagant provisions, nearly every mile of every track was privately owned. Financing a new railway usually ineant its promoters would set up secretly controlled construction companies, then negotiate inflated contracts with themselves, collecting hefty profits at both ends of each deal. At the same time, they would award themselves bloated debenture offerings in return for artificial corporate services, reducing their balance sheets to rivers of red ink. They would then turn to Ottawa and demand subsidies to cover fiscal overruns, either bribing ininisters to ensure bailouts or threatening to embarrass the government by halting construction-or both. STEAL OF EMPIRE 135 And yet the railways did get built, and they provided the essential infrastructure for the transcontinental economy, yanking an embryonic Dominion into the new century. The railways' promoters and operators became folk heroes, Canada's version of the great American robber barons-reviled and envied, riding about in their ornate private cars, gesturing with fat cigars, collecting old masters and young mistresses. Apart from the obvious chicanery in the link between politicians in power and these railway manipulators, the industry corrupted the electoral process itself. Railways and politics in nineteenthcentury Canada became interchangeable black arts, only marginally more ethical than piracy on the high seas. DONALD SMITITS DEBUT in Canadian politics followed ]its successful arbitration of the Red River Rebellion in 1870. He contested and won the Winnipeg and St John seat in Manitoba's first provincial election and was simultaneously appointed to the executive council of the Northwest Territories. Unhappy with its municipal status as a "police village," Winnipeg in 1872 requested the right to incorporate itself as a city, but the new provincial legislature adjourned without dealing with the issue. Feelings ran so high that when enactment of the ineasure was delayed by Dr Curtis James Bird, a local physician who had been elected the legislature's Speaker, he was lured out of his home on a phony nocturnal house call and waylaid by constituents who dragged him from his sleigh and poured a bucket of tar over him. Popular outrage had been roused by a belief that Bird was helping Smith oppose incorporation so that the HBC could avoid paying city taxes. Insinuations of corporate favouritism were fanned by the factthat the province's first lieutenant-governor, A.G. Archibald, lived on Company property and his successor, Alexander Morris, toured his domain STEAL OF EMPIRE 137 aboard IIBC steamers. Before Manitoba's first bank was incorporated in 1873, the Company acted as the provincial treasury and repository for funds collected by customs officers. This official status, added to the retroactive bitterness over the 1113C's long monopoly, had jelled into ,in enduring resentment of the Companyand all Dr John C hristian Schultz, the charismatic leader of Manitoba's pro-Canadian moVement, sunirned up popular sentiment when he labelled the Hudson's Bay Company "a curse to the country." f'he act of incorporation was finally passed in the closing days of 187 1. Winnipeg's original street surveys followed the M6tis river lots and boundaries of the HB(A Land Reserve, its five -hundred - ac re holding around Fort Garry.* The settlement's muddy alleys ("a mixture of putty and bird-lime") had been graded and planked, but there was nothing taine about Winnipeg's roughneck inhabitants, who turned the settlement into Canadas closest approximation to the Nmerican Wild West. The gin mills and mug-houses were there, as were the prostitutes brazenly auctioning off their sexual wares. "Winnipeg and Barrie are the two most evil places in Canada," went a typical report of the time. Smith sponsored few initiatives in the Manitoba Legislat-ure mainly because he was hardly ever there. Quickly growing dissatisfied with the constraints of provincial and municipal venues, be won the Selkirk federal seat in 1871 and held it in the next three campaigns.t He showed no *Winnipeg'sorigina I coat of arms featured a buffalo, a ~tearro locomotive and three sheaves of wheat. This A as slightly fanciful, since the buffalo had long vanished from the city's environs, the first train would not arrive until 1878. and there would be no substantial grain exports for another five years. tThe constituency Donald A. Smith represented was known as Lisgar in his time. In 1891 the name was changed to Selkirk. Sornesources listSmith as Member for Lisgar, others forSelk-irk. 138 LABRADOR SMITH fax ouritism, being elected twice as a Conservative and twice as a Liberal. The contests were hard fought, with boozing and brawling part of each run-up to election day and axe handles across the head frequently used to persuade dithering voters. Smith's margins of victory, ranging from a high of 196 ballots in 1872 to only 9 in 1878, reflected the bitterness of these contests. The first Manitoba representative to arrive in Ottawa, Smith didn't take his parliamentary career too seriously and spent little time in legislative pursuits; debating the fine points of new laws was not a profit-producing enterprise. But from the moment he walked into the House of Commons, Smith knew that within the shifting alli~inces of that resplendent chamber there was significant personal authority to be gained, and he intended to grab it. 'I he great issue of 1871 was British Colurribia's entry into Confederation. The twelve thousand white residents of the former IJBC territory and British colony had decided to enter Confederation as Canada's sixth province on condition they be linked to the rest of the country by a railway within ten years. The only regular passage across the Rockies north of the forty-ninth parallel was by IIBC-owned pack mules. The aninials, fitted with aphareos (Mexican-style pack saddles), gathered at the Punch Bowl, near what 'is now jasper, to transfer loads and passengers.* The entrepreneur who first undertook to build a railway across the Canadian West A as Sir Hugh Allan, yet another Scottish inunigrant, who had expanded his Montreal shipping line into the North Atlantic's largest merchant and passenger fleet. Allan had most *I I BC packtrains, numbering three hundred or inore 211inials, ~kere led 1w ~i guide folloved by a bagpipcr and an IIBC Chief Factor, who usually carried a Bible anda bottle of gin in his sad- dlebags, consulting boi halong the %v~iy. STEAL OF EMPIRE 139 leading C onservative politicians, including Sir John A. ,N,Iacdonal(l, Sir John Rose and Sir George-Etienne Cartier, in his pocket and regularly obtained lucrative subsidies and mail contracts for his maritime operations. Named to the Bank of Montreal board, Allan also expanded his coal and steel interests, and built himself Ravenscrag, a magnificent house on a fourteenacre estate on Mount Royal that had originally been owned by the greatest of the Nor'Westers, Simon McTavis~. Modelled on a fifteenth-century Tuscan villa, the house had thirty-four roorns including an imposing ballroom complete with a minstrels' gallery to accommodate a large orchestra. From the estate's seventy-five-foot tower Allan could scan the horizon for glimpses of his steamers returning from their weekly run to Glasgow or setting off to supply the sloping riverbank settlements along the St Lawrence. (These luxurious surroundings contrasted harshly with conditions at Allan's east-end Montreal cotton inill, which employed ten-year-old street waifs who didn't earn enough to buy shoes in winter.) When the Macdonald government decided to honour its railway commlitrient to British Columbia, Sir Hugh Allan was the logical choice to head the construction syndicate. His laxN yer, John J.C. Abbott (later Canada's fourth prime minister), incorporated the Canada Pacific Railway Company to take advantage of Ottawa's offer to grant the builder $30 million in cash and fifty million acres of land, plus an undertaking to extinguish Indian title along the wav. Donald Smith was originally recruited as a member of Allan's syndicate to ensure the Hudson's Bay Company's co-operation in gaining use of its existing infrastructure through western Canada, but his name was not included in the final offering memo- randum. To guarantee that he would be granted the Pacific railway charter under Ottawa's generous terms, 140 LABRADOR SMITH Allan pledged secret subscriptions of $100,000 to Macdonald's 1872 campaign fund and even arranged for his Merchants' Bank to cancel $80,000 of Macdonald's personal debts. The great Pacific Scandal that followed, one of the most thoroughly documented instances of bribery in the country's political history, involved more than $500,000. Its least subtle manifestation was the telegram Macdonald sent tojobn Abbott, the Allan lawyer, at the climax of the 1872 campaign: "I MUST HAVE ANOTHER TEN THOUSAND. WILL BE THE LAST TIM[,'. OF CALLING. DO NOT FAIL ME. ANSWER TODAY-J.A. MACDONALD." Abbott consulted with Allan and hastily replied: "DRAIV ON ME FOR TEN THOIJSA-ND DOLLARS." When the Montreal Herald published these and other incrinunat- ing documents, a royal commission was established to investigate the bribery allegations. It found the Tories g-uilty as charged. Macdonald had won the 1872 election with a dismal inargin of only two seats, and his governiTieDt seemed dooined--unlcss he could somehow remin Parliament's confidencc. Macdonald quickly realized the fate of his administration hung on one vote, that of Donald Smith. "Upon you and the influence you can bring to bear," he wrote to the 11BC executive, "may depend the fate of this administration." Smith was in Fort Carlton, half~va ' v from Fort Garry to Edmonton, on an inspection trip at the time, but immediately rushed back to Ottawa. He set a record of only five days returning to Fort Garry, six hundred miles to the east. Angus McKay, then a fifteen-year-old FIBC apprentice, witnessed that mad dash across the Prairies. "We first noticed a cloud of dust on the big salt plain near Hurnbolt [sic]," he wrote in his journal. "Then we saw a buckboard, a Red River cart an(] a bunch of loose horses, driven by two men on horseback. When they met our STEAL OF EMPIRE 141 freight train [of Red River carts], they stopped for a few minutes to ask questions while the men changed a tired horse for a fresh one, driving on again and leaving the tired one on the prairie. [Smith] was strapped crossways on his breast with wide strappings and onto the seat of the buckboard to prevent his falling out when asleep. It was the fastest Journey ever made between Carlton and Winnipeg with horses." Smith was in his seat when the Commons met on October 2 3, 187 3. He hoped that Macdonald might take this occasion to grant Louis Riel the amnesty that had originally been promised and to pay back the $3,000 Smith had spent bribing the M6tis leader and his followers during the 1870 Rebellion. The debt was long overdue, and Smith rightly maintained that he had been carrying out Ottawa's instructions, but had to pay the money out of his own pocket because there were no banking facilities in Red River at the time. The Prime Minister never disowned the debt, but he didn't honour it either. He was all too aware of how precarious the Conservatives' political situation was and that if word of any amnesty or payments to Riel leaked out, he would lose his remaining ~upport in Orange Ontario. The Prime Ministers cronies buzzed around Smith, trying to ensure hl~ support, and eventually arranged a private meeting between the two men. Macdonald had been drinking for most of three days and took exaggerated offence when Smith calmly requested repayment of his loan and then a,lvised the Prime Minister to confess his political sins and ask the country for forgiveness. Instead of trying to appease hii western MP, Macdonald (fared him to make the Riel bribe public, boasting with the false courage of the bottle that he could win Ontario in another election, no matter ~A hat Smith said about him. That barely coherent bombast was followed by a stream of woozy obscenities. as the Prime Minister 142 LABRADOR SMITH worked himself up imo red-faced ferinent and finally passed out. The performance didn't impress the puritanical Smith. He let it be known he would probably go against the administration but agreed to postpone his final deci sion until tile night of the vote. Smith met with a sobered-up Prime Minister two (lays later, on Novem ber 4, and vet again asked for his Riel money back. Macdonald wearily a ' greed, had Smith write out an invoice, and promised he would be paid $3,367.50 the following morning. (Smith had characteristically added an interest charge.) The two men parted warily, as if thev had not yet taken the full measure of one another. The Commons session that evening was jammed with so many political ward heelers and lobbyists that they were crowded into the space oil either side of the Speaker's dais. The busiest spot on Parliament Hill was the bar in the Commons basement, as MPs used any excuse to sneak away and toast their fortunes or drown their sorrows.` At five minutes after one on that moon-washed auturrm night, when tile question oil the government's amendment to the non-confidence motion was put, -rhere has never been anything unusual (then or now) in having drunken M Ps on the floor of the Commons, but tactics in those (lays were slightly more crude. Whenever the sozzled inernbers got excited, they would throw parliainentary papers (or, on one occasion, firecrackers) into the air, nninic roosters, dogs or bagpipes, perforin jigsup and down the aisles -orjustgo to sleep. An inebriatedJarnes DoniN ille, president of the Maritirne Bank and MP for Kings, New Brunswick, is oil record in I lansard as havin,, addressed the Commons with the flN of his pants open, and Colonel C.J. Carripbell, the MP for Victoria County, Cape Breton, once prostrated himself at the fcet of the Speaker, hellowing a dFLItiken chalL.-nge for ailyorie iii governinent, oil Parhanient I lill or froni th~ whole universe to coineand fight hun. STEAL OF EMPIRE 143 Smith finally rose to speak. The House of Commons hushed as its members tried to size up the enigmatic "member for the Hudson's Bay Company," the penthouse ofhis eyebrows masking any signal of his intentions. Barely four years removed from the Labrador wilderness, Smith was about to determine whether Canada's founding ministry would survive. He began hesitantly-, as if suddenly aware of how far he had come and how much depended on his decision. He condenined the Liberal Opposition for establishing a case against the government on the basis of purloined letters and telegrams, defending the sanctity of private correspondence. He meandered on about Manitoba's need to have its own railway, then seerned to harden in his discourse by declaring that the Prime Minister had certainly not taken Sir Hugh Allan's money with any corrupt motive. That satisfied the Tory Whip, who led a troop of relieved Government benchers to the bar, where thev lifted tumblers charged with champagne "To the health of Donald A." It wasn't long before they were chanting "Rule, Britannia!" and "God Save the Oueen"-the echoes of their ribaldry drifting up to the Commons floor. There the mood had changed. Donald Srnith had turned sour. "I would be most willing to vote confidence in the Government," he said, baiting the trap, "if I could do so conscientiously." Then, with that special brand of righteousness reserved for middle-aged Scots with long beards, he pronounced his verdict: "For the honour of the country, no government should exist that has a shadow of suspicion resting upon it; and for that reason, I cannot give it my support." A page hastily whipped down to the bar to inform the revellers: "Donald A. has gone over to the Grits." Members rushed back to vent their fury at the treachery of their colleague from Red River. 144 LABRADOR SMITH The Commons was adjourned without a recorded vote, but the government knew it was beaten and resigned the following afternoon. As Sir John A. Macdonald walked out of the chamber that momentous night, he turned to one of his cronies and remarked with bitter bite: "I could lick that man Smith quicker than hell could frizzle a feather." In the parliamentary basement, the Liberals now had their own bellies to the bar, singing "Sir John is dead and gone forever," to the tune of "My Darling Clementine." Behind Smith's switch in allegiances was a web of motives that became clear only in retrospect. Charles Tupper, in an 1877 speech at Orangeville, Ontario, described the HBC executive's 1873 tactics: "Mr. Smith was a representative of the Hudson's Bay Company and he had been pressing a claim on his Right Hon. friend [Macdonald] for public money; Sir John had been holding back, and Mr. Smith came to the conclusion that it would be just as well to jump the fence if there was to be a change of Government. But Mr. Smith was a canny *Ironically, Macdonald's last act before leaving office was to implement one of Smith's recommendations in his report on the Red River Rebellion: creation of a North West Mounted Police to rid the plains of American whisky pedlars and proclaim Canadian sovereignty~ (in the summer of 1873, twenty-two Assimboines were massacred by the rotgut traders in the Cypress Hills of what is now southeastern Alberta.) Their first commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel George French, head of the Canadian Militia Gunnery School at Kingston, treated his troops more as a cavalry regiment than a police force. That impression was heightened by their first uniforms: red jackets modelled on the BritishArmy's red coats, cut to resemble those ofHussars, black breeches with red stripes as worn by the British cavalry, lances like those carried into battle by the doomed Light Brigade in the Crimean War, and pillbox hats held on with chinstraps-later replaced by Texas Ranger stetsons. STEAL OF EMPIRE 145 inan; he held back and sat on the fence and watched the course, certainly not in the interests of his country, because he did not want to jump too soon and find that lie had jumped into a ditch. But, when he came to the conclusion that the Government was going out, he made the bolt, and he (Dr. Tupper) had no doubt but that he had had a great deal of reason since for congratulating himself on having jumped as he did." But beyond such strategic considerations was Smith's ambition to build the Pacific railway himself In their wonderful Lords of the Line, popular historians David Cruise and Alison Griffiths unlock the mystery. "The key to Smith's actions most likely lay in the awarding of the Pacific railway com ract, in which he had a clear personal interest. Certainl~ no one knew better than he the potential wealth of the northwest, and he wasn't anxious that the lush Red River territory be entrusted to the whims and self-interest of Hugh Allan That imputing of motives rings true, but it doesn't do full justice to Smith's baser side. There was yet another reason for his betrayal of Macdonald. By aligning his syndicate with Jay C ooke's Northern Pacific, Allan had virtually guaranteed that his Canada Pacific Railway Company would have to utilize an extension of the American promoter's railway from the international boundary to Winnipeg. Cooke had for years wanted to expand the Northern Pacific into Canada, and this would have been his ideal opportunity. But a competing syndicate, led by Smith and including his cousin George Stephen, had already applied for a railway charter to serve the link between the border town of Pembina and Winnipeg-just sixty miles away. Smith was also protecting his private investment in the Pembina venture. In the 1874 election that followed, Smith ran as a Liberal supporting Alexander Mackenzie, the Sarnia 146 LABRADOR SMITH stonemason who became Canada's second Prime Minister.* Smith's political antics had begun to concern London. The HBC Governor pointedly wrote to James Grahame, the Company's Canadian Chief Commissioner: "We are now simply a trading corporation and wish to confine ourselves to our own business, cultivating the most friendly relations with those in authority, but taking no side with one party or another. . . ." Smith paid no attention to such admonitions and won his seat with a 102-vote margin. At one meeting, local Tories, furious at his defection, pelted him with raw eggs until he was unrecognizable. "Few figures in political history apart from Benedict Arnold ... have incurred the opprobrium directed at the member from Selkirk," noted the business historian Gustavus Myers. Back in Ottawa as one of Mackenzies most influential advisers, Smith began to lobby for his Pembina charter. The Liberal Prime Minister had assumed the Public Works portfolio himself, determined to build the transcontinental railway as a government enterprise without increasing taxes or pledging incentives to greedy promoters. At about this time, Smith's interest quickened in an awkwardly named relic of American railway speculation called the First Division of the St Paul and Pacific line. That preoccupation dated from his first meeting with James J. Hill, the Canadian-born entrepreneur from St Paul, Minnesota. The two men had tented together in 1870 when Smith was returning to Ottawa from settling *Mackenzie's background contributed to his reputation as Canada's most close-mouthed Prime Minister. While he was working as a stonemason, a hunk of cut stone weighing more than a ton dropped on his toes. He uttered not a soundand during his five years in office said very little about anything important. STEAL OF EMPIRE 147 the Red River Rebellion. They had jointly acquired the Red River Transportation Company-possibly the most profitable steamship line in North Arnerica.* Now that their shipping monopoly was threatened by the advent of railways, Hill came to Ottawa early in 1876 and stayed with Smith at the Bank of Montreal's residential "Cottage" on O'Connor Street. He had arrived late in the afternoon of St Patrick's Day in the vanguard of a fierce blizzard, and the two men talked for most of two days about what could be done. Their thoughts quickly turned to the First Division of the St Paul and Pacifi~, which had gone bankrupt and was being reorganized by a trustee, John S. Kennedy, and the line's receiver, Jesse P. Farley. The main bondholders were six hundred Dutch investors, headed byJohan Carp, who were owed $2 8 million. Hill knew they had become disillusioned by long-overdue payments and were open to offers. The two Promoters agreed that Hill would obtain more details about the insolvent property, reach a realistic estimate of what salvage price the Dutch might accept, and put feelers out to the railways receiver. Smith had frequently travelled aboard the unfinished St Paul and Pacific on his way to and from Red River. Seldom out of bankruptcy, the ravaged company *With their partners Norman Kittson and Captain Alexander Griggs, Hill and Smith had turned the Red River Transportation Company's monopoly into a formidable cash cow. Although it discounted HBC transportation invoices by one-third, helping to maintain the London firms oligopoly in the area, the transportation company still turned such a huge profit that annual dividends of 80 percent were not unusual. One of Sinith's critics calculated that regular freight charges along the Red River Transportation Company's three hundred miles of slack navigation cost customers double the rates paid for taking grain across the Atlantic and that freight could be sent the length of the Mississippi for half as much. 148 LABRADOR SMITH maintained the link between St Paul and Breckenridge with an increasingly decrepit railbed. By 1873, the right of way was littered with rotting ties and twisted remains of collapsed bridges. The tracks were a crazy-quilt of fifteen different types of rail, all made of iron instead of steel so that passage of a train made the whole rusty works tremble. Several stretches could be crossed only by handcar. James J. Hill's investigation revealed that despite its grotesque physical plant, the road was still an immensely valuable property. He discovered that an investment of only $5.8 million (most of which could be borrowed from the Bank of Montreal) would be enough not only to buy out the Dutch bondholders but also to complete the tracks to St Vincent, a town on the international boundary, which was the cut-in point for the 2.6-million-acre state grant that the woefully underfinanced railway had never been able to trigger. The road also had an exclusive charter to build up to the Canadian border. Because most of the land in the grants was in counties that were now well settled, Hill estimated that the bankrupt railway's real-estate assets alone were worth at least $20 milfion. To complete the deal, Smith enlisted the cousin, George Stephen, he had first met while still a Factor in Labrador. Stephen had meanwhile become president of the Bank of Montreal and a dominant figure in Canadian finance. He was sufficiently interested to visit Amsterdam, where he obtained an option to buy the Dutch bonds at a third of their nominal value. He then arranged to have the Bank of Montreal underwrite a loan to take out both the railway's mortgage holders and the Netherlands group, while Smith, Hill and their partner Norman Kittson rolled their Red River Transportation Company shares over into railway stock. In 1878, the Smith-Hill-Stephen-Kittson partnership won clear title to the line and renamed it the St Paul, Minneapolis and STEAL OF EMPIRE 149 George Stephen Manitoba Railway. They put up only $283,000 in cash for what turned out to be a bonanza. Within a decade the railway would be worth $60 million and over the next thirty years Smith and his partners received an estimated $500 million in interest-bearing securities, not including dividends, from the once-defunct property. The full potential of the renamed St Paul line could only be realized with completion of the Canadian link to Winnipeg. Prime Minister Mackenzie had promised to build that branch line to provide citizens of the newly incorporated province of Manitoba with outside access. Construction was painfully slow, but by the spring of 150 LABRADOR SMITH 1878 the Pembina Branch was snaking the sixty miles to the American border. The first spike had been driven on September 29, 1877, in St Boniface when the Governor General, Lord Dufferin, and his wife had each driven a silver spike into the first tie. The viceregal couple had been entertained by Smith at Silver Heights, his estate outside Winnipeg. "It is impossible to describe to you," Dufferin wrote to Mackenzie about that visit, "all that Donald Smith has done for our comfort. Had he been a great Duke in the old country receiving the Queen, lie could not have made greater assertions,-In fact, I am quite vexed about it as the expense of his preparations must have been very considerable, and they quite exceed what we needed, for instance, he has built a large Reception Room, and two offices for the Colonel and myself, which are quite equal to those at Rideau, and in the minutest details has forgotten nothing. . . ." Stephen had lobbied the Prime Minister hard to allow his St Paul syndicate to lease the new line, but Smith's participation in the project was a complicating factor. The Liberal leader knew that no undertaking with the Smith name attached to it would be approved by Sir John A. Macdonald and his Tories, who remained so angry with Smith that they left the House of Commons en masse whenever he rose to speak. When Mackenzie introduced the bill to lease the line on March 18, 1878, he not only left out Smith's name but also pointedly denied that Smith had any connection with the project. The Opposition Tories quickly turned the routine bill into a major issue, with Macdonald insisting that the legislation was a fraudulent measure because it would only "put money in [Smiths] own pocket." Mackenzie used his Commons majority to ram the lease through, but it was vetoed by the Torydominated Senate. Smith informed the Prime Minister STEAL OF EMPIRE 151 that if the roadbed could not be legally leased, his syndicate would be happy merely to rent running rights. When Mackenzie approved that compromise, Macdonald could no longer hold himself back. In a stunning attack on Smith, the Tory leader commended the Senate's action, "which would put a stop to their [the government's] bargain with the honorable member for Selkirk to make him a rich man and to pay him for his servile support." Smith rose in the Commons the following afternoon (the last day of the session) to defend his honour. The I-louse was all set to prorogue for a general election, but the Selkirk member's question of privilege halted the proceedings and turned Parliament into a rowdy daycare centre. When George Brown, founding editor of the Toronto Globe and at the time a Liberal senator, described the scene that followed as "the most disgrace- ful in the annals of the Canadian House of Commons," he was indulging in understatement. Members' shouts escalated from "liars" to "treacherous liars" and many cruder epithets that Hansard reporters chose to ignore. just as the Commons was on the verge of bedlam, the sonorous knock of Black Rod, the parliamentary official whose entry signals termination of sessions, could be heard. The Speaker, trying to invite him in, as protocol demanded, could not make himself heard, so the poor man kept on knocking. "Finally ... Black Rod entered," reported WTR. Preston, then a parliamentary page. "He bowed, as usual. His lips moved, but no sound reached the frantic House. The Speaker stood up and evidently made an announcement. He was not heardthe 'Faithful Commons' continued to shout at one another with unabated fury! Finally, with what dignity he could muster, the Speaker stepped down from the dais, the Sergeant-at-Arms shouldered the mace, and preceded by Black Rod, they slowly made their way to the 152 LABRADOR SMITH lobby leading to the Senate. The Cabinet followed, and then as excited a mob as ever disgraced the House of Commons. . . ." Preston himself was caught up in the swaying, belligerent crowd and at one point found himself' pushed against Smith, just as "Tory members reached out to strike his grey top hat." As usual, Sir John A. Macdonald had the last word. The final insult recorded in Hansard during that stormy parliamentary sitting was attributed to Macdonal~. "That fellow Smith," he declared, "is the biggest liar I ever met!" The Liberal governments final official act was to grant Smith, Stephen and their partners the ten-vear running rights on the Pembina Branch line they had requested. It was soon connected with their St Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba tracks, gWing them a inonopoly on western Canadian freight. In the election that followed, which easily returned Macdonald to power, the Tories singled out Smith as a special target. "Now, Sir John, if you want that prince of old scoundrels 'Sinith' beaten, use your influence to getVVilliam Ogilvie to con- sent to run adxised John C. Schultz. "Donald Smith has I think lost just about the last vestige of char acter he ever possessed here, since the accounts of the closing scene of the House have come to hand. . . ." Smith's challenger turned out to be an even more for midable choice, Alexander Morris, who had been a min ister in Macdonald's first administration and served as Manitoba's first chief justice. When Morris pointed out his opponent's obvious conflict of interest between what was best for land sales in Manitoba and best for him as one of the proprietors of the St Paul, Smith reacted with a dose of righteousness improbable even for him. With a straight face he explained that "the primary object of the railway was for the benefit of Manitoba and not for the purpose of making money." STEAL OF EMPIRE 153 Realizing that his re-election bid was in serious trouble, Smith tried to enlist the organizational assistance of J.H. Mcl~vish, a popular HBC Factor, but London head office firmly directed Winnipeg to "keep the Company neutral ... the Fur Trade officers must take no part in the election as such." Smith attempted to protect himself by pretending he was politically independent,* pledging that he had "no favour to ask and nothing personal to desire from any Government" and would "support only such measures as are conducive to the advancement of Manitoba. . . ." just in case this high moral ground might prove too slippery, Smith transferred several gangs of Mkis who were on the Company's payroll to his riding and ordered twenty-six YIBC families to be iemporarily moved into his jurisdiction, then bribed them to vote for him. Even these out- rageous manoeuvres barely turned the trick. He won the election by a hair's-breadth margin of nine votes. On the night of his modest victory, as his cheering supporters led him through Winnipeg's main streets, the salute guns of Fort Garry boomed happily in the background. Smith was magnanimous in his triumph: he donated $7 50 to the Knox Church Building Fund. A petition charging Smith with bribery and corruption was immediately filed, but when it was heard before Mr justice Louis Bkournay in the Manitoba Court of Queen's Bench, Smith was confirmed in his seat. That verdict was tarnished by the fact that Smith held a fourthousand-dollar mortgage on Bkournay's house, granted at highly favourable terms. When the decision was overturned, a by-election was called for September 10, 1880. Smith ran as an independent, bolstering his political stance with bribes that totalled more than $30,000. But the voters refused to be bought. Smith was *Which, in a way, he was-his sole allegiance was to himself 154 LABRADOR SMITH decisively beaten. His subsequent comment to James Cole, an HBc Factorwhohad acted as his campaign manager, easily ranks as Canadian history's longest snort. "I am sorry to say," Smith complained, "that a majority of the intelligent electorate of my late Selkirk constituency have, in the exercise of their undoubted privilege and the right to choose the most fit and proper person available for the purpose of representing them in the Dominion Parliament, seen fit to reject my own humble, not hitherto unacceptable person." "The dainn voters," shot back the more succinct Cole, "took your money and votedagainst you!" "You, " intoned Smith, "have properly expressed the situation." HIS POLITICAL CAREER temporarily abandoned, Smith could concentrate on his long-standing ambition to be a fiscal animator-and personal beneficiary-of building a railway across Canada. His involvement with that project was to be the central public accomplishment of his life, forever perpetuated in the history books by the photograph ofhIs driving In the last spike. Because it was the CPR that finally destroyed the HBC's dominance in west- ern Canada, its construction, at least as briefly stinunarized in the pages that follow, is part of the Company's history. Smith had resigned his post as the HBCs Land Commissioner in 1879, but he continued buying up stock. By 1883 he had become the HBCs dominant shareholder and a year later was appointed, along with Sandford Fleming, to head a Canadian subcommittee that controlled the Company's overseas operation-all this before the CPR had been completed. The building of that railway probably ranks as Canada's greatest achievement. "A new current was in motion within the mainstream of human history," wrote STEAL OF EMPIRE 155 Ralph Allen in his evocative Ordeal by Fire. "The railways opened up a new caravan trail for the restless, the driven, and the questing and led them to the heartland of Canada." By 1880, all the elements of Smith's career seemed to combine in pushing him to join his cousin George Stephen in becoming a decisive figure in the railway's realization. A fringe benefit of the Minnesota railway venture had been to provide Stephen with an opportunity to view the West at first hand. He had travelled over the St Paul's rickety tracks in the autumn of 1877 and was then driven north to Silver Heights, where Smith and Stephen discussed the railway pro) ect's future. "The immensity of the treeless Prairie landscape affected him deeply, indeed disoriented him, as it does most people when they see it for the first time," WE Morton wrote of Stephen's reaction. "He could at last imagine what Smith had all along been telling him-that people would come to this emptiness, that they would survive and prosper, and that the railway would be the instrument of this population-that it would bring the population to its lands, and those people would provide it with its future earnings." Because the revelation of his association with the project would have killed its chances, Smith was deliberately kept in the background, but it was his determination that proved essential in financing the epic venture. He had roused Stephen's interest in both railroading and the great North-West, and though the cousins both tended to hoard their emotions too much to develop an easy friendship, theirs was an enduring partnership. Stephen was unassuming in private and invisible in public. He loathed the circuitous mouthings of politicians but knew how to rent them-and occasionally buy them. He believed devoutly that man's salvation lay in hard work and besting one's enemies. His only recreation was fishing, and be owned the rights on two rivers to 156 LABRADOR SMITH prove it, the Matap6dia (later sold to the Ristigouche Club in New Brunswick) and the Mitis, where he regularly cast a most beautiful fly. He was a tall man, thin, with a hangdog look and brooding eyes that, complemented by his droopy nioustache, endowed his face with a cast of melancholy wisdom. His position as the Bank of Montreal's president togethcr with his experience in reviving the St Paul line made him a natural choice when the newly re-elected SirJohn A. Macdonald began his search for a syndicate to build the long-delayed transcontinental railway. "This m as the climate in which the CPR Syndicate was eventually formed," noted Pierre Berton in his lively history. "For all the controversy served to illuminate one fact: there was now available a remarkable group of successful men who had experience in both railway building and high finance. In the summer of 1880, the Macdonald government was looking for just such a group. It wasJohn Henry Pope, the homely and straightforward minister of agriculture, who had first drawn his Prime Minister's attention to the St Paul associates. "'Catch thern,' he said, 'before they invest their profits."' And "catch them" Macdonald (lid, with as generous a mark-up as was ever offered any businessman not selling snake-oil. According to WT.R. Preston, it was "the most stupendous contract ever made under responsible gov- ernnient in the history of the world." To complete the transcontinental tracks from North Bay, Ontario, to Port Moody, at the head of Burrard Inlet in British Columbia, within ten years, the syndicate was granted an eventual $206 million in cash, subsidies and stock guarantees in addition to 25 million acres in land grants, with the shortfall in fertile acreage made up in other regions.* Between 1893 and 1930, the CPR sold 2 3 million acres worth $178 million. STEAL OF EMPIRE 157 According to John Gallagher, a historical researcher, when all the tax benefits and value of the land exchanges are taken into account, the CPR received gifts from the country worth $106,300,000. The CPR's authorized history, written by its publicity manager, John Murray Gibbon, was called Steel of Empire; a more appropriate title might have been Steal of Empire. The new Canadian Pacific Railway syndicate, granted its charter on October 21, 1880, included George Stephen, James J. Hill, J.S. Kennedy (the New York banker who had acted as trustee of the St Paul), Duncan McIntyre, who controlled the Canada Central Railway running between Ottawa and North Bay, Sir Stafford Northcote, twenty-second Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, and Richard Bladworth Angus, yet another Scot with a nose for money, who had been named the Bank of Montreal's general manager when he was only thirty-eight.* Building a Pacific railway was the dominant issue in Canada's fledgling Parliament for thirty years. One CPR lobbyist boasted that whenever the Speaker's bell rang for a division, there were almost always more MPs in his apartment, swilling free liquor and puffing *Unlike most of his confr~res, Angus rejected the offer of a knighthood-twice-though he was a founder of the prestigious Mount Royal Club and his neo-Romanesque home was ample enough to eventually house McGill University's Conservatory of Music. His great hobby was cultivating orchids. One of his daughters married B.T Rogers, founder of British Columbia Sugar, amalgamating what became two great Canadian fortunes. Angus, along with Stephen and Smith, dominated the Bank of Montreal for most of four decades, raising its asset base from $3 8 million to $350 million. Angus was its general manager from 1869 to 1879 and president from 19 10 to 1913; Stephen served as vice-president and president between 1873 and 1881; Smith occupied the same positions from 1882 to 1905. 158 LABRADOR SMITH complimentary cigars, than anywhere else in Ottawa. The CPR directors dispensed bountiful "bonifications," as they preferred to call them, to smooth parliamentary obstacles. Most of these bribes were in the form of CPR share options deposited in secret bank accounts.* From the beginning the railway was difficult to finance. Most of the government's largess was scheduled to kick in only after completion targets had been met, and most sophisticated international investors had been disillusioned too often to gamble again on North American railway bonds. Stephen at first could not get any stock exchange to list the CPR shares, and by December of 1881, Stephen and Smith were already forced to borrow on their own signatures $300,000 in working capital from the Bank of Montreal. That same month, the railway's prospects brightened considerably with the i ecruitment of William Cornelius Van Horne as the CPR's general manager in charge of constructing the rail line. His assignment was to complete twenty-nine hundred miles of track through a sparsely explored land mass, across the Rocky Mountains and around Lake Superior, stretches that even daring railroaders considered impassable. During the 1881 construction season, only 161 miles of road across the flat prairie had been completed, and the entrenched staff of British engineers resented the intrusion of the fat Yankee with the big cigars who cursed like a spike driver and seemed immune to sensible objections to his outrageous demands. "We did not like him when he first came to Winnipeg as general boss of everything and everybody," *At the CPR's incorporation, the company directors sold to themselves at least 200,000 common shares at twenty-five cents each. Stephen's holding of 3 1,000 share,, later produced .1 net dividend income (in equivalent 1990 dollars) of $3.9 million a year, and Smith's was at least as large. STEAL OF EMPIRE 159 William Van Horne J.H.E. Secretan, a CPR surveyor, complained to his diary. "His ways were not our ways ... he told me that if he could only teach the section men to run a transit, he wouldn't have a single damn engineer about the place." Van Horne boasted that he would lay five hundred miles of track in 1882. By train and steamer or on horseback he ranged the Prairies-firing, hiring, ordering people and obstructions about. The snow had not left the ground when ten thousand men and seventeen hundred teams of horses began to push the rails westward, advancing two, three, and even four miles a day-once as much as twenty miles in three days. By the end of the 160 LABRADOR SMITH 1882 season, 417 miles of track had been completed. When construction was held up by an engineer's refusal to drive his locomotive over a swaying trestle, Van Horne climbed into the cab himself "Well, if you ain't afraid of getting killed, with all your money, I ain't afraid either," reasoned the reassured driver. "We'll have a double funeral-at my expense, of course!" Van Horne shouted back across the lurching engine as it successfully pirouetted across the deep divide. Even tougher to cross were the two hundred miles along the north shore of Lake Superior. It is a land drowning in its own juices, with muskeg, quicksand and matted spruce forests making any kind of orderly traverse impossible. One particularly bitter stretch of muskeg cost $750,000 to cross, swallowing the tracks seven times along with three locomotives. To the east, between Sudbury and Cartier, a lake had to be lowered ten feet to secure a foundation for tracks, and three miles of curve were needed to go around Jackfish Bay, although the straight lump across the water was less than half a mile. The unexpected ruggedness of the terrain rapidly drained the companys treasury. The normally placid Stephen was beside himself with worry and at one meetingwith Smith despondently predicted the railwaywould go bust, "It mav be that we must succumb," Smith calmly replied, "but tl~at must not be as long as we individually have a dollar." The Macdonald government grudgingly advanced another loan of $30 million, but within six months Van Horne sent Smith a coded cable with the blunt message: "HAVE NO MEANS PAYING WAGES, PAY CAR CAN'T BE SENT OUT. UNLESS YOU SEND IMMEDIATE RELIEF, WE MUST STOP." Stephen begged Macdonald for an additional $22.5 mil- STEAL OF EMPIRE 161 CPR tracklayers and boarding cars in nhich they ate and slept lion, and even though the Prime Minister at first told the CPR president he might as well ask "for the planetjupiter as for more money," a bill for the further extension of funds was hastily presented to the Commons. The Liberal benches exploded with outrage, their critic charging that for six months a year the new railway would become "an idle, ice-bound snow-covered route," while party leader Edward Blake predicted its mountain section "would not pay for the grease on the axles." The Tories finally rammed the extra loan through, but caucus denianded a dividend for their support. It took the form of humiliating Donald Smith by forcing him to agree, the story went, that he would run for Parliament in a future election not merely for the Conservatives, the party he had betrayed in 1873, but as a personal admirer of Sirjohn. As the CPR's troubles became more serious, Smith had emerged more and more into public view. "He was the great controlling spirit in all the principal business of the syndicate," Preston wrote of Smith, who officially became a CPR director in 1883 and remained the most influential member of the board's executive 162 LABRADOR SMITH committee for the next thirty years. He was more or less reconciled with Macdonald over a bottle of Scotch at a 1883 meeting arranged by Stephen. In his typical selfcentred way, Smith reported that the Prime Minister felt better for it: "I know-without his saying it-that he is today a much happier man." Stephen hurried off to London and by pledging Smith's and his own personal credit was able to negotiate a E77,000 loan, which would tide them over until the government's guarantees were formally approved. "Once again the partnership of company and government, the partnership of Donald Smith, John A. Macdonald, and himself, had triumphed," Donald Creighton wrote of this moment in The Old Cbieftain, the second volume of his magnificent Macdonald biography. "They were all Scotsmen, all Highlanders, all, ultimately, sons of the same river valley.. . . He remembered the river itself, winding onward, peat-black between the high banks, and brown, like old ale, over the shallows. He remembered the great rock which had given the Clan Grant its rallying-place and its battle slogan. The rock of defiance. Craigellachie.... He took a telegraph form, addressed it to Donald Smith in Montreal, and wrote a message of three words only; 'Stand fast, Craigellachie!... Less than a year after the $22.5-million bailout, the CPR was on the verge of bankruptcy again. Stephen and Smith borrowed yet another $650,000 from the Bank of Montreal. By March 1885, they were pleading for another one million dollars to provide Van Horne with construction funds for one more month, but even their Bank of Montreal credit facilities had been exhausted, and to try tapping another bank would have triggered panic. The desperate situation prompted from Smith a totally unexpected retort: a short, declaratory sentence. "It's to the government, or to the penitentiary," he told Stephen, who had lapsed into his customary silence. STEAL OF EMPIRE 163 It was, of course, to the government that the CPR turned because, as one of the railway directors correctly pointed out, "The day the CPR busts, the Conservative Party busts the day after." Whatever his personal feel- ings, Macdonald didn't dare ask his followers to approve yet another loan. Ile was on notice that at least three cabinet ministers would resign if he allowed the insatiable railway to feed at i fie public trough one more time. At a dispirited directors' nteeting, Smith and Stephen agreed to see what credit they might raise from their personal possessions. Stephen stood quietly by in the study of his $3-million house as evaluators assessed his paintings, statuary, cutlery, furniture, linen and imported piano. But the CPR president didn't have to surrender these luxuries. His raihA ay was saved by Louis Riel. WILLIAM VAN HORNE later claimed the CPR should erect a monument to the M6tis leader, and he was right. Since fleeing Canada, he had spent time in a Montreal lunatic asylum, become a naturalized American citizen, and taught in a Montana mission school. When settlers along the South Saskatchewan River became radicalized by Ottawa's insensitivity to their demands, they joined forces with local Indians and M6tis who invited Riel to champion their cause. Once back on Canadian soil, he declared, "The time has now come to rule this country or perish in the attempt." Riel's exile had transformed him from the dreamy statesman of Red River into a hectoring, hard-edged prophet, preoccupied with theological theories. Riel spent little time on political or military strategy, formulating instead new catechisms and decreeing such oddities as new names not derived from pagan gods for the days of the week. He declared Bishop Ignace Bourget of Montreal his new Pope and himself a Messiah. 164 LABRADOR SMITH Chief Poundmaker (left) and Gabriel Dumont The rebellion, which was backed by Big Bear's and Poundmaker's Cree warriors, grown aggressive with the frustrations of lost land and impending starvation, as well as the M6tis demanding aboriginal title similar to that granted their Manitoba cousins in 1870, was masterminded by Gabriel Dumont. Grandson of a voyageur, illiterate yet fluent in six languages, a crack shot, permanent chief of the buffalo hunt and head of the first local government between Manitoba and British Columbia, Dumont was a worthy predecessor of Ernesto (Che) Guevara, the Argentine revolutionary who perfected modern guerrilla tactics as Fidel Castro's lieutenant. Appeals to Ottawa having been either ignored or rejected, Riel set up a provisional government at Batoche, a fording place on the South Saskatchewan River thirty-seven miles southwest of Prince Albert, and appointed Dumont his adjutant-general. In a preliminary skirmish at nearby Duck Lake, Dumont's M6tis easily routed a North West Mounted STEAL OF EMPIRE 165 Police detachment from Fort Carlton, killing twelve constables and several volunteers. A dozen whites were inassacred at Frog Lake; Battleford was ransacked by Chief Poundmaker; local IJBC posts were looted and burned; lodges ol Assiniboines were already inarching east; and the powerful Blackfoot nation was threatening to join in. In Ottawa, Stephen and Smith were back in their customarv pose, palnis outstretched for yet another government ~andout. The CPR had run out of payroll money and notes worth S7 irlillion would be maturing by June 1885. Failure to redeem them would push the company into the bankruptcy courts. In British Columbia, a band of three hundred strikers demanding back wages was being held at bay by the NWATP, and the company's stock was in a free-fall on the New York and London exchanges. On March 26, Macdonald gave Stephen the hard news that the federal treasury was shut tight to any further CPR grants or guarantees. That also happened to be the date of the battle at Duck Lake, and as word of the inassacre was flashed to the Dominion's capital, everything changed. Having barely prevented the M6tis takeover of Manitoba in 1870, Macdonald knew he had to move fast or the M6tis leader might have the entire North-West up in arms. Yet there seemed to be no practical way of enforcing the federal power; Riel might as well have been on Mars. William Van Horne, who was in Ottawa to backstop Smith and Stephen, announced that if the government put two batteries of men in his care, he would guarantee to have them on the Qu'Appelle River, next to Riel's encampments, in twelve days. Forty-eight hours after the Prime Minister agreed to the daring scheme, CPR trains were pulling into Ottawa to load the soldiers. Singing "The Girl I Left Behind Me," the men marched to the station for one of the most remarkable train rides in 166 LABRADOR SMITH Canadian history. Macdonald had been right. There was no practical way to move the militia west; the railway's Superior link was incomplete, with four gaps totalling eighty-six miles yet to be filled in. Much of that country was nearly impassable for lone hunters; to move more than three thousand men with supplies, ammunition and heavy artillery pieces across these quagmires seemed impossible. Van Horne routed trains across temporary rails laid only hours earlier and at each end of steel loaded the troops into hastily fashioned freight sleds, feeding the soldiers steak and roast turkey to keep up their spirits. Fifteen years earlier it had taken Colonel Wolseley ninety-six days to move his volunteer army from Toronto to Red River. Van Horne's army made it in seven, and two days after that they were safely on the banks of the Qu'Appelle. By mid-April, the entire force was in place except for one Halifax battalion, and the troops moved into battle. Dumont's brilliant hit-and-run tactics at Fish Creek had won the initial encounters, but only two hundred M6tis sharpshooters remained to face the full onslaught of more than eight hundred soldiers at Batoche. Riel had refused to heed Dumont, who had advised continued guerrilla warfare. Instead, the M6tis were placed in siege formation; without any artillery, they had no chance. The four-day battle ended with Dumont fleeing to Montana while Riel surrendered to three Mounted Police scouts.* *The M6tis leader was at first to be taken to Winnipeg for trial, but when he reached the CPR main line at Moose Jaw his party was rerouted to Regina for what, it was explained, were judicial reasons. The real reason was that under Manitoba law, prisoners had the right to demand half the jury be French-speaking. The Northwest Territories, where Regina was located, had no such provision. STEAL OF EMPIRE 167 Canadian soldiers travelling west to put down the North West Rebellion, 1885 True to form, the Hudson's Bay Company reacted to the battle by trying to exploit its profit potential. Immediately after the Duck Lake massacre, the Company ostentatiously placed itself at the disposal of the Dominion authorities and assured Minister of Militia and Defence Adolphe Caron that it would provision his forces in the battle area. Trade Com- missioner Joseph Wrigley set the tone of the HBCs patriotic contribution when he sent an urgent letter to Chief Factor Archibald McDonald at Fort Qu'Appelle, the field force's main jumping-off point. "All supplies furnished by you to the Military Expedition," he ordered, "must be charged at wholesale prices ... get receipts!" By the end of hostilities, the Company submitted bills for $2 million, which included a $96,000 profit. The HBC then claimed a further $207,115.84 for damaged buildings and stolen furs but collected only $163,768.54. In gratitude to the nascent railway for transporting the troops west, Parliament voted to authorize the guarantee 168 LABRADOR SMITH of a temporary $500,000 loan. It wasn't much, but it was enough to save the line. An impatient creditor was about to push the companyinto receivership. When Van Horne and a group of CPR executives got the news, they went wild. "We tossed up chairs to the ceiling; we tramped on desks; I believe we danced on tables. I do not fancy that any of us knows what occurred, and no one who was there can ever remember anything except loud yells of joy and the sound of things breaking." Soon afterwards Parliament guaranteed most of a final $35-million issue of mortgage bonds,* and Stephen hurried over to London where Lord Revelstoke, head of Barings, the famous merchant banking firm, purchased the balance. Because Smith was forced by political circumstances to stay under cover during much of the CPR's construction, it was Stephen and Van Horne who got most of the public credit for the projects completion. But a few years later before a London audience, Sir Charles Tupper, who as Alacdonald's ministcr of finance had been in the centre of the bargaining, declared that "the Canadian Pacific Railway would have no existence to-day, notwithstanding all that the Government did to support that undertaking, had It not been for the indomitable pluck and energy and determination, both financially and in every other respect, of Sir Donald Smith." CHOSEN TO FIAUMER IN THE CPR'S LAST SPIKE, Smith had travelled west aboard his private railway, car, Matapedia, as part of a small train that included Van Horne's Saskiih-bewan, a baggage car and the engine, As *At this crucial moment, Smith reportedly presented Lady Macdonald with a necklace worth $200,000 to influence her husband to grant the new loan. Stephen later confirmed the "bonification" but stoutly maintained it was "a personal gift." STEAL OF EMPIRE 169 they puffed across the country, crews were racing to lay the final links through Kicking Horse Pass. The rails from east and west were due to abut at Eagle Pass, a forlorn spot in the Monashee Mountains that Van Horne had named Craigellachie, after the clan stronghold of Smith's and Stephen's ancestors in Moray. In the United States, comparable last-spike ceremonies had inevitably included fireworks, marching bands, extravagant speechifying, free liquor for construction crews and gold-plated spikes. At the last-spike ceremony of the first transcontinental U.S. railway at Promontory, Utah, two gold and two silver spikes had been driven into polished laurel cross-ties. Telegraph offices along the line were manned, their specially wired keys left open so that an account of the hammer blows could be heard across the country. In contrast, the Craigellachie celebration was to be a very Canadian occasion with no pomp and little ceremony. A discarded boxcar had been set aside to serve as a temporary railway station. From the Pacific side arrived a mixed work train, and a small party of labourers gathered to watch the final spike being driven home. Lord Lansdowne, then Governor General, had commissioned a silver spike for the occasion, but Van Horne was his usual practical self. "The last spike," he decreed, "will be just as good an iron one as there is between Montreal and Vancouver, and anyone who wants to see it driven will have to pay full fare." On the misty morning of November 7, 1885, Major A.B. Rogers, who had found the pass for the railway through the Selkirk Mountains, held the tie bar under the final rail in place for the ceremonial finish. Smith's first feeble blow merely turned the designated spike's head, bending it. Roadmaster Frank Brothers yanked it out, replaced it with a new one, and Smith carefully tapped it home. Alexander Ross, the hunchback 170 LABRADOR SMITH photographer from Winnipeg, took his famous shots, but except for a thin cheer there was little rejoicing. The only sound that reverberated in that historic canyon was the thump of Smiths niaul. For a long moment there was silence, as if thosc present were remembering all the an-u1sh that had led to this moment. "It seemed," recalled Sir Sandford Fleming, the CPR director who had first suggested the practicability of a transcontinental railway twenty-five years earlier, "as if the act now performed had worked a spell on all present. Each one appeared absorbed in his own reflections." Smith said nothing. Van Horne gruffly allowed that "the work has been done well in every way." But it was the conductor of the little train, now cleared to head due west, who pronounc(!d the ceremony's most dramatic line when he shouted. "All aboard for the Pacific!" It was a moment that changed Canadian history. Louis Riel, whose two rebellions had unintentionally *The engine that pulled the train west was scrapped and the Alatapedia burned on her trucks at Princeton, B.C., in 1925, but Van Horne's private (at has been preserved by the Canadian Railroad Historical Association. The maul used by Smith to pound in the last spike was last seen in the basement of his Montreal house being used to break up coal lumps for the furnace. There is considei able controversv about the fate of the last spike, but in a letter to the author datedAlarch 10, 1989, the present Lord Strathcona explained what happened: "The last spike was an ordinary nail and is still in place. The 'one-from -last' spike was bent and pulled out. Small pieces were cut out and incorporated into spike-shaped diamond brooches for Ladv Strathcona, Lady Shaughnessy, and the wife of the GovernorGeneral. In the Shaughnessy one, an emerald has been put in place of iron. We still have a slightly larger brooch with iron disc. The 'one-from-last' spike, with pieces cut out, was presented bv me to the CPR at a centenary ceremony on condition it was put on display. It is on permanent loan to the Transport Museum in Ottawa, probably still sitting on a teak block made by me." STEAL OF EMPIRE 171 Donald Smith hammers in the last spike, November 7, 1885 opened up the West, was hanged for high treason in Regina nine days later, clearing the way for prairie settlement. The closed world so jealously guarded by the Hudson's Bay Company for two centuries was now irrevocably breached. The spider's web of waterways and Craigellachie itself never prospered and was all but abandoned after the Second World War. Its tiny train station was closed, though location of the last-spike ceremony was landscaped for a 1985 centennial re-enactment. The CPR did not bother to maintain the site, and in January of 1990, the railway company withheld permission for the final run of its last transcontinental passenger train to pull in at Craigellachie. Told they couldn't stop, the crew decided to throw a wreath off the train at the appropriate spot. But when the engineer slowed down, he forgot to notify the rest of the crew, and nothing happened. "They didn't tell us they were going to let us throw it off," explained a befuddled employee. If Paris was worth a mass, Craigellachie was worth a stop--but no one at the CPR cared. 172 LABRADOR SMITH prairie trails, worn out of the wilderness by decades of Red River carts hauling goods from Fort Garry to Edmonton, from Qu'Appelle to Battleford, and on westward to Red Deer Forks and all the way to Peace River Junction, had been rendered obsolete in a day. The great HBC installations at Fort Carlton and Fort Pitt shrank to inconsequence. By throwing most of his energies into financing the CPR instead of enlisting the 11B(A London board to sponsor or at least propose a joint venture for the rail way through its former territory, Smith threw away the Company's future as a major plaver in the evolution of Canada's modern economy. "ihe Canadian Pacific Railway," Michael Blliss pointed out in his Northern Enterprise, "was created by westerners and fur traders. But not by the Hudson's Bay Company. The fur-trading concern was not able to maintain the monopoly it gained in 1821 or use its advantages to diversl~- into new lines. ... New men, some of whom began as pipsqueak fur traders challenging the mighty Company, became the key to the Canadian Pacific-in alliance with one of the HBC , s own former Factors. The former fur traders orga nized the CPR syndicate and built the road after central Canadian capitalists had bungled the job and given up. They succeeded without the help of the Hudson's Bay Company, and by their success they put it permanently in the CPR's shadow." The first scheduled transcontinental left Montreal for Port Moody on June 28, 1886. Its engine was draped with flowing silk ribbons as the Pacilic Express pulled out of Dalhousie Square Station to cheers and a fifteengun salute. It completed the 2,907-mile journey in 139 hours, just over five and a halfdays. Once it became fully operational, the CPR phigged Canada into world trade. The Silks-non-stop express trains hurtling eastward from Vancouver~provided a link for consignments of STEAL OF EMPIRE 173 Oriental textiles dispatched from Hong Kong and Siam to Montreal and on to London. The dream of a North West Passage had been achieved at last-even if it was a century late and over land instead of water. AN EXHAUSTED GEORGE STEPHEN retired to England and turned the CPIR over to Van Horne, who transformed it into an integrated transportation system, building grain elevators, hotels and steamships, as well as infusing the railway with the same gusto that had allowed him to build it in the first place. He later threw railways across Cuba and Guatemala but his first loyalty was to the CPR. "Building that railroad," he said on the day he renounced his American citizenship, "would have made a Canadian out of the German Emperor." On the way back from the last-spike ceremony, Van Horne had sprung a surprise on Smith. Without the elder man's knowledge, a spur line had been built from *One of Van Home's favourite ploys was to test future employees with his cigar trick. When a firm of cut-rate tobacconists had capitalized on his fame by calling a five-cent brand the "Van Horne," he ordered several boxes of the leafy horrors, removed their bands, and mixed them with expensive perfectos in his humidor. Prospective employees, wishing to acknowledge his reputation as a connoisseur, would inhale the tarry mixture, then ecstatically compliment him on the "delightful aroma." They could only smile icily at Van Horne's crude guffaw that followed his explanation. f le once hired a man mainly because he had butted one of the dud cigars after his first whiff and demanded: "How much does the stable boy charge you for these things?" During Van Home's final illness, his doctors limited him to three cigars a day. He meekly agreed. But by next morning he had a box of specially rolled two-foot-long perfectos brought to his bedside, and so puffed contentedly the prescribed three a day, four hours each, until he died on September 11, 1915. 174 LABRADOR SMITH Winnipeg to his country house at Silver Heights. Smith and his party of railway executives were so busy talking no one paid any attention when the engine was being driven in reverse until they were almost pulling up to his house. "Now, there's a very neat place," Smith remarked, looking increasingly puzzled. ". . . who is it that has Aberdeen cattle like that? I thought I was the only one. This is really very strange ... I must be going crazy; I've lived here many yean, and I've never noticed another place so exactly like Silver Heights." The mystery was explained when the conductor called the stop: "Silver Heights!" For once, Smith was overwhelmed. Proud of his homestead, he had i-aised a small herd of buffalo there and entertained four governors general. Smith could never do enough for his visitors. When the Marquess of Lorne, the Queen's son-in-law then Canada's Governor General, came to visit, the faqades of Silver Heights' main buildings were transformed into a copy of Inveraray Castle, the viceroy's ancestral home. Success of the railAay had converted the trio of capitalist desperados who had built and financed it into high- Establishment figures. Queen Victoria honoured Stephen with a baronetcy while Smith and Van Horne were dubbed Knight Commanders of the Order of St Michael and St George. By 1887, Smith was named the Bank of Montreal's president, having become one of its dominant shareholders, second only to Sir William C. Macdonald.* Smith ran for Parliament as a Sir John A. Macdonald supporter In the 1887 election and sat as a largely quiescent MP for the next nine years. During that period, he took some time out to savour his accomplishments and become a significant philanthropist. He donated at least $2.5 million to McGill University, of *Alacdonald was a Prince Edward Islander who had arriassed a fortune selling tobacco (luring the American Civil War. STEAL OF EMPIRE 175 which he became the chancellor, directing that some of the funds be used to provide I-or the admission of women.* Together with Stephen, he financed the building of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal and donated two ships to Dr Wilfred Grenfell's mission in Labrador. To display his wealth and influence properly, Smith built a mansion on two properties at the corner of Fort and Dorchester streets. The exterior was brownstone, brought from the Ontario Credit Valley, and the front door opened onto a magnificent three-storey, $50,000 mahogany staircase, carved by artisans who dovetailed all the parts so that not a single nail was used in its construction.The second-floor ballroom was overlooked by a marble balcony to accommodate the musicians. Smith understood little about painting, but his private collection included work~ by Raphael, Titian, Gainsborough, Revnolds, Romney, Constable and Millais. The diningroom opened into a garden for summer receptions attended by more than two thousand neck-craners. Below stairs and out of hearing was a row of eight rooms for more than a dozen maids and flunkeys, including an English butler, inevitably nained James. Fitted more by temperament than by birth for the aris-ocratic life, Smith ruled his household with huniourless mastery. Once, while he was eating breakfast with Dr Grenfell, ~e watched the lamp under the hot-water kettle falter and die. When the missionary wanted to relight it, Smith stopped him and angrily summoned the butler. "Remember, James," he said, "vou have onlv certain duties to perform. This is one. Never, under anv circumstances, let such an omission occur again." *In his honour, McGill's first eight fernale graduates, who received their Badielor of Arts degrees in 1888, called theinselves the "Donaldas." 176 LABRADOR SMITH Smith was a snob to the point of keeping a private guest tally categorizing his visitors according to their social rank. The impr,_~ssive roll call includeda futureking and queen of England, a prince and princess, eight dukes, seven marquises, twenty-one earls, six viscounts, six governors general, seven prime ministers, twentv-seven provincial premiers, four archbishops, seventeen bishops, fourteen chief justices, twenty- nine supreme court judges, thirt.y-one imiyors and fif~-eight generals. The tally even separated this last group into forty-seven generals of the Imperial Army and eleven commanders of colonial troops. The future king and queen were George V and Queen Vary, who came to -Montreal as the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York. On that occasion, Smith not only refurnished their rooms but had a special balcony built off the second floor so that the royal Couple might have a better view of the fireworks display lighting up the top ofA Iount RoN al in their honour.* Through Smith's involvement A ith the building of the CPR he had become a significant figure on the world's financial stage, and in his corporate dealings he now reverted to concentraiing his wiles ond energies on the Hudson's Bay, Company. Within three years of the lastspike ceremony he would become the Company's Deputy Governor and, less than twelve months later, its Governor. *According to Freeman Clowery, the former archivist at the Bank of Montreal, Lady Strithcona presented the Duchess with a spray of maple leaves fashioned of gold, diamonds and pearls that had been made by Henry Birks & Sons for $1,600. CHAPTER 7 CANADA IN A SWALLOW-TAIL coAT Becoming a peer of the realm was no tri ling matter. So Smith did what be always did on such uwtersbed occasions. He remarried Isabella. The secret ceremouy ... reunited the bride and groom (thin sevenq-seven) fir tbefourtb andfinal time. DURING THE TROUBLED WIN'l ER of 1895-96, there were whispers that Donald Smith would become Canada's sixth Prime Minister. Mackenzie Bowell, the fusty Ontario Oringeman who occupied the nation's top political office at the tirne, governed with a degree of incompetence that decisively distinguished him among the uneven quartet who succeeded Sir John A. Macdonald. In his humbling way of dealing with nearly every issue threatening the still fragile Dominion, Bowell demonstrated an unerring instinct for his own jug-Lilar. His inability to manage the ordinary business of government, much less such politically ch~arged issues as the Manitoba Schools Question, prompted seven ministers, half his cabinet, to walk out and demand a new leader. 1170 180 LABRADOR SMITH Smith, " ho had by then been the loyalTory member for Montreal West for most of a decade, was immediately nominated for the job. "There is one man, and one man alone," declared Sam Hughes, MP for the Ontario riding of Victoria North, "who can save the LiberalConservative Party from falling to pieces, and also who can command the respect and confidence of the whole country, and that is Sir Donald A. Smith." The cry was taken up by others, but the Hudson's Bay Company Governor, ever faithful to his creed of self-advancenicrit, saw no point in tying his future to the leadership of a party that had the smell of a dying political movement. Still, he used the occ.ision to help nianoeuvre circurnstances that would hell) him realize what was, to his way of imperialistic thinking, a more attractive alternative: appointment as Cana,la.s High Cot n rniss loner to the Court of StJames's. Since that office m as held by Macdonald's veteran lieutenant, Sit- Charles Tupper, Smith made a great show of eschewing pcrsonal ambition and with mock modesty helped lever the holder out of the post he wanted to occupy. "I have no claim Ito the prime ministership]," he humbly insisted, "while such a statesman as Sir Charles Tupper is alive and active, and prepared to assume the burden should the latter prove too great for Sir Mackenzie BoAell." Tupper rushed back to face the thankless task of leading his part~ into its disastrous electoral confrontation with Wilfrid Laurier. When Smith began to lobby him hard for the London Job, the new Prime Minister, delighted at the prospect of having an ocean between himself and his one-time nemesis, undertook to appoint the HBC Governor High Commissioner, though the neophyte diplomat was seventy-six years old. True to form, Smith followed his standard procedure whenever faced by an. important career move: he CANADA IN A SWALLOW-TAIL COAT 181 remarried Isabella. Using the excitse that he had mislaid his marriage certificate, on March 9, 1896, he and his wife went through their third wedding ceremony in the Wall Street office of John Stirling, Smith's New York lawyer. Staged to put an end to whispers about the couple's murky marital past, this masquerade Onlv drew attention to Smith's relentless sense of Presl~yterian guilt. Tupper served only ten weeks in office before being beaten by Laurier, but on April 24, 1896, he appointed Smith to London and in a touching move also named him a Privy Councillor, the title Smith had coveted when the two men had ridden together to Red River twenty-six ycars earlier. The British posting was Canada's most important (indeed, only) diplomatic appointment, but its occupant was under few legal, partisan or economic constraints. Sir Alexander Tilloch G~alt, the railway promoter who became Macdonald's finance minister and later served as Canada's first High Commissioner, used the prestige of the office to help finance exploitation of the coalfields his son had discovered on the Belly and Little Bow rivers near Lethbridge in southern Alberta. Tupper himself held the posting while still a member of ,'vlacdonald's cabinet and regularly returned home to fight election campaigns.* *The post has gont ever since mainly to superannuated politicians. During the Second World War it was occupied bV former Liberal organizer Vincent Massey, who later became Canada's first native-born Governor General. AXhile in London Massey vividly recalled receiving a letter from a worried British housewife with a unique complaint. "A Canadian soldier on leave has visited my house," ~he wrote. "As a result both my daughter and I are pregnant. Not that we hold that against your soldier, but the last time he w;,s here he took my daughter's bicycle which she needs to go to work." 182 LABRADOR SMITH Although he served as his country's ranking representative in the glittering capital of history's greatest Empire, the High Commissioner devoted most of his time and energy to more mundane pursuits, acting as Canada's main immigration recruiter, chief financial facilitator and manager of the national debt. London was the centre of world trade and finance, while Canada's money markets were still too primitive and much too modest to capital -ize the new Dominion's rapid expansion. The 1896 election spawned a new age in Canada. The once vital era of Macdonald, which had sputtered to a dreary conclusion after the death of its guiding spirit, was replaced by the tantalizingly optimistic "min- istry of all the talents" headed by Wilfrid Laurier, the forceful yet pragmatic nationalist who was to govern Canada for the next fifteen years. Suddenly, everything seemed possible. The new Prime Minister personified the young nation's hopes with his assertion that the twentieth century belonged to Canada.* Laurier didn't agree with Tupper on very much, but it didn't take the Liberal Prime Minister long to decide that Smith, who had spent most of two decades subverting the Liberal cause, was far less dangerous in London than back in Canada. The Hudsons Bay Governor, who also retained his presidencies of the Bank of Montreal and Royal Trust and his seat on the executive committee of the CPR, was quickly reappointed by the new government. Even if he didn't really say it. The closest Laurier came to coin ing that aphorism was during his Canadian Club speech in Ottawa onjanuary 18, 1904. "Canada has been modest in its his tory, although its history is heroic in many ways," he declared. "But its history, in my estimation, is onlv commencing. It is com mencing in this centur " y. The nineteenth century was the cen tury of the United States. I think we can claim that it is Canada that shall fill the twentieth century." CANADA IN A SWALLOW-TAIL COAT 183 Smith, who as a youth sixty years before had worshipped British royalty from afar, could now participate in history's grandest festival of Empire, Queen Victoria's Diamond jubilee, celebrated in the shimmering summer of 1897. The Empire on which the sun dared not set then encompassed more than a quarter of the earth's land surface occupied by 372 million people, whose representatives came to parade for their Queen. "There were Rajput princes and Dyak headhunters," rhapsodized Jan Morris in her epic Farewell the Trumpets, "there were strapping troopers from Australia. Cypriots wore fezzes, Chinese wore conical straw hats. English gentlemen rode by, with virile moustaches and steel-blue eyes, and Indian lancers jangled past in resplendent crimson jerkins. Here was Lord Roberts of Kandahar. . . . Here was ... Wolseley, liero of Red River, Ashanti and Tel-elKebir. . . . That morning the Queen had telegraphed a Jubilee message to all her subjects.... The occasion was grand. The audience was colossal. The symbolism was deliberate. The Queen's message, however, was simple. 'From niv heart I thank my beloved people', she said. 'May Go~ bless them."' And He did. The forces that held the British Empire together seemed at times to be more theological than political. True adherents felt little confusion about what to believe or how to behave: God, Queen, Union Jack and family were the icons that mattered; being patriotic, disciplined, uncomplaining, frugal, chivalrous, stiffupper-lipped and not too expert in any one thing (the cult of the all-rounder reigned supreme)-these were the coveted virtues. "The British as a whole," Jan Morris astutely observed, " would have been shocked at any notion of wickedness to their imperialism, for theirs was a truly innocent bravado. They really thought their Empire was good ... they meant no harm, except to evil 184 LABRADOR SMITH "W, 'k-. 1~ PW Lord and Lady Stratbcona in London enemies, and in principle they wished the poor benighted natives nothing but well." The passion in which the Empire was held is difficult to exaggerate. Typical was the story of Warburton Pike, an Englishman who had graduated from Rugby and Oxford but spent most of his adult life trapping, hunting and hiking in the Canadian wilderness. An archetypal imperial adventurer who took many risks exploring the outer edges of the northern tundra, be never forgot his British roots. Fifty-four when he reached home to enlist shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, he was rejected as too old. Pike was so upset he hiked to Bournemouth, walked into the sea, and plunged a knife into his heart. At this high noon of Empire, the pervasive influences of what O.D. Skelton, the great Canadian public servant, called "the dervishes ofAi-igio-Saxondom" were in full and glorious flight. The Jubilee was pure light opera, with Edward Elgar writing the score and Rudyard Kipling the libretto. British society had little conception of how to treat the slightly awkward representatives of their newest "self-governing colony." One London matron who had condescended to include CANADA IN A SWALLOW-TAIL COAT 185 colonials at her garden reception addressed a special request to the Canadians suggesting that Wilfrid Latirier an(] his party kindly appear in their "native costunies." Canadians it home found themselves caught up in the fever of the occasion, with local parades, fireworks, floral arches across main streets and patriotic speeches. "-As a warm darkness fell on the exhausted town that evening," June Callwood wrote of the elaborate jubilee celebrations held in London, Ontario, "fireworks spelling VICTORIA hung for a long, poignant moment in the black skv. People watched it sputter out and were transfixed. It seemed something important had happened to them, to the whole countrv. It felt like a flowering, a future greatness just opening to enfold them all." The Jubilee rewarded Smith with a royal accolade. Summoned to Windsor Castle, he received a barony frorn Queen Victoria. Becoming a peer of the realin was no trifling matter. So Smith did what he always did on such watershed occasions. He remarried Isabella. The secret ceremony, held according to Anglican rites at the British Embassy in Paris, reunited the bride and groom (then seventy-seven) for the fourth and final time. That requisite guilt-pacifier out of the way, Smith set about finding a title, crest, motto and coat of arms appropriate to his elevated rank. The crest was easy: a beaver gnawing at a maple tree. The motto was one exquisitely apt word: "PERSEVERANCE," the coat of arms a canoe paddled by four HBC traders, and a hammer with nail to symbolize the last spike. But the title proved more difficult. Queen Victoria usually referred to him as "Your Labrador Lordship," but Smith finally settled on a characteristically convoluted moniker-in the words of Burke's Peerage, "Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal, of Glencoe, co. Argyll, and of Mount Royal, Quebec, Canada"-in tribute to both his Canadian 186 LABRADOR SMITH domicile and the large estate he had recently purchased in western Scotland.* The freshly minted peer's love of Empire knew no bounds. In a speech during the launching ceremony of the steamer Mount Roval at Wallsend in the summer of 1898, Strathcona laid down some new definitions. "I do not," he trumpeted, "care to speak any longer of Canada and the other countries constituting the Empire, as Colonies. They are constituents of an Empire, one and indivisible. They are Fnglish quite as much as is Great Britain, and to remain so to all time is the desire of Canada and all other possessions of the Empire." Strathcona and some of his more imperialist-minded friends conceived the idea of girdling the globe with telegraph wires and a transportation service, to be known as the All-Red Route, that would link railway lines with accelerated British steamship schedules. Telegrams, mail, people and merchandise could then move aboard conveyances inviolably British. Express timetables called for a twenty-knot service across the Atlantic, with sailings from Liverpool to Halifax taking only four days. "The All-Red Line," declared Sir Sandford Fleming, one of the project's enthusiasts, "would, in some respects, resemble the spinal cord in the human body; it would prove to be the cerebro-spinal *The Strath in Strathcona is the Gaelic equivalent for glen or valley. The difference between being just plain Donald Smith and becoming Lord Strathcona was most visible in the new peer's signature. The Bank ofMontreal at that time issued its own currency, bearing the printed autograph of its president. As Donald A. Smith he had signed his name unobtrusively, the neat, tiny letters taking up only thirty-nine millimetres on the banknote; the hold new scrawl, Stratbcona, could not be contained in its alloted space, spreading over nmet~-five ruillimetres and puting into the bill's margin. CANADA IN A SWALLOW-TAIL COAT 187 axis of our political system, and give origin throughout its length to many lateral groups of nerves ... through which would freeiy pass the sensory impressions and the motor impulses of the British people in every longi- tude." Using a slightly more comprehensible metaphor, Strathcona's doctor once remarked to his patient just before a heart examination, "Now we must attend to the All-Red Route, my Lord." Strathcona tried hard to promote the project, but the fact that it would have required government subsidies of more than $100 million considerably cooled the ardour of its supporters. 'rhe Hudson's Bay Company Governor turned his attention to more practical pursuits. THE SECOND-STOREY WINDOW of the Canadian High Commission on Victoria Street glowed through London's nocturnal smog into so many long evenings that passersby nicknamed it "the Lighthouse." Here Strathcona spent eighteen years, occupied with the business of his life. While he placed the HBCA affairs at the top of his agenda, actively participating in the Company's daily management and ongoing policy formation, his energies were dispersed in many directions. He sat in his office, signing cheques, justifying accounts, writing letters (always by hand, because he considered typewritten correspondence a breach of courtesv): to the Queen's Chamberlain, asking for special seats at a royal ceremony for a visiting politician; to an old fur trader at Temiskaming, thanking him for a box of lightly salted deer tongues; to another former FIBC Chief Factor, forty-three years in the service, bitter about having to live out his days with no Company pension; to his cronies at the Bank of Montreal, requesting them to approve a loan to help James J. Hill "fight 188 LABRADOR SMITH off the Harriman forces." His cable messages flew around the world. He bargained for tea and silk shipinents frorn Yokohama ;md sent timber to the Orient; he settled Lewis crofters in northern Saskatchewan and sold Labrador sable to Chinese aristocrats; he tied down a Canadian company that would ,ive him a monopoly on salt production; he shipped flour from Vancouver to Fiji; he arranged for the Bank of Montreal to underwrite the bonds for construction of the New York "El"; and he approved plans to expand the HBC's department store in Vernon, B.C. The work never stopped, and even if being Governor of the HBC was his dominant concern, he seemed frantic to keep expanding his reach, as if he could never have enough money, pom er or prestige. Calculation of an individual's private wealth was not a suitable topic for public discussion in Victorian England, but Strathcona arguably ranked as one of the Empire's richest men. His vast holdings of HBC stock returned record dividends; the Bank of Montreal, with himself as its second-largest shareholder, was Canada's most profitable bank; and the CPR shares that he had purchased for $25 or less appreciated to $280 in his lifetime. Besides holding these highly visible directorships and major stock positions in these companies, he enjoyed similar arrangements with Royal Trust, the Canada North-West Land Company, the Canadian Salt Company, the Commercial Cable Company, the Great Northern Railway, the Minnesota Imperial and Colonial Finance and Agency Corporation, the London & Lancashire Fire Assurance Company, the Manitoba South Western Colonization Railway, the *Although he was offered a thousand dollars a share by E.H. Ilarrinian for his Northern Pacific Railway stock, Strathcona stuck with his old friend Hill, rescuing hirn froni bankruptcy and he didn't even send I lill a bill for use of his proxy. CANADA IN A SWALLOW-TAIL COAT 189 New Brunswick Railway Company and the St Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railway. fie was also an important shareholder of Barings, the London merchant bank he helped rescue after the 1890 crash. Strathcona continued to use the Bank of Montreal (which during his term as High Commissioner was hired as Canadas chief fiscal agent abroad) as his private cash dispenser and in his first nine years in London did not surrender the bank's presidency. In 1905, on his eighty-fifth birthday, Strathcona decided it might be time to give the young bucks a chance. Fle allowed himself to be named honorary president and was succeeded by Sir George Drummond, who was only seventy-six. Drummond in turn was followed live years later by Richard Angus, then a spry seventy-nine. The High Commissioner still returned regularly to Montreal (once estimating he had crossed the Atlantic at least a hundred times), but his heart belonged to London. Although he had long ago achieved life's highest social and economic peaks, Strathcona continued to labour like a man possessed, with no detail small enough to escape his fussy attention. More pathetic than admirable, his devotion to duty finally affected his health-though he always remembered the warning of a leading London physician, Sir Andrew Clark, that for him to stop work would be fatal. After one of Strathcona's bouts of illness, Sir Thomas Shaughnessy, then president of the CPR, reported in mock serious tones to an Anglo-Canadian gathering in London that "yielding to the earnest entreaties of his physician ... [Lord Strathcona] has decided to relax his energies. He has succumbed to the united pressure of his medical man, his family, and his friends, and has been induced to promise to leave his office at 7.30 each evening instead of 7.45." During a holiday in rural England, Strathcona began dictating letters to his newly hired secretary early 190 LABRADOR SMITH Sunday morning. The assistant politely but firmly declared he could not work on the Sabbath. The High Commissioner courteously agreed to indulge the young man, then spent most of the day impatiently pacing his room. Promptly at midnight he woke the startled clerk with the command: "The Sabbath is over. We must make haste with those letters!"* His daily office labours done, Strathcona spent most evenings hosting or attending dinners and receptions at the Athenaeum Club, the Imperial Institute, and the Savoy or Westminster Palace hotels. As these and other venues proved insufficiently exclusive for the grand scale of the High Commissioners hobnobbing, he eventualtv acquired seven houses and did most of his own entertaining. In Canada he had retained his magnificent dwelling on Dorchester Street in Montreal,t Silver Heights near Winnipeg, with its buffalo pound, and Norway House, his stone mansion at Pictou, Nova *Such work habits weie not new. Dr Wilfred Grenfell, the Labrador medical missionary, noted how he had been granted an appointment to see Smith at Hudson's Bay House, on Montreal's St Peter Street, one Christmas Day. "I still remember vividly the deserted streets ... the silence and entireabsence ... of any living thing," he later told a friend, "and at last the great, towering portals of the world-fainous Company's offices. I climbed the steps with no little trepidation, and the bell startled me, when its echoes rang out, as if in some long-deserted haunt of men. Finally, the great door swung open, and there stood, quite alone, the smiling old gentleman, apologizing for keeping me waiting." tThe Smith mansion was sold in 1927 to Lord Atholstan, publisher of the Montreal Star, who converted it into a home for elderIv Presbyterian ladies from good but bankrupt Montreal families. In 1Q4l, the contents were auctioned off and the fol]owing year the mansion was demolished to make way for an office building. CANADA IN A SWALLOW-TAIL COAT 191 Lord Strathcona's mansion on Dorchester Street, Alontreal Scotia. In London his first town residence (at No. 53 Cadogan Square) was replaced by the much larger fivestorey Grosvenor Square house (~o. 28). As his country residence, he at first leased Knebworth in Hertfordshire, the ancestral home of the Lyttons (of Last Da~ys ofPompeii fame) where Oliver Cromwell had met in solemn conclave with his followers to consider how England could rid itself of a tyrant king and a corrupt parliament. He later purchased Debden Hall in Essex and the Inner Hebrides islands of Oronsay and Colonsay, which included a beautifully sheltered manor house built from the ruins of a priory. But his most impressive property was the magnificent mansion he built in Black Corries of Glencoe, the rugged 64,000-acre estate he purchased in the west f lighlands of Scotland, near Ballachulish. The place had an orninous background, and Dickens said that part of Argyllshire was "perfectly terrible." 192 LABRADOR SMITH Strathcona loved taking friends on grouse shoots in the Highland wilds, but his more serious entertaining was focused on pet causes. "Lord Strathcona presides most afternoons and every evening at some meeting or another," noted Gaspard Farrer, a young London merchant banker who moved in his circle, "and speechifies with greataplomb on art, music, medicine, science, university extension, French Employment, and every other interest that is glad to enlist the dear old gentleman's presence-and purse." Strathcona's most elaborate social function was the reception he threw for the fourhundredth anniversary of Aberdeen University. Named Lord Rector of the university in 1899 and later Chancellor, he realized there was not a hall on campus large enough to seat the 4,500 graduates and dignitaries invited to attend. He had a temporary building erected at his own expense on a three-acre site that could accommodate 2,500 at dinner and 4,740 in rows of chairs for the official ceremonies. Since no Scottish caterer was equipped to handle such a mob, he imported 650 waiters and their equipment (including 25,000 plates and 12,000 glasses) from London by special train. The actual graduation ceremonies and handing out of honorary degrees proved an anticlimax because by the end of the day the badly ventilated building was so fogged with cigar smoke no one could see which of the platform notables was speaking. When Andrew Carnegie, the American robber baron, couldn't make out the notes for his convocation address, he stopped in mid-sentence and explained, "I have given the eloquent speech which I had prepared, and from which I had hoped to elicit your cheers, to the myriad-mouthed press, and you will read it there in full tomorrow morning." Carnegie never did officially get his doctorate because when he walked up to Chancellor Strathcona, who was presiding, for his "capping," the two elderly CANADA IN A SWALLOW-TAIL COAT 193 men, who had started from nothing to reach this pinnacle, looked into one another's eyes and, moved by the emotions of the moment, shyly hugged one another instead of going through the degree ritual. As he became ever richer, Strathcona turned himself into one of the Empire's more imaginative philanthropists. On top of the usual donations to hospitals and various finids for the unemployed (it then being cheaper to do good works titan pay good wages), he also provided seed money for the establishment of Major-(3,eneral Sir Robert Baden-PoNA ell's Boy Scout movement and helped finance Captain Joseph Bernier's explorations of Canada's Arctic coast in the steamerArctic. He purchased the auxiliary barquentine Discoveiy used by Captain Robert Falcon Scott in his Antarctic exploration of 1901- 4, assigned the vessel to the HBC's northern trade for five years, then donated her to the Boy Scouts.* All requests for funds were placed on a silver tray, and every Sunday Strathcona would fish out a dozen or so. Those that satisfied his strict tenets of being "properly deserving" received a donation. One exception to this ritual occurred when an arrogant tramp appeared at his office and ordered the secretary to inform the High Commissioner that he m as the son of the man who had driven young Donald to Aberdeen when he had left home to sail for Canada. Given a Y,5 note, the tramp was back the next day. When he was announced, Strathcona quietly told his secretary, "Give the gentleman another five pounds and tell him he need not return. You may add that his father did not drive me to Aberdeen. I walked." Besides granting him automatic access to the Empire's most distinguished soldiers and statesmen, Strathcona's peerage made him a member of the She was later docked at theThaines Finbanknient in London as a inernorial to Scott and inoved to Dundee in 1986. 194 LABRADOR SMITH Imperial Parliament. Until 1910 the Lords and Comnions exercised equal constitutional powers, and the upper chamber contributed Prime Ministers of the realm into the twentieth century. It was two years before Strathcona made his first speech In these august surroundings, and when he did, it was on a curious subject. On June 2 8, 1898, he introduced a bill to legalize in the United Kingdom colonial marriages with sisters of deceased wives. It was a quirky, rather risky topic for him to champion, and Queen 'Victoria, who resented such excursions into ecclesiastical law, was quick to take offence. "His Labrador Lordship," she pointedly remarked, "should be the last to meddle in these matters." Strathcona was careful to point out that his proposal would leave untouched marriages to brothers' widows and wives' nieces, but even though the Lords passed the bill, the government refused to take it up in the Commons. His slightly strained relations with the royal household improved on Queen Victoria's death in 1901 and the succession of her eldest son, Bertle, the fifiy-nineyear-old Edward V11.* The two men struck up a friendship so close that Edward treated the flBC Governor almost as a member oftbe royal household, referring to Strathcona as "Uncle Donald" and consulting him on matters of state as well as personal finance. Edward fondly remembered his 1860 tour of the Canadian provinces as Prince of Wales, particularly the great canoe pageant staged for hint by the HBCs overseas Governor, *Victoria, who died in the arms of the Kaiser at eighty-one at Osborne House, her beloved country seat on the Isle of Wight, had become a powerful force for perpetuating the status quo in her country's life and exemplified it in her own, having her hushand's shaving water taken to his room every day for four decades after his death. CANADA IN A SWALLOW-TAIL COAT 195 Sir George Simpson, at Lachine.* But what had really won the heart of the British Monarch and most of his subjects was Strathcona's magnificent gift of Empire, the regiment of rough-riders he personally donated to help the British fight thc Boer War. THE APPOINTMENT 01, .10SEP11 CHAMBERLAIN, an impatient Birmingham screw manufacturer, to the Colonial Office in 1895 had hardened the face of British imperialism. A dandy who sported a monocle, Chamberlain didn't Jusi preach white supremacy-he actually believed in it. The main flashpoint for the inevitable counter-thrusts that followed his sabre- rattling was South Africa, a pivotal outpost along the Empire's eastern trade routes. It was occupied by "black pagans" and, among others, intractable Huguenots from Holland, Germany and Belgium known as Boers (and later as Afrikaners) who had graduallywithdrawn inland to the Transvaal and Orange Free State, while in the nineteenth century the British settled in the Cape Colony, Natal and Rhodesia. A major gold strike in the highlands near Johannesburg disturbed the uneasy equi- librium, and a pre-emptive strike by the Boers into British territory on October 11, 1899, served as a declaration of war. British troop commanders, most of whom had not evolved their tactics much beyond the stolid battlesquares of Waterloo, were easily outmatched by South Africa's territory-wise opponents, who did battle in everyday clothing, elected their officers, and knew the contours of every gully in the veld. By winter, the proud British battalions, still rigidly close-advancing into battle to the wail of bagpipes, were in disarray. *For a description of this unique cereniony, see Caesars of'the Wilderac~s, hardemer, pages 3S7-58. 196 LABRADOR SMITH Canada's defence force at the time consisted of a weak militia commanded by British generals, with eight steelclad Royal Navy cruisers patrolling the coasts. Although Laurier had responded to Chamberlain's 1897 plea that the colonies come to the aid of Mother Britain in times of need by declaring "Let the watch fires be lit on the hills and Canada will be the first to respond!" the Canadian Prime Minister now felt much more ambivalent. Henri Bourassa, the Quebec activist who later founded Le De7vir, resigned from the Liberal party to protest Laurier's intention of dispatching Canadian troops to the African killing-ground. "arching his adopted country dither, Strathcona decided to act. On the last day of 1899 he offered the British War Office a mounted Canadian regiment, recruited, armed and pavrolled at his own expense. This grand one-million-dolfar gift, Strathcona's most deliberately spectacular gesture, caught the public imagination on both sides of the Atlantic. The patriotic troop of 540 mobile scouts was placed under the coinmand of Colonel Sam Steele, the most impressive of the young North West Mounted Police officers who had helped establish lam, and order during construction of the CPR and the Klondike Gold Rush. Recruiting quotas for Strathcona's Horse were oversubscribed several times in five days, some 600-odd Arizona cowboys willing to supply their own g-uns and horses having been turned down. The final roster included many a renegade British aristocrat along with former army officers glad to serve as privates (known as "gentleman-rankers"), at least one fugitive from the law of the United States, as well as cowpunchers, bushwhackers, whisky-priests and the toughest frontiersmen Steele could find. When this motley assembly was inspected at an Ottawa march-past by Governor General Lord Minto, he complained to his diary of "the useless ruffians, the halt, the lame and the blind." The regiment CANADA IN A SWALLOW-TAIL COAT 197 Colonel Sam Steele and a detachment of Nortb ffiest Mounted Police tit Beaz,ermouth, British Columbia, 188~ may not have pleased Minto's fastidious Sandhurst standards, but other Ottawans, especially the young girls, loved these wild-eyed soldiers of fortune, colourfully clad in stetsons, high yellow boots, and charcoal-hued greatcoats. As the troops journeyed by train to Halifax they were cheered at every stop before embarking for the long journey to the front. Never at a loss to capitalize even on his patriotism, on the very day his soldiers sailed for Cape Town, Strathcona began to apply pressure on Chamberlain to make an important change in his barony, which, according to accepted custom, would have descended to his eldest son. Since he and Isabella had only a daughter (Margaret Charlotte, who had married Dr Robert Howard of McGill), he wanted to have a change made so the title would remain perpetually in the family. The adjustment required proclamation of a royal decree, and Chamberlain replied, through a letter to Sir Charles 198 LABRADOR SMITH Tupper, that "there were great difficulties in the way of such an unusual grant." These problems were magically resolved by the intervention of Sir John McNeill, a Victoria Cross winner in the Maori War of 1864 and a friend of Strathcona's (they first met when the Scots officer was on Wolseley's staff at Red River), who now served as an equerry to the royal household and arranged for the required patent to be issued in the summer of 1900. It must have been a happy coincidence that shortly afterwards Strathcona purchased his Hebridean islands (Colonsay and Oronsay) from Sir John for Y,30,000. In South Africa, the Canadian irregulars quickly gained a well-deserved reputation for matching the Boers' own guerrilla tactics with commando raiding parties and daring thrusts to sever the enemy's supply routes. Steele's contingent looked hopeless on the parade square, but in the field, where mobility, courage and innovation counted, no one could match the Canadians. Originally hardened by their ability to survive on their home turf, they had been toughened by their commanding officer's brutal approach to discipline. When half a dozen of his soldiers complained they were suffering from piles, for example, Steele ordered them to gallop bareback for five miles to burst the source of their complaints. "Of all the regiments, British or Colonial," reported London's Daily Express, "... Strathcona's Horse among the Boers were the most dreaded, and, strange to say, the most respected." Strange indeed, because Steele's men were reported to have lynched some Boer prisoners, and when a British officer remonstrated, they threatened to lynch him, too. On the way back to Canada, Strathcona invited his regiment to London, where King Edward presented its battle colours, pinned each man with a medal, and rewarded Steele with the Victorian Order. Strathcona CANADA IN A SWALLOW-TAIL COAT 199 later dined the entire unit at an elaborate banquet. "The occasion of his own toast being drunk," trumpeted The Times, "produced the wildest enthusiasm, the officers and men springing to their feet, making the roof echo with their ardent cheering." At a special reception for officers in the great drawing room of the Savoy Hotel, attended by the Empire's leading dignitaries, Strathcona launched into yet mother laudatory address, but Steele would have none of it. "He arrived a bit tight and grew tighter," recalled Agar Adamson, one of Steele's subalterns, "insisting on making a speech in the middle of which Lord S. pulled him up and said that they would have speeches on other occasions. He insisted upon continuing, in the middle of which [Steele] wanted to pump ship. He left the table ... lost his way, and found himself in a kitchen, on the stove of which he relaxed nature. He then returned, and wound up being sick on the carpet." Despite such lapses, Steele was given important Canadian army commands and Lord Strathcona's Horse fought with distinction in both world wars and Korea.* Revered as the Empire's pre-eminent visionary, Strathcona became Londons favourite colonial character. Ever courteous, more British than the British, painfully anxious to please, Strathcona as he grew older caused minor protocol problems for his London hostesses. He could never quite remember the proper precedence. One regal maven complained that "it was very difficult indeed to persuade him to 'stand in the order During the 1980s, the regiment, now armoured and 500 strong, fielded Canada's last ceremonial cavalry troop consisting of a configuration of fourteen horses and eighteen men as riders and equipment personnel. It was saved from extinction by another Scottish-born philanthropist, Alan Graham, head of Calgary's Cascade Group, 200 LABRADOR SMITH of ]us going."' But the highly publicized generosity of his South African contribution had earned Strathcona wide repute and rescued the Hudson's Bay Company from social oblivion. "He is Canada in a swallow-tall coat," marvelled A.G. Gardiner, editor of the London Dally News. "You talk with him, and it is as if Canada stands before you, telling her astonishing story." CHAPTER 8 THE RECKONING Too weak to stand or even to read his own remarks, he sat before a representative gathering of the Company's shareholders like a stuffied effigy of himself- mute, barely emitting any vital signs, yet still there, the Governor and a Bay man to the end. ,rHE BOER WAR HND CRACKEDTHE MIRROR of imperial glamour. While the British could claim a military victory, it had been achieved in a sequence of senseless slaughters. The Empire finally had to mass 450,000 troops to crush 35,000 elusive Boer warriors. In the process, the invaders ravaged the countryside, burned the Boers' farms, and imprisoned their families in detention camps. There, 20,000 wornen and children died, son-ie of the youngest casualties being victims of ground glass mixed into their morning porridge. The conflict put an end to the na*fve Victorian notion of 61gentlemen's wars," and Britain's "splendid" isolation now became real. At the same time, technological change was making the grip of Empire less tight. Electricity began to take over from steam, and Marconi's transatlantic wireless transmissions shattered dreams of cable and telegraph monopolies. Few of these momentous changes disturbed Lord Strathcona's personal world. His already spectacular financial prospects changed only for the better. The CPR 203 204 LABRADOR SMITH was finally realizing its traffic potential, the Bank of Montreal was setting new profit levels, and the soinnanibulant I ludson's Bay Company became one of the London Stock Exchano~e.s most fashionable investments. Wbile trade in furs faced an uneven future, the Company's landholdings took on new significance. Since 1898, settlers had been funnelling into the Canadian West in ever-increasing numbers, and as they became successful farmers, even more were attracted. The influx triggered a land rush. Three million immigrants settled the barely inhabited Prairies before the outbreak of the Great War. Land values doubled, then doubled again. BN 1903, the 1111c was able to sell nearly 400,000 acres to willing homesteaders at five dollars an acre, though Strathcona A ould live to see the price quadruple to inore than twenty dollars. As land values soared, stock quotations shot up. The Economist, which hadn't thought about the IJBC for thirty years, noted that the Company was showing "remarkable vitality in its old age." Share prices moved from ItM in December 1889 to YI 29.5 in November 1906, while dividends reached 24 percent and rocketed up to 50 percent-their highest level since 1688-though even at 50 percent this worked out to only 3.1 percent on the par value of the stock.* Instead of sharing some of this new-won affluence with the field hands whose efforts had created and rnaintained the Hlic's land empire, at the Company's 1904 *A fringe benefit of the fortunes made from the rise in value of IJBC stock was the foanding of Dublin's renowned Abbey Theatre. Forerunner of the Little Theatre movement and the first state-subsidized stage in any English-speaking country, the Abbe ' V was able to open in its own building in 1904 thanks to .CI,3()O in 1113C stock profits donated by Annie Horniman, a London theatre manager. THE RECKONING 205 annual ineeting Strathcona delivered these worthy veterans the coup de grdce. He proposed that a pension plan be established (paying a top annual rate of $1,500 to Chief Factors witli thirty years' continuous service) but specifically excluded aiding those who were already retired. Not only were the former traders to be deprjve~ of any sustaining income but the Y~50,000 left in the Servants' Pension Fund after abrogation of the fur partnerships by surrender of the Deed Poll in 1893 was absorbed into general corporate revenues. When retired Chlef Factor Roderick MacFarlane complained, urging Strathcona "to aid ill doing the right thing by those ... [who] have suffered many hardships, and endured many privations in the performance oftheir onerous duties in the interior," his pathetic appeal was disinissed with a curt note pointinIg out that it was really quite useless to trouble the board with correspondence relating to a period with which the existing Hudson's Bay Company had only "an historical concern." That brutally dismissive phrase relegating more than two centuries of steadfast dedication by generations of loyal employees to the oblivion of "historical concern" served as the corporate epitaph to the HBC's fur traders, if not the fur trade. It seemeo an easy, if heartless, decision because the land boom kept accelerating. When Rudyard Mpling came back from a trip to Medicine Hat (where he had seen flares of natural gas blazing like torches) and reported the town had "all Hell for a basement," Strathcona quickly realized the underground potential of mineral rights and ruled that the 11BC would henceforth retain them on all the lands it sold. The High Commissioner's interest in speeding up the already hectic pace of land sales was not limited to his mandate as Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company. He was also a controlling investor of the Canada North-West Land 206 LABRADOR SMITH Company, formed in 1882 to acquire five million acres of the original CPR land grant. In case emigrants to Canada failed to enrich his purse through purchase of a homestead, there was always the shipping line. During Strathcona's London tenure the CPR, in which he remained a dominant shareholder, established steamship connections between Liverpool and Montreal. The new fleet immediately became part of J.R Morgan's North Atlantic maritime cartel, which was estimated to have extracted frorn newcomers to North America a surcharge of $44 million until U.S. courts broke the back of the trust in 1911. Canadian Pacific vessels used in the service were already subsidized by the Canadian government. Yet both Sir Richard Cartwright, the Liberal Minister of Finance (and later ofTrade and Commerce), and his Tory successor, Sir George Foster, substantiallv increased these subventions, then enacted regulations that only goods travelling to Canada on steamships sailing directly to Canadian ports would be eligible for preferential British tariffs. The rush to Canada was partl~ the result of the propaganda flooding Great Britain. The new Dominion was variously described as "the dutiful daughter of Empire," 16a hunter's paradise," "the wild and woolly west" and ,,the land of golden opportunity." "It little mattered ... if the Rocky Mountains sometimes penetrated into Saskatchewan or that no foothills ever dotted the fictional landscape," noted R.G. Moyles and Doug Owram, who have studied the promotional literature, "or whether the intrepid hero really could, simply by ,turning to the right-hand seek the rugged haunts 4thc grizzly bear ... or, by turning to the left, ride after the buffalo on his own undulating plain.' . . . It was best that nothing be too specific or accurate; that setting be an impre."ion only, an impression of a 'great wilderness' where . . . 'the red man and the buffalo roamed at will, THE RECKONING 207 and the conventionalities of civillsed life troubled them not."' Settlers' guides were distributed on British street corners; every railway station featured a poster glorifying some aspect of Canadian agriculture. Adventure novels of the period even hinted at erotic murmurs in the grain fields. ("Caleb would stand for long moments outside the fence beside the flax. Then he would turn quickly to see that no one was looking. He would creep between the wires and run his hand across the flowering, gentle tops of the growth. A stealthy caress-more intimate than any he had ever given to woman.") The reality faced by immigrants was very different, of course: after the Atlantic crossing, cramped into steerage bunks, to be unloaded, cattle-like, in Halifax or Quebec; then the climb aboard wooden railway cars equipped with cookstoves but no mattresses for the long journey west. There the newcomers were dumped onto the flat, sloughpitted prairie to scrub for a hidebound life. But at least their fate was their own, and within the cycle of the seasons they cultivated the virgin soil, bought an ox, then a horse, built a house, made a life. Out of their labours emerged not only a new land but a new nationality. Much to the surprise of almost every official involved (except Strathcona, who had been on the grol-nd and appreciated the area's rich potential), the Prairies turned out to be almost as good as advertised. Even better, when Charles Saunders, an inspired cerealist working at a federal experimental farm, perfected a strain of wheat that required two weeks less to ripen than the standard Red Fife and produced top-quality flour. Even earlier, the prairie had been producing more than 100 million bushels of wheat, and as farmers consolidated their holdings, villages, towns and eventually cities simmered up. The local HBC trading posts were quickly overshadowed by general stores, train stations, grain elevators and bank branches-opened by young clerks sent west from head 208 LABRADOR SMITH offices in Montreal andToronto with a thousand-dollar bill pinned inside their coats to provide the initial capital. "There isn't a tmhorn gambler left in Nevada," exclaimed an American journalist after touring the West. "They're all selling town lots in Canada!" Winnipeg came fully into its own. By 1911, it was Canada's third-largest city, and, at the height of the land boom, Winnipeg's hotel accommodations were so hard to come by that proprietors charged travellers willing to sleep on stairways a dollar a night. By 1904, Winnipeg's railway yards had grown into the world's largest-and busiest-with as man) as 1,800 cars shunted through per day'. While the city's North End became the centre of immigrant cultures, mansions of Winnipeg's rapidly expanding merchant class were thrown up on the south bank of the Assiniboine, forming Wellington Crescent and its environs, where many of the leading figures in Winnipeg gathered. They included, over the years, the Aikins family, the Allans, Alloways, Ashdowns, Bawlfs, Drewrys, Flatons, Galts, Heimbeckers, Heubachs, McMillans, Nantons, Oslers, Pitblados, Richardsons, Rileys, Searles and Sellerses. In the summer of 1909, when Lord Strathcona paid his first visit to Winnipeg in two decades, the local business establishment turned out in force. They organized a two-mile triumphal parade from the Canadian Pacific railway station to Government House, under arches and banners glorifying (and exaggerating) his connections with the city. Giggles of maidens dressed in white spread flowers before his carriage, and the crowds cheered at the verv mention of his name. It was a marked contrast to his firsi furtive visit forty years earlier, when as Donald Smith he had slipped into town and was promptly placed under house arrest by Louis Riel. Strathcona enjoyed the celebration but could not find it in himself to forgive Winnipeggers for having voted against him in the 1880 THE RECKONING 209 Lord Stratbcona unveiling a plaque on the Fort Garry Gate during bis ~,isit to Winnipeg in August 1909 federal election. "hen a local deputation asked him for a million dollars to help establish the Selkirk Exhibition, he politely heard them out and said he would give his decision on his return through Winnipeg from ajourney to the Rockies. On his instructions, the CPR schedule~ that arrival to bring his private coach into the Winnipeg station at midnight. The organizers were on the platform, but no one was invited to enter his darkened and shuttered railway car. Such incidents aside, Strathcona, assisted by W.T.R. Preston, who had been appointed Commissioner of Immigration for Europe by Laurier, threw himself into the recruitment drive for new Canadians with typical enthusiasiii-and,A as almost arrested for his trouble. Not satisfied with trying to boost emigration from Britain, he visited Hamburg to preach the gospel to German 210 LABRADOR SMITH booking agents. They seemed impressed that a British lord had taken the trouble to address them, but the German authorities, particularly anxious not to lose any farmers, had a different reaction. The Minister of the Interior, Count von Posadowsky-Wehner, officiallycomplained about the visit to the British government, threatening to arrest the High Commissioner if he ever returned. -rhe arrogance of the Canadian, Lord Strathcona, and the utter disrespect shown by him for the laws of the Empire in publicly conducting his emigration propaganda on German soil in the very teeth of the authorities, demand that vigorous representations should be made at once to the British Government. . . " editorially thundered the Hamburger Nachricbten. "Apart from the weakening of the Fatherland which the success of such propaganda entails, the attempt to lure our fellow countrymen to this desolate, sub-arctic region is, upon humane grounds alone, to be denounced as criminal." SHORTLY AYFERTHE TURN OF'ri* CENTURY-only a few decades too late--the Hudson's Bay Company nervously began to develop retail stores. Although there had been a tiny tuck shop for local customers in a corner of the compound at Fort Garry since 1830, it was not until twenty-eight years later, during the Fraser Gold Rush, that the Company opened, in Victoria, its first real store.* In 1881, a modest drygoods, hardware and grocery *Other small outlets, mostly glorified versions of the original trading posts, eventually appeared in Vancouver, Kamloops, Vernon and Nelson in British Columbia; at Pincher Creek, Edmonton, Calgary, Lethbridge and Fort Macleod in Alberta; at Prince Albert, Battleford, Yorkton, Fort Qu'Appelle and Whitewood in Saskatchewan; at Shoal Lake, Portage la Prairie, Deloraine and Lower Fort Garry in Manitoba; and at Kenora, Fort Frances, Fort Will iam and Mattawa in Ontario. THE RECKONING 211 An early HBC retail store, at Peace River, Alberta emporium was built at the intersection of Winnipeg's Main and York streets, and there the Company stubbornly remained for forty-five years while most of the city's commercial development took place several crucial blocks away at Portage and Main, later Canada's bestknown intersection. Sensing that the HBC was not intending to capitalize on Winnipeg's remarkable growth, in 1905 the Toronto-based T. Eaton Company opened a magnificent five-storey department store at Portage Avenue and Donald Street-the latter, ironically, named after Smith. Spread over 6.5 acres and using all the latest merchandising techniques, it employed beautifully groomed high-stepping delivery horses that were soon the talk of the town. Eaton's had revolutionized the Canadian retail trade by selling merchandise strictly for cash with a satisfaction-or-money-back guarantee. A militantly Methodist abstainer who drank buttermilk instead of water because he didn't believe merchants should patronize anything that was free, the chain's founder, Timothy Eaton, had 212 LABRADOR SMITH established a reputation for scrupulously honest dealings. Among other things, he had eliminated the socalled wet sales. This was a shabby trick used by merchants of the day to market fabrics by pretending they had been slightly water-damaged on their way across the Atlantic and could therefore be purchased at unbelievable savings. The merchandise was actually old stock nobody wanted to buy that had been carefully sprinkled with salt water from barrels kept specifically for that purpose in the storekeepers' basements. In contrast to Eaton's innovations, the HBC persisted in its parsimonious and conservative ways, losing trade to rambunctious new competitors throughout the West. That lassitude was best expressed by Strathcona at the Company's 1908 annual meeting. When shareholders objected that little effort was being expended to turn existing trading posts into attractive sales centres, the Governor haughtily replied that this was unnecessary because "the Hudson's Bay Company, by their dealings, then- administration, and their management in the past : * * acquired a prestige, which is not possessed by others in the West.... The name of the Hudson's Bay Company is an advertisement of itself, and our stores do not require so many embellishments." If this had ever been a fact, it certainly wasn't true now. New iminigrants, who constituted the overwhelming majority of prairie customers, had never heard of the HBC; many of the oldtimers, who knew it only too well, had unsettled scores with the Company and would gladly have walked or ridden miles to shop elsewhere. THE FIRST SIGN OF CHANGE, though it seemed a natural and not particularly important appointment at the time, was the election in 1907 to the HBC board of Leonard Cunliffe to replace the retiring Sir Sandford Fleming. An THE RECKONING 213 important City animator involved with the financing of Harrods department store, Cunliffe did what few other British I I BC directors of the day had ever done: he went on a Canadian inspection tour, accompanied by Harrods' resident impresario and managing director, Richard Burbidge. It was Burbidge who had converted a modest groceteria into the world's largest department store, with, eventually, 220 departments and 20 acres of selling space. Under his influence, Harrods became recognized as a social rendezvous, with bevies of elegant dogs chained outside its entrances, waiting for their owners who were shopping or relaxing at one of three watering holes: a Georgian- style Gentlemen's Club done up in rich mahogany, a Ladles' Club in the Adam style, with figured satinwood and windows of stained glass, or the palm court tearoom, which featured its own orchestra. Burbidge was also known for engaging daughters of the nobility to model fancy underclothes. Paid C20 a week, debutantes considered the assignment quite a thrill.* Cunliffe and Burbidge returned from Canada shocked by the inadequacy not only of the 11BCs pitiful retail outlets but also by the absence of any administrative structure capable of capitalizing on the prairie boom. There was nothing particularly outrageous in their carefully worded report except its unmistakable *Among other innovations, Harrods pioneered the use of department-store escalators, with attendants stationed at the top of the first flight to serve jiggers of cognac to anyone flustered by the ride. flarrods' cable address was, and remains, EVERYTHING-LONDON. The store much later became part of the business empire of the mysterious Egyptian billionaire Mohamed al-Fayed, who grew so enraptured with his possession that he vowed it would remain in his family for a thousand years. Ile announced th,it when he died he would be mummified and laid to rest in a tomb atop Harrods. 214 LABRADOR SMITH subliminal message that Lord Strathcona was running the Hudson's Bay Company into the ground. The few stores that had been opened were so badly stocked and so poorly operated that they were turning over their merchandise only once every twelve to forty-eight months, and their accounting techniques were a century out of date. Strathcona's determination to govern the firm through a centralized London bureaucracy only vaguely in touch with Canada's startling new realities and, above all, his unwillingness to mobilize the 11BCs financial resources to modernize its operations made it crystal clear that only the Governor's removal from effective authority could revitalize the Company. Strathcona was yet again trapped in his own myth. He genuinely believed-as he always had-that what was beneficial for him personally would naturally benefit the Company. That may briefly have been true when both the man and the HBC were on their earlier growth curves, but the ever-increasing land-sale revenues and his own fattening purse had lulled the Governor into a false sense of corporate security. From his own narrow vision, it may have made sense to minimize expenditures on stores and to concentrate on marketing land. But such a shortsighted approach also meant that the Company was forfeiting its future. If current trends and management continued, the Hudson's Bay Company would have been virtually out of business the day it sold its last acre. The most devastating condemnation of Strathcona and his methods was contained in an unpublished history of the HBC, written by Philip Chester, who was named the HBCs first General Manager for Canada in 1930 and had access to all the records. "Company policies were not changed by [Strathcona]," Chester alleged; "in fact he accentuated that [policy] of taking every possible dollar out of Canada, as he apparently believed the Deed of Surrender committed the Company to a slow, lingering death, which would come about when the acreage it had THE RECKONING 215 received as part of' the purchase price of its monopoly had been sold. He established for himself a network of spies among employees in Canada, which contributed to denuding the organization ... of good administrators and managers. The vital qualities of restless energy and expansion of the Simpson era were crushed by apathetic policies, and as civilization gradually pushed the Fur Trade into the North, the Company left the rich opportunities of a growing Canada to its young and aggressive competitors. In those years Canada became a nation and enjoyed great economic and social expansion, but the Company failed to meet these favourable circumstances, and the natural opportunity to become a great mercantile Company in Canada was lost." While Strathcona was ensconced in the Governor's chair and still the Company's largest single shareholder, not much could be done to dislodge him. But in 1910 a powerful stockholders' alliance was formed to combat his regressive policies by challenging his sway over the HBCs board of directors. After a London court of appeal had ruled that receipts from the sale OfHBC land were a return on capital and therefore not liable to income tax, a group of City financiers associated with the American interests of J.P. Morgan started to put pressure on Strathcona to increase the number of outstanding HBC shares so that they could participate in the potential growth of the company. At the 1910 annual meeting the Morgan interests won four out of the nine directors' seats, gaining significant influence. Thomas Skinner, a financial adviser to the Canadian government, a director of the CPR and the Bank of Montreal, and chairman of the Canada North-West Land Company, was promoted to Deputy Governor, along with the four Morgan representatives: Robert Molesworth Kindersley, chairman of the mer- chant bankers Lazard Brothers & Company and Whitehall Trust; he was also a director of the Bank of England, and 216 LABRADOR SMITH managed large private shipping interests. Within five years he would be clevated to Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company. Vivian Hugh Smith, a partner of Morgan, Grenfell & Company, later Lord Bicester, who served as Governor of the Royal Fxchange Assurance for forty-two years and was one of the City's most distinguished financiers. Richard Burbidge, the managing director of Harrods, who immediately obtained the FIBC's British goods purchasing account (at 2.5 percent commission) and had his second son, Herbert, appointed Commissioner of the Company's stores. Harrods was also granted exclusive rights to merchandise HBC furs, the first time the pelts had been offered publicly in London since the Company's founding in 1670. The only other display of the Company's products had been at the Colonial Exhibition of 1886. William Macken ,ie, the Ontario-born teacher-turnedentrepreDeur who was founding chairman of Brazilian Traction and president of the Canadian Northern Railway, complete(] from Halifax to Victoria in 1915. He was the first Caradian-born director and revelled in the honour. This powerful quartet's first decision was to divide the JIBCs operations into three separate departments, each with a new commissioner, in charge of the fur trade, land sales and retailing. The Company's stock was split on a ten-for-one basis and its capitalization doubled through issuance of 200,000 cumulative Y,5 preferred shares, which raised YI million for store expansion. To advise on overseas growth, a fledgling Canadian Committee was appointed consisting of three eminent Winnipeg businessmen, Sir Augustus Nanton, George Galt and Sir William Whyte, a retired CPR vicepresident. Almost at once they got down to the business of transforming the Hudson's Bay Company into a modern corporation. Construction of a major chain of THE RECKONING 217 department stores was commissioned, starting with Calgary and Vancouver in 1913. By the end of that year, the HBC had fifteen sales shops in operation, with $5 million invested in expanding the facilities. Strathcona continued to occupy the Governor's majestic office, but the Company was beginning to slip away from under him. -XS TOUGH AS OLD PEMMICAN, Strathcona had finally begun to betray signs of his advanced age. During his 1909 Canadian visit when he had been on a buggy tour of the Okanagan Valley, the horses stumbled while going downhill and his carriage overturned. Both of the driver's legs were broken, but the eighty-nine-year-old High Commissioner survived intact except for a slightly strained arm. The same summer when he was back in England, a Royal Navy flotilla sailing up the Thames fired a salute salvo that exploded too close to Strathcona's eardrums. He was temporarily deafened and grew cranky and even more fusty than was his habit. When he heard that WEI. Duff-Millar, Agent-General for New Brunswick, had ordered a ceremonial uniform for a roval reception, he personally tracked down the tailor, wall~ed into his shop and, waving his cane for emphasis, insisted that work on the garment be stopped immediately because provincial agents-general had no official standing and were not entitled to special dress. In the spring of 1910, feeling poorly and having reached the great age of ninety, Strathcona reluctantly offered Laurier his resignation. The Prime Minister just as reluctantly accepted it and officially announced the High Commissioner's retirement at the Dominion Day banquet in London the following summer. The resignation having been offered and accepted, nothing more happened. There was an election in the air, and neither 218 LABRADOR SMITH Lord Stratbcona visiting missionary Fatber Lacombe in Edmonton, 1909, after being tbrou,n from bis carriage in the Okanagan. (His rigbt arm is in a sling) of Canada's political parties wanted to press for the old man's departure. Any partisan demand for the High Commissioner's scalp would have left the offending politician open to Strathcona's wrath and the possibility of financial aid to his opponents. And so Strathcona was able to stay on through a simple stratagem: neither of Canada's political parties wanted him back because each was fearful of his possible support of the other. Laurier had earnestly tried to accommodate Strathcona's every whim during the fifteen years of their political partnership. But in 1911, as the Liberal Prime Minister faced his toughest election campaign, advocating support for a reciprocity agreement with the United THE RECKONING 219 States, Strathcona remembered the one disagreement of their relationship and publicly came out against Laurier's trade scheme.* Laurier's subsequent electoral defeat brought the Conservatives back into office under Robert Laird Borden. That pleased Strathcona because one of the new Prime Minister's first decisions was to order construction of three dreadnoughts as Canada's contribution to the Royal Navy. Borden and Strathcona had first met during a London visit by the then Opposition Leader two years earlier. "[Lord Strathcona] was most kind and attentive in every way," Borden later recalled. "I was struck at that time with an almost pathetic earnestness in the discharge of even the minor duties of his office. . . . He was in evidence on every occasion. He met us at the station upon our -arrival in London; he regularly called upon us at our hotel; when I left to visit Paris, I found him (to my great astonishment) waiting for me at the hotel door early in the morning in order to accompany me to the train. On that occasion he reproached me for not having given him formal notice of my departure; and he seemed to feel that his failure to attend would have been almost a disgrace." Once in office, Borden reappointed Strathcona-now in his ninety-second year- unaware that the old man had turned his mind to one final project. Strathcona was still nursing his recollection of the time the heir to the throne had visited Canada and stayed at his Montreal residence. When the royal party left for the West, Laurier would not allow the High Commissioner to attach his private car to the royal train-even though Strathcona prornised to ride along only as far as Calgary. Another, more weighty reason for umbrage involved Laurier's enthusiastic support for construction of two transcontinental railways, the Grand Trunk Pacific and the Canadian Northern, that cut into the CPR's earnings. 220 LABRADOR SMITH STRATHCONA'S LASTADVENTURE, historically his most significant, ensured that in the decisive run-up to the First World War the Roval Navy would have adequate fuel reserves to take on & Kaiser's fleet. Strathcona had been interested in petroleum explo ration since it was reported to him that a CPR construc tion crew drilling for water in southern Alberta had struck gas. Besides retaining the Company's rights to minerals found on the lands it sold, he also instructed the new Canadian Committee to search for oil. Not much happened at first, but Strathcona was rewarded with a rich geological sample of oil seepage formations found near what is now Norman Wells in the Northwest Territories.* Through his Scottish connections, the High Commissioner had meanwhile obtained control of Burinah 011, a firm founded in 1886 by Glasgow engi neers who pioneered the extraction o ' f oil from shale. The company's deposits up the Irrawaddy River in cen tral Burma were not particularly extensive, but at least they were under British control. That suddenly became important as development of marine engines fired by oil instead of coal began to revolutionize the world's navies. The Royal Navy had continued to act as the guardian of the Empire, protecting garrisons "on every rock in the ocean where a cormorant could perch," as the parliamentary reformer Sydney Smith had caustically observed. The silent service;s selfesteem remained unaffected by the Boer interlude. Admiral Algernon Charles Heneage habitually removed his jacket while reciting his morning prayers because he considered it unthinkable for a uniformed British officer to fall on his knees. Another salty character, Admiral Sir Robert Arbuthnot, was such a martinet that when, *Located on the Mackcnzie River, the little settlerrient did eventually strike an econornic oilfieldand still produces a million barrels of crude a year. THE RECKONING 221 shortly after he passed command of his ship to his successor, a seagull defecated on the foredeck, a chief bosun's inate deadpanned: "That would never have happened in Sir Robert's day." The navy's progressive element, led by the First Sea Lord, Sir John Fisher, was more concerned with transforming its obsolete coalfired vessels to oil. Coal engines took eight hours to flash up and some ships took days to coal; oil propulsion was faster, more efficient, produced less telltale smoke and nearly doubled the effective action radius of warships. The Royal Navy's predicament was that 94 percent of the world's oil supplies were under Russian or American control, with Royal Dutch Shell and the Rockefellerdominated Standard Oil interests uneasily sharing the western oligopoly. Apart from the tiny Burmah Oil operation, Britain's only potential petroleum source was Persia (modern Iran), where William Knox D'Arcy, the wealthy developer of the Mount Morgan goldfield in Australia, had obtained a sixty-year oil exploration concession for only V0,000 ani 10 percent (later 16 percent) of net profit. He risked most of his fortune drilling the concessions, but his Polish and Canadian field crews reported only dry holes. Afraid that D'Arcy would be tempted to join the Shell or Rockefeller cartels, a delegation headed by Fisher secretly called on Strathcona and asked him to become chairman of a reconstructed and refinanced major oil consortium that would combine the Burmese and Persian properties.* Briefed on the D'Arcy had in fact been negotiating with both rival concerns. At one point Shell had hired a freclance master-spy identified by British Intelligence as Sidney George Reillv to intercept D'Arcy during talks he was holding with the Rockefellers aboard a Rothschild yacht anchored off the French Riviera. Reilly dressed up as a priest and, inveigling his way aboard the vessel on the pretext he was collecting money for a nearby orphanage, took D'Arcy aside and on behalf of Shell offered to improve any Rockefeller offer. 222 LABRADOR SMITH strateiric siLmificance of the Royal Navy's maintaining defensible oil supplies, Strathcona 'immediately agreed to help finance the new oil firm and become its chairman. A new Anglo-Persian syndicate was hurriedly incorporated, D'Arcy was pushed aside, and at least Y, 1. 5 million was personally contributed to the oil hunt by the HBC Governor. He received 75,000 shares for his trouble, and by the very act of agreeing to become chairman of the highly risky enterprise provided the credibility required to raise more exploration funds. The joint venture struck oil at Maidan-i-Naftun soon after-wards and quickly outlined a ma)or oilfield. At the personal urging of Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, Strathcona signed over the Persian concessions to the British Crown for 22.2 million, guaranteeing the Royal Navy twenty years of oil at a price that Churchill estimated saved British taxpayers enough money to have paid for construction of all its pre-war dreadnoughts. The Anglo-Persian reserves fuelled the fleet that gave Britain the edge at sea over Germany in the First World War. "It was not as a mercantile company that I looked upon it," Strathcona explained, "but really from an Imperial point of view." BY THE SUMMER OF 1913, Strathcona looked and acted his ninety-three years. The old man's proud chin no longer jutted out before him but looked more like a manmade jaw in which the paraffin was melting. Ethel Hurlbatt, the Warden of McGill's Royal Victoria *The Anglo-Persian Oil Company eventually grew into British Petroleum, the $50-billion London-based petroleum giant that now ranks, as the world's third-largest oil multinational. In January 197.5, Burmah Oil sold its 21.5-percent interest in British Petroleum to the Bank of England for $426 million. THE RECKONING 223 College, who met him at the time, poignantly recalled his "detachment of manner, as if he had already passed some boundaries of time and space beyond his fellows, and while occupied and keenlv interested and ceaselessly concerned with work and duty and service, [he was] really alone with himself." On June 13, 1913, Labrador Smith presided for the last time over the Hudson's Bay Company's annual Court. Too weak to stand or even to rea~ his own remarks, he sat before a representative gathering of the Company's shareholders like a stuffed effigy of himselfrnute, barely emitting any vital signs, yet still there, the Governor and a Bay man to the end. The news was all good: Y.300,000 had been invested in the building of larger stores in Calgary, Vancouver and Victoria; the year's dividend declaration of Y,5 on each share of El 0 value set a modern record; land was being disposed of at an unprecedented $20.06 an acre, and 4,032,860 acres were still to be sold.* The High Commissioner's final public function was the giant Dominion Day reception he had given every July 1 at Queen's I lall. He tirelessly shook 2,300 hands, but his voice, never very strong, had given out. "The whole scene was exceedingly beautiful," noted the Reverend J.W Pedley, a visitor from Canada. "The great hall with its brilliant illumination, its fine decorations ... its orchestra discoursing the sweetest music, and crowded with the elite of London's social life ... all arrayed in their best, flashing with jewels and adorned *A further million acres had been sold by 1923, with most of the balance of the land-bank moved in the following two decades. By 1954, the HBC had only 18,250 acres in its inventory; the last major parcel of fifty acres was donated to the University of Victoria by the Company in 1961 when Richard Murray was Managing Director. 224 LABRADOR SMITH with knightly orders, presented a spectacle of light and color and animation, which was not only charming but wonderfully impressive." A month later, Strathcona decided on a lightning visit to Canada to inspect his lat- est investment, the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Montreal. His wife, Isabella, herself a frail elighty-nine, had always accompanied him everywhere, but, having suffered several mild strokes, was not feeling healthy enough to go along. When Strathcona gently reminded her that he might not be well enough to return, she insisted on going to Euston Station so she could see him off. He last saw her there on the platform, lifted by four young men, gazing directly into the window of his private carriage, waving her fond fareA ell. On the morning of November 7, after walking her Yorkshire terrier in Grosvenor Square, Lady Strathcona collapsed. Her cold developed into pneumonia, and she died five days later. Her husband of sixty years-and four weddings-was devastated. His grief caused him to make a fatal mistake: he stopped working. 'Fen weeks later, on January 21, 1914, in his ninetyfourth year, Lord Strathcona died of "great prostration and heart failure." Incredibly, on his deathbed he was still worrying about the legitimacy of his marriage to Isabella, as if unwilling to carry the burden of that imagined sin to his grave. His two physicians, Sir Thomas Barlow and William Pasteur, signed a legal declaration with a firm of London solicitors testifying to his last words.* "Lord Strathcona," the affidavit stated, "said he knew he was dying and asked us to (ome close to the bed and listen to what he was going to say... He said his wife's first marriage was performed by a man who had not the legal power to do it in that district. The man to whom his wife was first married was called Grant. Grant treated tier so badly that life with him became impossible. They separated. Before Lord Strathcona married his wife he consulted several persons including Sir George THE RECKONING 225 In their tributes, Strathcona's contemporaries attempted to outdo each other with purple praise. "We need not fear exaggeration in speaking of Lord Strathcona," declared Sir Charles Davidson, Chief .justice of the Quebec Superior Court. "In especial degree has he enriched and uplifted Canadian life. May we emulate even if we cannot in the mean while at least reach to the lofty standards of his public and private careers." Sir William Peterson, the principal of McGill University, had little trouble topping that. "Duty was his guiding star," he said of Strathcona, "duty and conscience. We ought to be glad, too-ought we not?-in our day and generation, that Canada can boast of him as a man of unspotted integrity." Even Sir Wilfrid Laurier seemed overcome by grief. "Since SirJohn Macdonald's time I do not know that there has been any Canadian who, on departing this life, has left behind him such a trail of sorrow as Lord Strathcona.... He came as a simple clerk to the Hudson's Bay Company, and from that station he rose step by step until he became . . . at first in fact, and afterwards both in fact and name, the governor of that historic company, a position which he held to the last day of his life." The Times summed up his amazing career most succinctly: "With no advantages of birth or fortune, he made himself one of the great outstanding figures of the Empire." The Dean of Westminster had suggested the High Commissioner's rernains be preserved in a sepulchre in Simpson ... and they all advised that [he] would be justified in marrying her. The domicile of Lord Stratheona being Scotland and he being a Scotchman he had no doubt about the validity of the marriage. The marriage was subsequently repeated in New York...." Oddly, his last Paris marriage, the only one accompanied by fidl religious rites, was not mentioned by the expiring peer. 226 LABRADOR SMITH the Abbey among Britain's most distinguished sons, but Strathcona had stipulated that he wished to rest beside his beloved Isabella at Highgate Cemetery in North London.* Still, the Abbey was the scene of his faneral, a state occasion of grand proportions attended by the Empire's noblest citizens. His coffin, carried in to the sombre cadence of Chopin's funeral march, was followed by a single wreath of lilies and heliotrope orchids. Attached to it was a card from the Dowager Queen Alexandra: "In sorrowful memory of one of the Empire's kindest of men and the greatest of benefactors." By the time he died, Lord Strathcona had outlived most of the violent animosities he had created as Donald Smith. Yet his carefully drafted will perpetuated many of his earthly quarrels. Although the document was a model of philanthropic generosity, spreading funds across three continents, it never once mentioned Winnipeg. The former fur trader's snobbery also extended beyond the grave. His legacy establishing a leper colony was conditional on a strict entrance test: only leprous English gentlemen of good standing might apply. More than $25 million-the bulk of his estate having been distributed to family members before his deatb-was dispersed to McGill, Queen's, Yale, Cambridge, and Aberdeen universities, as well as a dozen poor divinity schools and underfunded hospitals. He left small inheritances (11~50) to a number of HBC traders and set up the Strathcona Trust for Physical and Patriotic Education in the Schools, which still operates from Ottawa. The will's strangest revelation was an obscure paragraph that stated: "I remit and cancel the debts owing to me by (1) the estate of the late Right Hon. Richard Cartwright, (2) the estate of the late Lieut.-Colonel *'Fhus sharing the graveyard with Karl Marx (1818-83). THE RECKONING 227 William "ite, one time Deputy Postmaster-General of Canada, (3) the Hon. George E. Foster." Cartwright had been the Liberal finance minister who made his reputation denouncing politicians who had sold their souls to the CPR syndicate, yet shortly after formation of the Laurier government he became highly sympathetic to the railway and later authorized huge handouts to Canadian Pacific steamship lines. Foster, a former professor of Classics at the University of New Brunswick, who had risen to be minister of finance in five Tory administrations, had similarly helped out the CPR while in office; the favours procured from William White were never revealed, though the CPR received many valuable mail contracts during his tenure. The heirs of the three men could now officially keep Strathcona's bribes-but only at the cost of'sullied family reputations. ITHAD BEEN A HELL OF A RUN. The minor HBC clerk who began his career for "Y,20 and found" had during his seven and a half decades with the Company not only preserved it and drastically altered its character but, unlike most of its modern Governors, had also become a pivotal figure in Canadian history. Here was a man of little privilege, unbridled ambition, and the mindset of a conquistador. For a time, he personified his country.  PART II QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE CHAPTER9 ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX "Most masters of the Company's posts is lak kings.... Yo kin be birthed and died without Itheir consent but dat's 'bout all. -Annie Redsky HAVING LOST ITS EMPIRE in the western Canadian plains, where the influx of railways and settlers had reduced its influence to the kind of commercial competition for which the IFIBc had little skill and less stomach, the Company set out to establish a new kingdom on Canada's northern frontier, Man), things about this frigid realm were radically different: the climate and terrain, the pelts the Company traded (Arctic fox, not beaver); the aboriginal people who did the work-Inuit instead of Indians; and the animals that fed and supplied the hunters-seal and northern caribou rather than deer and buffalo. But nearly every other aspect of the Hudson's Bay Company's shift north had an equivalent in its earlier sweep west. The move into the Arctic took place mostly in the twentieth century, but, as in the plains, the Company had been operating successfully on the fringes of its new spread for most of two hundred years. While the pace of its expansion was at the speed of a funeral slow march, 231 232 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE the I 113C eventually prospered in the harsh new environment-as it had in the Prairies--but only as long as it could maintain a monopoly. Eventually, the HBC became the dominant retailer in each region, its initial customers being mainly the aboriginals whose way of life its presence had robbed of self-sufficiency. In both places, the Company's expansion was essential to its own-and Canada's-future. During its western and northern hegemonies the 11BC exploited a territory that was commercially untouched. Just as its slow but persistent move across the continent laid down the matrix of subsequent prairie settlement, its invasion of the land mass North of Sixty carved into that bleak landscape the lines of human traffic that would become its permanent pattern of habitation. Of the fifty main population centres in the modern Northwest Territories, three-quarters had been former fur-trading stations. As in the West, the Company served to protect Canada's sovereignty from outside, mainlv American, pressures, not by heroic gestures or patriotic deeds, but simply by being there.* "For at least 150 years," William Watson, a professor of economics at McGill University, noted, "the Hudson's Bay Company dominated the northern economy, both as a monopsonist [the only buyer] in the market for furs and a monopolist [the only seller] in the market for finished goods. There can be little doubt that it was The Bay-and not northerners, whether white or non-white-that was best served by this system." A *Canada's claim to ownership of the mainland portion of the Northwest Territories was based on its inclusion in the 1870 transfer of the HBCs charter lands to the recently formed Dominion. The islands of the Arctic archipelago were ceded to Canada through the British Colonial Office in 1880 "to prevent the United States from claiming them, and not from the likelillood oftlicir proving ofany value to Canada." ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 233 simpler rationale for the Company's domination of the North was offered by Bob Chesshire, a veteran Bay man in charge of its fur-trade department in the 1940s. "At one time," he said, "we dispensed all the welfare in the Arctic, and the Government took the position that since we had a monopoly, we could bloody well provide the relief I told them that was all right but that we only had a monopoly because no one else could operate in the damn country." Except for explorers trying to find the North West Passage, or each other, Canada's far northern reaches had remained almost entirelv outside the white man's purview until the nineteenth century, with only the whalers or the occasional missionary, looking for new positions, daring to break its silence. First to appear were the Moravians, who in 1771 established a mission at Nain, on the Labrador coast. Members of the world's oldest Protestant church, founded on the teachings of Jan Hus, the Bohemian martyr burned at the stake by Catholic persecutors in 1415, these dedicated men of God provided solace and support where little was available.* By the 1890s, Canada's North had become an area of intense theological competition, with various denominations attempting to carve out spiritual monopolies. *Early missionaries had some unexpected problems with their gospel, which claimed that those who obeyed the Ten Commandments would go to heaven, Ahere it was very beautiful, while those who sinned would go to hell, where it was very hot. To the preachers' shivering listeners, hell didn't sound so bad. When Father Pierre Flenri, the Catholic missionary at Pelly Bay in 193 5, told his flock about how Jesus Christ had once walked on water, he was surprised to find they were singularly unimpressed. When the good Father asked why, a member of his congregation replied, "What's so difficult about that? We walk on water all winter." 234 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE There is a documented story of Father Henri Grollier, OMI, racing Archdeacon James Hunter down the Mackenzie River in the winter of 1858-59 to evangelize new districts around Aklavik. (The Catholic beat the Anglican.) With Roald Amundsen's epic 1903-6 east-to-west journey across the roof of North America, the 400-year quest for the fabled Passage came to an end. The Arctic became, if not more accessible, at least less mysterious and more frequently visited. As more southerners ventured beyond the tree -line, they encountered the Inuit.* Because the white man entered a climate that defied his own survival, he had to manufacture a set of myths to account for the ability-and willingness-of the Inuit to endure. Such mythologies were expressed in many dubious ways, but the underlying message from those early contacts was that the people of the North were happy campers, frolicking in the snow-"Nanooks of *"Eskimo" is the Indian (most likely Alontagnais or Naskapi) name for the northern aboriginals. It was the designation originally used by whites because a Jesuit in 1611 had heard Indians refer to the northerriers as Eskintantsiks, a derogatory term meaning "eaters ofraw flesh." It is used in this chapter onlywhen authors or resident HBC Factors refer to the aboriginal population by that word. In uit, the more contemporary term, simply means "people." (Inuk is the singular of Inuit.) Canada's 2 5,000 Inuit are divided into eight tribal groups: Labrador, Ungava, Baffin, Iglulik, Caribou, Netsilik, Copper and Western Arctic. They speak a common language, Inuktitut, which has six dialects. Dwellers in the Western Arctic have in recent years coined a new word, "biuvialuit," to distinguish themselves from other Inuit. Those who live in Northern Quebec (Ungava) are "Taqramiut" (people of the shadow); they call the aboriginal citizens of Labrador "Si(linirmiut," people of the sun, which rises in their land first. ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 235 the North" done up in polar-bear pants, their children playing with litters of photogenic puppies in cute igloos. "The Eskimo makes his or her appearance with a smile," wrote the northern expert Hugh Brody in a dev- astating parody of this silly stereotype. "[He] is an eternally happy, optimistic little figure; a round, furry and cuddly human with a pet name; a man or woman who amazes and delights our European representatives with innocent simplicity. Gorge themselves as they might on raw meat and blubber, a stereotypical Eskimo of the impossible north wages his battle against environment in astonishing good humour." Brody also pointed out the difference between Inuit and Indians: "The 'Eskimo' smiles from the sidelines; the Indian is cunning, warlike and stands in our way. This distinction between the two peoples is a geographical and anthropological myth, but the double stereotype has nonetheless persisted. . . . The one at war with nature, the other with settlers." Other observers have noted differences in their philosophical approaches to life, with the Indians tending to be more introverted and generally less mischievous. One example: for a time during the 1950s many Indians and Inuit suffering from tuberculosis were lodged at a hospital near Moose Factory in northern Ontario. "The Eskimos were very smart," recalled Jj. "Woody" Wood, a local HBC Factor. "They never complained but could get their point of view across. When there was an economy drive, the cook kept serving spaghetti. Nobody said anything, but I remember one supper hour when the hospital was unusually quiet. As the nurses started making their rounds again, they found everything-the light fixtures, toilet bowls, door knobs-decorated with spaghetti. That was a creative protest and very unlike anything the Indians might have 236 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE done." Stuart Hodgson, the first resident Commissioner of the Northwest Territories,* notes that one of the main differences between the Indians (Dene) and the Inuit is that Dene settlements or camps are usually along a lake or river, whereas the Inuit are seldom far from salt water. Inuit survival had a lot less to do with mischief or good humour than with an environment that daily stretched the limits of human endurance. Generations of men and women grappled with the exigencies of a frozen world that held out no advantage, except that it was home. The many historical instances of starvation, cannibalism and infanticide were eloquent evidence of how agonizing it all had been-the numbing cold, the constant quest for sustenance, and the unremitting search for shelter and for driftwood for cooking fires. To cheat nature they had to be tough. EJ. "Scotty" Gall, a veteran HBC Arctic trader, recalled that while building a boat at Tuktoyaktuk, he once saw his Inuk assistant pull nails out of the hardwood planking with his teeth. That story may or may not be true, but Father Frans Van der Velde, the veteran Arctic missionary, *A Grade 8 dropout and successful union organizer, Hodgson was an improbable appointee to head what was, before his arrival, a colonial old boys' club, the Northwest Territories Council. (During his union days he headed an organizing drive for the International Woodworkers of America in Newfoundland, where union -busting goons nearly killed him. He was terrified by his narrow escape. The next morning, when he looked into a mirror, he found his hair had turned white. Only later did he realize that in his nervousness he had put toothpaste instead of Brylcreern on his head.) During his dozen years as Commissioner (1967-79), when he actually lived in the NAVF, f lodgson shook up the council and left a permanent and enlightened imprint on the North. "The Arctic does funn), things to you," he once observed. "It's a jealous ]over and it doe3w't forgive." ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 237 reported that an Inuk used his teeth like a third hand. The Inuit developed quite extraordinary ways to deal with their surroundings. While the wind that howls across the flat tundra prevented them from using such primitive communication methods as yodelling or Tibetan "far-away singing," they learned to ftel movement a horizon away, so that they could communicate with arm-signals at great distances. Until a version of Cree svllabics was introduced by the Reverend EJ. Peck in 104, the Inuit had no written language, transmitting their myths and history through songs, stone carving and elders' recited memories. The half-dozen dialects of their spoken language catch the underlying sophistication of their culture. They use different words when addressing dogs or people, and some verbs possess a dozen tenses, so that instead of merely a past, present and future there are a near and a distant future, an imperative, a negative past and present, an interrogative, a subjunctive and so on. Many words describe snow because its exact condition is so important for hunting or trek-king.* In the early days, Inuit lived entirely off the land and sea, lighting fires by rubbing driftwood or striking bits of pyrite together, fashioning cooking pots out of soapstone, and making garments from sealskin with needles of goose or gull wing bones. Driftwood and whalebone were carved into harpoons; fish strips were frozen into thick, smooth packets to build sled-runners-providing basic rations in emergencies. No part of an animal was wasted. Seal windpipes were used as snow-house windows, ptarmigan bladders made children's balloons, fish *Some of the more common are igluksaq, which is snow suitable for shelter-building on long journeys; pukak, a powder snow; ganik, falling snow; piqtuq, snow being blown about by a blizzard; mauya, soft, deep snow. 238 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE eyes were snacks-a munchy Arctic version of Smarties. Inuit in the Western Arctic lined the hoods of their sea] jackets with wolverine fur because frost won't stick to it. But the main source of nourishment, clothing and equipment was the caribou. Like the buffalo of the plains and the deer of the forests, the animal was a walking emporium, its skin used for tents, clothing, sleeping bags, ceremomal drums, hunting bags, gloves and buckets; its antlers turned into bows and arrows, thimbles, sled handles and anchors. Its migration cycles fitted in with native life (or vice versa). Herds of caribou moved like great quadruped tides from the margin of the boreal forest to the edge of the Arctic Ocean, migrating between their rutting and calving grounds, involuntarily feeding man and wolf along the way. While he was stationed at Baker Lake in the 1920s, Archie Hunter, who spent thirty-five years with the HBC, watched the caribou go by: "One could look across Baker Lake by telescope to the rolling land around the mouth of the Kazan River and, at first, see nothing," he recalled. "Then, as the glass was focussed, what appeared to be a sea of antlers came into view and then the caribou themselves. The hillsides seemed to be moving. In whichever arc the glass was turned there were the animals, thousands upon thousands of them. One old native told me of watching a caribou herd during the fall migration which took three days to pass where he was camped." The herds are supposed to have originally numbered a hundred million, and as late as 1907, the naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton estimated Canada's caribou population at thirty million, though both figures were probably exaggerations. According to calculations compiled for the Fourth International Reindeer Caribou Symposium, held at Whitehorse, Yukon, in 1985, the North American caribou count had by then declined to between 2.3 million and 2.8 million animals, of which ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 239 Inuit using a traditional muskox- or caribou-rib bow drill only half the herds were increasing in number. The grad ual decimation of the life-sustaining critters was bad news for all but the Company. "The sooner the caribou are gone the better ... for then more food-stuffs can be imported and the natives will be forced to trap and become fur producers or starve," a trader told Philip Godsell in 1934. Godsell, who himself spent two decades in the Companys northern service, abhorred that 240 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE attitude, commenting in his memoir, Arctic Trader, that it was "a case of the Indian and buffalo over again. As long as the caribou are plentiful the Eskimo is independent of the white man but once the caribou are gone he becomes nothing but flie white man's slave." The Company attitude of encouraging the Inuit to become dependent on its goods was reminiscent of Sir George Simpson's edict, outlined in an 1822 letter to the HBC's London Committee: "I have made it my study to examine the nature and character of Indians and however repugnant it may be to our feelings, I am convinced they must be ruled with a rod of iron to bring and keep them in a proper state of subordination, and the most certain way to effect this is by letting them feel their dependence upon us. " J.W Anderson, who spent his life with the HBC In the Canadian North, had a more thoughtful approach. "There is an optimum period in the dealings of any primitive people with the white man," he concluded. "This might be described as the period of time when the aborigines have sufficient of the white man's material civilization to ease the burden of life, but yet not enough to disrupt their way of life-muzzleloading g-uns instead of bows and arrows; twines and lines for fish nets and snares, instead of tree and willow roots ... steel traps instead of deadfalls. And one must not overlook those undoubted and perhaps harmless comforts, tea and tobacco, two of the greatest amenities we have given to the original inhabitants of Canada." The Inuit reached that turning point in the middle of the twentieth century; their treatment ever since has been a patronizing mixture of neglect and manipulation. But in the lexicon of villains that most Inuit feel have threatened their way of life, government ranks first, the missionaries second-and the Hudson's Bay Company a distant third. This is not because the HBC was particularly benign but because it ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 241 was interested in selling them goods, not-as was the case with Ottawa and the churches-in converting them to new ideologies or ways of living. THE HUDSON'S BAYCOMPAT,~ moved into the Far North with the founding of Fort Churchill south of the Arctic Circle early in the eighteenth century, but its commerce was with the Cree arriving from woodlands to the south. The only trade with the Inuit was from Company sloops irregularly dispatched into the upper reaches of Hudson Bay to barter harpoons, knives and lances for sealskins and whalebone. "So fond are these poor people of ironwork, that they lick it with their tongues before they put it by; indeed, I have seen them so transported with pleasure as to fall into dreadful convulsions," reported Andrew Graham, with his usual style of operatic exaggeration, after leading one of the earliest expeditions out of York Factory. The first regular trading station set up specifically to deal with the Inult was Fort Chimo (Kuujjuakj, at the south end of Ungava Bay, established by Nicol Finlayson in 1830. Not much business developed because the aboriginals had few items worth trading, but the Bay men hunted beluga whales and set up other whaling stations along Hudson Bay's east shore. In 1860 alone, twenty-three hundred white whales were harpooned off the Little Whale and Great 1Xhale river posts, but within a decade overkill had ruined the hunt. European whalers had been active in Davis Strait since the early eighteenth century. In pre-petroleum days the bowheads' blubber was valuable as a lighting oil and lubricant, while their baleen (horny tissue in the mouth with the consistency of human fingernails that allows whales to filter food from the sea) was used instead of spring steel or celluloid in many applications, including buggy whips, umbrella ribs and stays for women's 242 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE corsets. Whale tongues were an exotic delicacy, and whale oil was so valuable that the profit from a pair of harpooned animals was enough to pay for a new ship. At the peak of the east-coast hunt, in the decade after 1820, some 750 vessels took part, landing more than eight thousand whales. The commerce was so lucrative that men spent their lives in pursuit of the huge mammals; one Scottish harpooner named Peter Ramsay died of old age aboard the Erik while on his fifty-sixth annual whaling expedition into Baffin Bay. It was a rough trade. Interminable tedium alternated with moments of mortal danger as crews scrambled to answer the cry, "Thar she blows!" "It was not some primitive blood lust which prompted these sailors to endure the intense danger and prolonged monotony of a whale hunt," Daniel Francis wrote in his Arctic Chase. "The whalers probably served the most commonplace of masters, the need for a living wage. Today whaling is widely regarded as a slaughter of the innocents, but the men who engaged in it believed themselves simply to be doing a job-more perilous than most, less lucrative than many. Like those who engage in any task demanding skill, physical endurance, and bravery, the men had a fierce pride in their work, and popular writers found it easy to transform them into folk heroes." Only very occasionally did a whaler mildly lament the nature of his calling, such as this entry in the log of Captain William Scoresby, one of the most successful hunters: "There is something extremely painful in the destruction of a whale ... yet the object of the adventure, the value of the prize, the joy of the capture, cannot be sacrificed to feelings of compassion." As the business grew more competitive, the whalers began to set up shore stations to process the oil and to afford themselves the chance of profiting from a second summer in the whaling grounds. Tiny communities ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 243 sprang up at Cape Fullerton in Hudson Bay and in sheltered coves such as the eventual sites of Pond Inlet and Pangnirtung on Baffin Island. It was at these makeshift camps that the first prolonged contacts between whites and Inuit took place. The Inuit found most ships' captains happy to barter almost any item aboard their vessels for polar bear and fox skins. The whalers hired the aboriginals to help man the harpoon boats and to trap for furs that could be taken back and sold at highly profitable rates, while the Inuit were, for the first time, exposed to the iron-and-steam-age goods of their employers. Eager to acquire axes, pots, copper kettles, blankets, knives, needles and guns as well as the steel traps that allowed them to catch the animals whose pelts boosted their "gifts" from the white men, the Inuit came to treasure the imported wares. Having acquired rifles and inherited the clinker-built harpoon boats left behind by the whale hunters, the relatively small number of Inuit involved with the hunt gradually moved away from their traditional emphasis on the seal hunts to seek fur-bearing land animals, impatiently waiting for more white men to appear with more goods. The trade grew even faster on the continent's west coast. The first whaling ships into the Beaufort Sea were a fleet out of San Francisco, and when one vessel-the Grampus-came back with twenty-two bowheads worth $2 5 0,000, even more whalers followed. A wintering station was set up at Pauline Cove on Herschel Island, a rocky outcrop northwest of the Mackenzie Delta, and soon as many as six hundred whalers were living there, trading with the Inuit. Unfortunately, that exchange, which went on for two decades, was not limited to food and fur. From late September to earlyjuly the ships were frozen in, with most of their crews gradually dispersing to aboriginal settlements that had sprung up nearby. Unlike their east-coast counterparts, the western 244 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE Wbaling sbip, the Era, being preparedfor spring wbale bunt, Cape Fullerton, 1904 whalers distributed large quantities of liquor to the local population and participated in such uninhibited sexual orgies that a disgusted witness described Herschel as "a paradise of those who reject all restraint upon appetite and all responsibility for conduct; when a dozen ships and five or six hundred men of their crews wintered here, and scoured the coasts for Eskimo women. I do not think it extravagant to say that the scenes of riotous drunkenness and lust which this island has witnessed have probably rarely been surpassed." Another observer noted that "when girls were not obtainable, wives were enticed away from their husbands, or men induced to rent out their wives." On August 7, 1903, two North West Mounted Police constables were finally posted to Herschel to enforce order, but they mainly collected customs duties in response to the HBCs complaints that the whalers were introducing cheap goods into the region. ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 245 By 1910, kerosene had taken the place of whale oil and the whalebone-structured corset had gone out of style, driving the price of baleen from a high of fifty dollars a pound to forty cents.* After trying to survive by slaughtering fleets of walrus and sea otters, the whaling crews departed the North, leaving behind an Eskimo population with a taste for European goods that the Hudson's Bay Company was only too happy to satisfy. Because the Company proceeded at its usual snail's speed, accomplishing in a decade what should have taken a season, former whaling skippers quickly established themselves as private traders. The most notorious of them was Captain Christian "Charlie" Klengenberg, who in his autobiography boasted about one of his typical commercial encounters with the Copper Eskimos: "They were so innocent a people of so long ago that I had not the heart to take advantage of them in trade, so all I took was most of their clothes and stone cooking pots and copper snow-knives and ice picks for steel knives and frying pans and a supply of inatches. They had no raw furs with them, but their garmerits would be useful for my family and some of my rascally crew." Klengenberg, who had arrived in the territory from Denmark as the cabin boy on an American whaler, turned his ship, the Afaid of Orleans, into a floating department store, serving, among others, the many Mixed Blood sons and daughters he had sired along the Arctic coast. One of his most popular items was trading rifles for furs, but the weapons lasted a long time. When the resourceful captain found there were few repeat *Whaling, on a reduced scale, has continued to the present day, with the magnificent animals'various body parts providing a fatty base used in the manufacture ofmargarme, fertilizer, food to fatten ranch-bred mink, and a special grade of oil used to lubricate the guidance systems of intercontinental ballistic missiles. 246 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE customers, he rose to the occasion by handing out steel rods which, he explained, should be used to clean out the gun barrels. After a few applications, the rifles wouldn't shoot straight. Not unexpectedly Klengenberg was standing by, ready to sell replacements. When the Company persuaded the police at Herschel Island to ban the Danish swindler from the country, he begged to be allowed to take his ship on one more round, so he could supply his extended family. The local police inspector placed Constable Slim Macdonald aboard the Maid to make sure the trade was limited to the captain's relatives, When the ship returned to Herschel in the autumn without the constable, Klengenberg lamely explained that the policeman had unfortunately fallen overboard off Rymer Point on Victoria Island. There were no witnesses and the Dane was never charged, but his northern exploits--and Herschel's evil legacy-had come to an end. The mainland sector of the Western Arctic, which lay to the south and east of Herschel Island, was far more accessible than the sub-Arctic regions on Canada's east coast because it had the Mackenzie River for a spine. With the connecting Liard, Peace, Athabasca and Slave river systems, the Mackenzie's drainage basin covers an area the size of Western Europe, most of it within relatively easy access- especially during the four precious months when the rivers aren't frozen. Though North of Sixty, this was mostly Indian, not Inuit, country and had been a highly profitable fur-trading preserve ever since Alexander Mackenzie's downstream dash to tidewater in 1789, because the frosty climate prompted its woodsy creatures to grow thick fur.* By the 1880s, the Hl3c had put steamboats on the Mackenzie and the Athabasca, *For a detailed description of Mackenzie's magnificent journey, see Caesars of the Wilderness, hardcover, pages 59-62. ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 247 with the Grabame running from Fort Chipewyan to Fort McMurray, where the Clearwater and Athabasca rivers meet, while the Wrigley served the lower Mackenzie. By then the f IBC was maintaining eleven trading posts in the area, with Fort McPherson, less than 150 miles south of the Beaufort Sea, its northernmost installation.* The area's commercial potential received a big boost when a CPR branch line linked Edmonton to Calgary, and Waterways (part of the present location of Fort McMurray) became the Company's regional transportation terminus. The HBC ships looked like awkward floating verandas, with picket-fence rails around their decks, but they fundamentally altered the area's human geography. To push the trade northward, roads were built bridging the Mackenzie's only navigation hazard-the sixteen miles of rapids south of Fort Smith. Accommodation aboard these early northern "fire canoes" was even more primitive than on their prairie counterparts, as attested to in this diary entry of Elizabeth Taylor, an early traveller down the Mackenzie. She had originally been assigned the Atbabasca River's best stateroom but was bumped to an ordinary cabin by an HBC Factor. "Mine, a single, had a hay tick only as furniture, no toilet articles whatever, and no bedding," she noted with mounting dismay. "I unpacked my blankets and went to bed. Had just settled for the night when a big drop fell on my nose and then another. I got up, spread the mackintosh over the slats above, and lay down again. But from the pattering above me, I saw that I should soon be deluged, so I rose, balanced myself uncertainty on the edge of the berth, and untied my bag *Founded in 1840 by an HBC explorer named John Bell, the first white man up the Peel River, Fort McPherson became known for the longevity of one resident Factor, John Firth, who was in charge from 1893 to 1920 and died there in harness in 1939. 248 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE of camping things, placed a frying pan under the leak, and tried to steep again. But the leaks came faster and faster, and in fact I spent the entire night in warfare with the waters."* A later passenger, on the sternwheeler Fort McMurray, was Jean Godsell, who went down the Mackenzie on her honeymoon in the 1920s. The ship was loaded with Mounted Police inspectors, priests, trappers, traders, card-sharps, Indians and "Improved Scotsmen," as she facetiously called the Mixed Bloods. The captain, decked out in gold braid and brass buttons, was constantly on the bridge, bellowing orders to crew members who paid absolutely no attention, except occasionally to bellow back some appropriate obscenity. The newly married Godsell spent most of her time with husband Philip in the Fort McMurray's "Bridal Suite," which consisted of "a number of sacks of flour upon which we spread our bedroll; a dirty tarpaulin, stretched on hoops of willow, being our only protection from the snow flurries and fall rains which frequently beat down upon the heavily laden craft." The ten-day journey to Fort Smith allowed Mrs Godsell time to ruminate on the HBC outports she passed along the riverbank. "The unutterable loneliness of these little outposts of civilization- clinging like birds' nests to the riverbank, a hundred and fifty to two hundred miles apart-strikes one forcibly. Cut off for nine months of the year the life is one of extreme solitude vet, at boat time, they manage to surround themselves with somewhat of a gala spirit.))t *The Company stopped carrying passengers on the Mackenzie in 1948. tA few years later, while stationed with her husband at Fort Fitzgerald, Jean Godsell created a scandal when she publicly beat up the wife of an RCMP corporal who had been spreading gossip about her. "Blinded by a curtain of flaming red, I reached ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 249 Despite the relative ease of entry afforded by the Mackenzie and the predisposition of local Inuvialuit towards European trade goods, the 11BC delayed its move into the far reaches of the Western Arctic until the second decade of the twentieth century, when it opened posts at Herschel Island, Baillie Island, Bernard Harbour on Banks Island, and Aklavik in the Mackenzie Delta. Even then, trade at these outstations grew slowly, easily surpassed by the busy commerce developing along the Mackenzie. In the Central and Eastern Arctic, whaling had also vanished, with the A. T Gifford making her last voyage into Hudson Bay in 1915. As if masterminded by some benevolent deity, the decline of whaling coincided almost exactly with a dramatic rise in demand and price for Arctic fox. It was a time when furs ceased being strictly an extravagance, becoming much more popular and affordable. The fox pelts were fashionable not so much as garments but as trimmings-collars, muffs, neckpieces, and floor-length stoles that dripped with heads, tails and paws. White fox was ideal for the purpose because, unlike beaver or muskrat, it had a luxurious appearance without being unduly expensive and could be dyed almost any colour, with light grey, beige and black most in demand. Although the market for Arctic fox was firmly established by the turn of the century, it took the Hudson's Bay Company the usual decade to react. Finally, in 1909, at Erik Cove on the south shore of f ludson Strait, which its out, caught her by the coat-collar and smashed my fist in her face," she recalW with obvious relish. "For the next few minutes, I thrashed the snivelling creature within an inch of her life, and sent her crawling and moaning back to the barracks with the warning that if, on any future occasion, she as much as dared mention my name this would be but an infinitesimal sample of what she would get the next time." 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 shore 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, Advertisement 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 trimmings 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 spawning 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 mass 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 shells while blue boxes were used for Dominion shells, 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 glass 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, buttons, 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-basement 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 brass, copper or later aluminum coins, had no monetary value outside the stores. (In 1926, the HB("s London Governor ruled that cash should be substituted 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 sexual liaisons between them. The Bay men's perceptions of these sensual assignations 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 sexual appetites. "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 sexual 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." "Of all the Bay men who came north in the last sixty years, Duncan Pryde was probably the best linguist and he gained an immense amount of respect among Inuit people," recalled Gordon Wray, an HBC veteran from Baker Lake who later became the Territories' minister of tourism and economic development. "But he destroyed himself because he did something that I don't believe he should have done. He wrote a book about his sexual dal- liances, and mentioned names. He was forced out of the North, and people said they would Ul him if he ever went back to the Central Arctic. Ile broke the rules. He was taken into Inuit life in ways that very few white men ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 265 ever are, and he used it for his own personal gain; he broke the code of iilence, and by using people's real names embarrassed a lot of people. Last I heard he was in London. He had lost an eye in a bar fight and was driving taxi." Each tale of sexual liaisons under the polar moon may have tallied with specific moments and local circumstances, but the notion that Inuit women could be bought and that they couldn't wait to climb into the white mens beds distorts the rigid Inuit code of sexual ethics. Marriage wa,-,-and is-at the core of Inuit societv. Men and women depended on one another not only for love and moral support but to carry out the division of labour so essential to the functioning of the Arctic family unit. Spouse-sharing did take place in the hunting days as a way of formalizing the sustaining alliances required for survival-less an expression of sexual licence than an essential social mechanism. "Far from being the casual and promiscuous affair that it is generally pictured to have been, 'wife-trading'was a very serious matter to the Eskimos," observed the American sociologist Ernest S. Burch, Jr. "We now know that it was an integral part of their system of marriage, which also included polygamous as well as monogamous forms of union. Both 'wife-trading' and polygamy, once thought to be manifestations of 'anarchy,' turn out to have been components of a complex but well-ordered system." An exception was "putting out the lamp"-a game played to relieve the tension of long winter nights. Nude couples shuffled about in their host's iglu until, at a given signal, they embraced the nearest person of the opposite sex.* And yes, in the early days Inuit did rub noses because kissing was considered unsanitary~ The smaller and flatter a girl's nose, the more desirable she was deemed to be. 266 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE "My experience with Inuit on the land suggests that itis difficult forone man to existwithout a woman," reminisced Commissioner Hodgson. "The man builds the snow house, looks after the dogs, hunts, traps, looks after the equipment and handles all of the chores outside the home. As the hunter goes, so goes the family. The woman does everything else: prepares the food, raises the family, makes the clothes, keeps the home, skins the animals, prepares the skins and so on. One can't make it out on the land without the other." "There are those that will tell you that the Hudson's Bay men were rapers and pillagers and there are those who will deny it ever happened. The real truth lies somewhere in between," Wray has pointed out. "Baker Lake is my home, and there are young and middle-aged Inuit whose features and mannerisms relate them to wellknown HBC men. As a Bay clerk in a northern post-and I was one-vou were, to a certain extent, the lowest caste or the lowest member of a caste system among the white community. There were two reasons for this: almost all of us were very young, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, while most of the other white people were professionals in their thirties and forties-missionaries, government administrators, managers, Mounties and so on. We had nothing in common with the other white people in the community. So the H13C clerks would gravitate to Inuit their own age. Most of us were Scots, and we very easily assimilated into Inuit society; it wasn't the other way around. All our friends were young Inuit men and young Inuit women, and naturally a lot of us had girlfriends. I mean, there was nothing else to do. "As a result, we became much more in tune with the goings-on within the Inuit community and because we were, that caused even more resentment among the older whites. There was this unwritten rule that the whites would stay together and have their own little parties and ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 267 mix with the Inuit only when business dictated it. And so that put us down even more at the bottom of the totem pole to the point where we wouldn't be invited to their get-togethers, whatever. Almost always the relationships we developed were with people our own age who were Inuit. I'm now forty years old and I came north when I was eighteen. This talk about people swapping wives and Inuit giving you wives, I never saw that. Inuit men were very jealous of their wives, and in fact a lot of the murders in the old days that went unreported were caused by jealousies. I'm not saying that it didn't happen, but it was rare. Even then, it was often done with sets of pre-conditions, and I don't think it was as loose as everybody made it out to be. But the Bay boys clearly had a bad reputation, no question about that. In fact, most selfrespecting Inuit girls wouldn't go to the Bay staff house until it was dark." The Compan) had many informal rules against its employees marrying Inuit women and on May 8, 1940, issued a policy directive to that effect that included a remarkably muddle-headed paragraph on the subject: "The Board also discussed the question of the line of demarcation to be drawn as between 'native' and other women, Fullbred Indian and Eskimo women would obviously be classed as 'natives', but the distinction to be applied as between these and half-breeds and other women whose blood-relationship to 'natives' is more remote still, would appear to be a problem." The young clerks served a five-year apprenticeship and learned to speak Inuktitut before being promoted to junior traders; if found incompatible with their surroundings, they were quietly dismissed. What they achieved upon promotion was a combination of freedom and responsibility. "So here we were," wrote J.W Anderson about his first posting, which received mail twice a year, "on our own in the far interior, with no 268 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE doctor and no means of communication with the outside world. We had to be prepared for all the hazards of life-fire, flood, famine, sickness and sudden death. This dependence on our own resources, and particularly inner resources, comes as quite a shock to the fur trade novice, though for my part I had made my peace with the country and its hazards during my first winter at Moose Factory." Anderson was fortunate compared to a trader named Charles Duncan, stationed at Payne Bay, where ice conditions were so bad it took two years to deliver a telegram notifying him of his father's death in a car accident. WHETHER OR NOT IT I LAD ANY CONNECTION with sto -ties of nocturnal goings-on, the northern service was the HBC's most coveted posting. For an employee of an enterprise steeped in history, being an Arctic hand revived memories of the HBC's glorious genesis on Hudson Bay, and even though they were strictly a twentieth-century addition, the northern stores were often referred to as the Company's "founding department." Running an Arctic post was curiously similar to being captain of a Royal Navy ship-of-the- line, constantly at sea. The Company's headquarters in London and Winnipeg were belittled as "home ports" where uncomprehending desk-bound "admirals" schemed to produce irrelevant, bureaucratic red tape. The naval analogy was heightened by the HBCs insistence on dressing up its Factors in blue blazers with Company crests stitched on left breast pockets and special caps to exhibit the wearer's rank. An interpreter's or junior clerk's headgear had only a red enamel IIBC flag on it; the flag on senior clerks'hats was surrounded by a cluster of gold leaves; post Factors or managers (as they were called after 1930) sported the flag and the cluster plus another spread of gold leaves ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 269 (known as scrambled eggs) on their caps' peaks. "It was really the comradeship that bound us together," recalled Scotty Gall. "You felt you belonged." Resident Factors derisively referred to anyone living South of Sixty as "on the Outside" and it was part of their rigid belief system that while they themselves spent most of their waking hours cursing the Company, any outsider who dared to agree with them did so at his own-often physical-peril. "The northern traders' loyalty had to be seen to be believed," noted Bob Chesshire, who was in charge of the northern posts during much of the transitional period to modern stores. "In some ways, it was a dangerous type of loyalty, because the Company could do no wrong, according to these oldtime Bay men." Bill Cobb, a Newfoundlander who joined the HBC as an apprentice clerk and retired thirty-seven years later as Deputy General Manager of Northern Stores, agreed: "God was the Company-and the Company was God. Let some outsider criticize the HBC and their life was in jeopardy." The Bay men knew no other life. When Cobb was at Rigolet in Labrador, the HBC employed a local cooper named Jim Deckers. He had spent his entire career making barrels at the post without ever bothering to collect his salary, though he had repeatedly been told there was a large savings-account balance available to him. "When the time came for Jimmy to retire," Cobb remembered, "he got quite upset and asked Ralph Parsons, Is that money you told me about still there?... When he was assured that it was, Deckers offered to buy the cooperage, just so he could keep working there. The Company allowed him to stay on the job till he died, and he never did collect his accumulated pay. An HBC Factor named Jimmy Bell was known as a character, even among the oddballs who populated this frozen outback. He served much of his time at Arctic Bay near the top of the Borden Peninsula on Baffin Island, 270 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE where he devoted himself mainly to eating. He could gulp down ten pounds of seal meat at one sitting with no effort at all, and as one observer described the process, "it disappeared into him just as if he were a polar bear." Bell soon began to look like a polar bear, so that his 350pound frame had to be lowered into his peterhead boat by block and tackle. Eventually transferred to Cape Dorset, Bell started to lose weight and vomit blood. He was diagnosed as having stomach cancer, but before leaving Dorset he told a companion that he wanted to be buried in the North. "When I die," he vowed, "my spirit is going back to Arctic Bay. That's the place I really love most. . . ." And that was exactly what happened. Although Bell was eventually treated at a Winnipeg hospital, where he died afier six weeks, and was buried in a nearby urban cemetery, from the moment of his death, Bell's ghost began to appear in the Arctic Bay staff house. Doors opened mysteriously, footsteps were heard in empty rooms, shadows moved along the walls, noises and moans sounded for no explicable reason. One night, the HBC trader who had taken Bell's place heard his kitchen dishes rattling, and, finally fed up, he yelled out, "Leave the goddamned dishes alone, Bell, and get the hell out of here!" That made Jimmy so mad he bounced the dishes right out of their cupboards. The phenomenon was eventually reported to the RCMP, which carried out a formal investigation, but they couldn't get their ghost. Bell's old shack had to be abandoned in favour of a new post building. The hardy stock that produced such dedicated eccentrics had previously generated the HBCs advance across the Prairies. They were hard-bitten Scots whose loyalty was beyond question even if their Company-supplied equipment was often beyond salvage-wilderness men who had more muscle than imagination and less introspection than courage. "They called us North Sea ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 271 Chinamen," recalled Scotty Gall, proud to be one of them, "because we iook the work cheaper than anybody else and we stayed with it. We were tough little guys; thev could beat us into the ground with a harnmer, and we'd spring up agam." Recruited as youngsters in the Orkneys, Hebrides and Highlands, they signed on for t" enty dollars a month to serve the FIBC by day or night, pledging to protect with courage and fidelity the prop- erty of the Company with their lives if necessary. The ~oungsters could be sent anywhere within the IIBC's dornain, but North was where they all wanted to go. A,part from the adventurous aspect of these postings, advancement was faster and the Arctic posts were far more informally run than the western or even sub-Arctic stations. Philip Godsell, who left an entertaining account of his twenty-year HBC service, was posted to Norway House not long after arriving in Canada. Although it was located three hundred miles north of "linnipeg, Norway House was not considered a north- ern post and was run in the old-fashioned way. "We lived in a sort of semi-feudal state," Godsell later reminisced. "At regular hours the bell rang and we paraded to the messroom. Here, with much pomp and ceremony, Presided the bewhiskered Donald McTavish, and although we were literally in the back of beyond, woe betide the person who appeared at table unshaven or without a white collar on. Once only I appeared with a spotted scarf knotted around my neck. Hardly was I seated ere I found myself transfixed by old Donald's astonishing and disapproving gaze. A string of expletives crackled off the old man's tongue as he demanded to know whether I considered they were all barbarians in this country. . . . I was forthwith ordered to proceed to my room and put a collar on." As late as 1912 at York Uactory, 1111C employees had to swear oaths of allegiance that obliged them "never to purchase any fur excepting 272 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE for [their] personal use, and never to betray any business information that might come into [their] possession." The local cook, a marvellous, earthy Mixed Blood named "Lame Annie" Redsky, best summed up the HBCs operational code: "Most masters of the Company's posts is lak kings.... Yo kin be birthed and died without [their] consent but dat's 'bout all." THEIR DOMAINS WF RE VAST IF NEARLY EMPTY, but within these icy realms the IIBC traders were kings. They acted as their subjects' shopkeepers, meteorologists, bankers, dentists, doctors and welfare officers as well as father confessors and, until the RCAIP arrived, administrators of justice. "When I was in charge of a post," declared Cornwallis King, who spent forty-one years with the HBC in the Northwest Territories, "if orders were good, I carried thern out. If not, I handled them in my own way. I was willing to be judged by results. Sometimes the orders from England were absolutely idiotic.* All right for London, perhaps, but no good in the Mackenzie River District fur trade. I did not look for credit for myself. If my own decisions brought the desired results, I let the honour go to the district London's suggestions included turning seal meat into dog food, processing Chesterfield Inlet inud into cement and building their famous boot-chewing machine. The traditional way to soften sealskin for boot -making was forlimitwomen tochewthe pelts until they were flexible enough to be sewn. This eventually wore their teeth down to the gurns', which caused them great difficulty in eating. The HBCs Development Department built A device to soften the I tides. It was base([ on the principle of an old-fashioned clothes v ringer and had brass teeth mounted in it. One of the contraptions was actually installed at Port BLInvell, 5ut it didn't work. ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 273 manager. We wereabove money considerations. We wei-e the Company [emphasis added]." The Company kept a fairly tight rein on its employees, with regular visits by district managers and inspectors, but the most potent self-regulator was the journal in which every Factor was obliged to document his daily rounds and busine~s transactions. Until the advent of radio and air travel, these diaries, kept in duplicate and forwarded annually to Winnipeg and London, were treated extremely seriously, so much so that on the inside cover of each journal there was pasted this admonition: "Your ability to keep this book in a neat and intelligent manner will be an indication of your character and abilitv as Post Manager " Some Factors grew bored and exas- perated with trying to describe each day's largely repetitious activities. When Pierre Mercredi ran Fort Resolution on Great Slave Lake, one of his jobs was to haul firewood with a team of oxen named Bill and Tom. For twenty-one days his Journal carefully noted the weather, how much wood was moved and so on. Each entry was virtually identical, and finally he could take it no longer. On the twenty-second day, his journal notation was reduced to two words: "Tom Balked." The Company bandied its staff with hard-fisted parsimony. "It was a pretty primitive existence," recalled Bill Cobb. "The ftirniture in staff houses was mostly home made, and some of the post manager's houses were real shacks." Architecturally, the worst example was the post manager's house at Repulse Bay on the Melville Peninsula. For reasons known only to himself, George Cleveland, who built the structure, reversed its windows so that they opened into the house and the windowsills sloped inward. That meant winter storm-windows had to be uselessly attached on the inside, allowing condensation to run into the roonis, where it froze. Local Factors vainly complained for decades that every winter 274 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE at Repulse Bay was a nightmare, but the faulty building remained in place. lb cheer up post managers' wives, who began to move north in the 1930s, the HBC allowed them to pick their own staff-house colour scheme. One stir-crazy lady painted the ceiling of her living-rooin black, a foot-wide border at the top of the walls white and the rest of the surfaces a shocking pink; another applied various combinations of mauve and yellow. These early Company installations had no indoor plumbing, and there were serious logistical problems with outhouses. Any hole dug into the frozen ground caused the permafrost to thaw and the opening to widen, so that eventually the whole flimsy structure would sink into its own cesspool. When William Duval, a Cumberland Sound free-trader who had become a hermit, died, the Inuit, who had liked the strange white man, thought he deserved a proper Christian burial. There being no wood in the area to build a coffin, they interred him in the only wooden structure available: his own outhouse. One area of significant discretion granted the Factors was the amount of credit they could allow various custoniers when Arctic fox prices were low and times turned bad. The problem was that no one could explain the basic laws of supply and demand to Inuit whose lives had come to depend largely on their ability to harvest furs. When fox prices at international auctions were at their lowest, the trappers worked extra hard because it took more pelts to obtain the supplies they wanted. That, of course, turned the classical supply demand equation upside down, since conventional wisdom would have required the trappers to hold their goods back until the market turned up again. Understandably, they had little idea of what governed the price of a fur that seemed worthless to them-but that the white men wanted without being able to decide exactly what it was worth. Stuart Hodgson ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 275 recalled how he once tried to explain the fluctuation in muskrat prices to an Indian on the Mackenzie. "One day this fellow came up to me and said, 'Commissioner, how come I only get twenty-five cents for my rats?' "'Well, I'll tell you, its like this. There's a guy In Paris by the narric of Christian Dior, and one day he decided women would wear H-forin dresses, w~hich meant using short-hair furs for trim. So orders went out to the London fur auction houses to buy seat, and the Bay told its post managers to set a lower price for longha I r rriuskrat.' "The Indian listened to the long-winded explanation with a stony expression, and shot back: 'Yeah, I know all about that. But how come I only get twenty-five cents for my rats?' "'Because that's all they're worth.' "'Well, why didn't you sav so in the first place?"' Because market prices and fox populations were both cyclical, on many occasions Inuit came into the HBC posts with no furs to trade or not enough pelts to obtain significant store credits. Some, if not most, of the HBC Factors responded with compassion, or at least as much compassion as was allowed within the limits of their headquarters-imposed credit lines and quantities of available supplies. But the extent of the HBCs generosity in those hard days before there was a federally sponsored welfare system remains an issue of active controversy. Charlie Watt, the fnuk who became a Canadian senator in 1983, has defended the Company. "When things were not going well, as they often did in those days ... the Hudson's Bay Company dispensed assistance to widows and people in need. Inuit were given per family per week: eight pounds of flour, half a pound of tea, half a pound of lard, half a pound of baking powder, two pounds of molasses or two pounds of sugar." 276 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE Others disagree. When he was Grand Chief of the Grand Council of the Cree of Quebec, Billy Diamond char-ed there was a graveyard ninety-five miles south of Rupert I-louse on James Bay where twenty families had starved to death because the local 11BC store would not give them credit. "The Bay would grubstake people," Stuart Hodgson maintained, "but they also kept good records and never lost a dime." Bernie Weston, a private fur trader wise in the ways of the North, argued that the HBc did carry starving people in off-season fur droughts, but that those who were helped later had to sell their pelts at whatever prices the Company set, even if it was less than they could get from competing traders. Peter Ernerk, a former president of the Keewatin InuitAssociation at Rankin Inlet and one of his people's more youthful spokesmen, put it this way: "The Hudson's Bay Company was necessary in our time as a trader of furs. It got rich from the native people in the North as well as throughout C anada and took advantage of the native people, especially in the area of furs, handicrafts and carvings. Inuit got very little return for their goods. It also lacked hiring native people, although this situation has improved in recent years. When I was growing up in Repulse Bay, which is my home town, I felt that. On the other hand, the Company provided a service which no one else was able to provide. So, from that point of view, it was positive. The Companv's staff also acted as j ack-of-a 11 -trades besides being traders. They provided medical supplies and also acted as paramedical doctors. This was good." Gordon Wray, the former Bay man who married an Inuk, is not as harsh in his assessment. "The missionaries were the ones who realtv changed people's ways and thinking," he claims. "When we joiiied the HBC, they said: 'The orily way YOU can serve your customers Is to understand that customer.' That's why they forced us ON THE TRAIL OF THE ARCTIC FOX 277 into learning to speak local dialects and how to run a trapline. They made our lives hard because they wanted us to understand the people we were serving. But they never tried to change the Inuit in terms of how they did things or how they thought or to stop the drum dances or any of that stuff * "The old people still have a lot of respect for the Bay. Some ofit was out of fear, there's no question, but also some of it was genuine respect because the Bay appeared at a time when the Inuit were in trouble; there was a lot of starvation. The Bav was seen to a certain extent as having saved a lot of Inuit people because the Company appeared on the scene with better hunting equipment that allowed them to get more food and they did a lot of early medical stuff. But there was a sort of a safety net around that didn't exist before. So among the old people, you'll never hear a bad word said about the Hudson's Bay Company. The younger people are a different story. To them it was just another store. But not among the older people. The Bay is much more than just a store, it's part of their life, part of their culture almost." Within two decades of its decision to seek a new empire in Canadas Arctic, most of the Company's infrastructure was in place and its business was reaching new levels of prosperity. Unaware that they were destroying aboriginal traditions in the process, the Factors who pioneered the HBC's northern service pointed with pride to the Inuit they had rescued from starvation. Closer examination revealed it was mainly the families of reliable trappers who were granted most of the store credit-and that the real reason for subsidizing them was that dead customers paid off no debts. CHAPTER 10 KILLING THE COMPETITION "To open up a store against the Bay, that was heresy. f Vky, you were committing an act against God. It was God who gave the Hudson's Bay that land!" -HBC Trader Bill Cobb THE WORLD OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY was not smaller, but it was faster. When Guglielmo Marconi tapped his first wireless telegraphy signals across the Atlantic in 1901, it was only a matter of time before prices at London auctions were instantly being flashed to posts in Canada's beaver swamps. Ever dependent on fickle fashion, the I-IBC faced the most serious threat yet to its long-establislied trading system, with independent operators able to move in and out of fur categories and, by taking advantage of the new advances in communication, turn over their capital several times a season. Installation of regular telegraph services shattered what was left of the Company's monopoly because it demystified the fur trade by allowing everyone access to the latest market information. At the same time, economic prosperity had returned to North America and stocks of luxury ftirs diminished as not only elegant women rushed to buy the glamorous garments but also men, driving the new open motor cars, wrapped themselves in enormous coats that made 279 280 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE F1UP(,tfASED IN CANADA 0 ON 0E T 0 B EA R I I I NRI I, TO rHF hk MNNipt VICTOR[i, CALGA~ VAWf)OVEP E "N T ON Advertisementfor HBC supplies for Klondike gold rush them look like pregnant mountain goats. "Growing numbers of fur buyers and traders, many of whom were Americans, were drawn into the Canadian north seeking new sources of supply," noted Arthur Ray, a University of British Columbia historian who specializes in the fur trade. Canada's northern edges-though not yet the Arctic-were being opened up through the Klondike gold rush and construction of railways towards Port Nelson on Hudson Bay and into the Peace River country. Traders and merchants poured into the Mackenzie River Valley and Great Slave Lake territory KILLING THE COMPETITION 281 so fast that the hamlet of Fort Resolution eventually boasted six retail stores, and Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca counted more than a dozen fur-trading posts clustered around the HBCs historic fort. Because these newcomers enjoyed much lower overheads and were not subject to decisions made by boards of directors on the other side of the world, they cut deeply into the HBCs established business. At the same time, consignment and mail-order houses appeared in Canada for the first time, buying and selling furs on commission, allowing competitors quick and simple entry into the trade.* Occasionally, the IFIBC deliberately-and deviouslycompeted with itself John Montague of North West River in Labrador recalled, witha touch of humour and an exaggerated accent, how he had once been fooled into selling to an "Independent," with unexpected results: "I remember one time for sure when I had quite a little bit of fur and there was this feller come from Cartwright. Martin he was, Jim or Frank, I fergits now. I thought this feller was a fur buyer, not from H13C at all. I took my fur to HBC and they priced it. I took my fur to Martin and he didn't offer me quite as much, but I sold it to 'en anyway because I wanted to encourage hirn to come back. After he was gone I found out he was buyin' fer HBC. That was wonderful funny." But more often, the competition was real, and it nearly drove the Company's fur business to the wall. *The impact of th(se innovations forced the FIBC in 1920 to abandon its 2 50-year-old policy of auctioning only its own furs and to begin moving consignment pelts as well. Competitors opened alternative auction houses in London (C.Al. Larripson & Company and k.W Nesbitt), New York (New York Fur Auction Sales Company), St Louis (international Fur Exchange), IA`mmpcg(FurAuctIonSaies Company), Vancouver (Little Brothers), Montreal (Canadian Fur Auction Sales Comp~uiy) and Leipzig ((;. Gaudig,", Blurn). 282 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE First to follow the 11BC into the Mackenzie district was Hislop and Nagle, which eventually opened twentvfour posts between Athabasca L,anding and Arctic Red River, built three steamships, and even had its own sawmill and engineering shop. James Hislop, a niathematician and civil engineer from Pictou, Nova Scotia, had gone West as a surveyor on the Pembina Branch of the CPR and later move~ to Edmonton. His partner, Edniund Barry Nagle, was a millwright who had served with the St Hyacinthe Infantr~ Company during the Fenian raids and had taken part in :\46tis buffalo hunts out of Fort Garry before joining Hislop in Edmonton. "They were considered outlaws at the time, because the Hudson's Bay Company behaved as if it still had a monopoly," notedJordan Zinovich, who studied the history of the enterprise. "When Mrs. Nagle arrived at Fort Resolution, the 11BC Factors and their wives would not talk to her. She was so socially ostracized that she had to bring in a 'professional friend' from the Outside." After harvesting fur worth $200,000, Hislop and Nagle in 1913 sold out to the Northern Trading Company of Edmonton, which eventually manned thirty-two small posts, obtaining financial sponsorship from London's A.W. Nesbitt and temporarily diminishing the HBC trade. When Nesbitt went bankrupt in 1919, Northern was pushed into receiN ership. A group of Winnipeg auctioneers led bv Max Finkelstein and fronted by Colonel J.K. Cornwail (the celebrated Alberta entrepreneur known as Peace Riverjim) obtained control and moved its headquarters to Fort Smith, but it never fully recovered and went bankrupt in 193 1; the HBC picked up its remaining assets. Lamson and Hubbard Corporation, Bostons leading fur dealers, arrived in C anada right after the First World War, erecting a dozen outlets on the Mackenzie and two short-lived Arctic posts at Chesterfield Inlet and Baker KILLING THE COMPETITION 283 Lamson and Hubbard employee R. D. Ferrier guarding winter suppliesfor Little Red River post Lake. The firm moved in like an invading army, or rather navy, launching an impressive sternwheeler (the SS Distributor) that shuttled between Fort Smith and Fort McPherson, two other steamers, a pair of large gas boats, several gas-powered tugs and a fleet of fifty twenty-ton scows. Within six years its heavy overhead sank the firm, with the HBC yet again absorbing the pieces. Several smaller trading outfits tried to buck the Company, but none succeeded. The most tragic attempt was that of a group of retired British naval officers who incorporated the Sabellum Trading Company in 1911 and for the next dozen years dispatched trading vessels to Baffin Island. One of their ships, the Erme, was blown up by a German submarine; another, the Vera, a forty four-year-old wooden Cowes-built racing yacht, proved comically unsuitable for Arctic voyages. Sabellum managed to land only one representative on Baffin, an elderly stone-deaf gunnery officer named Hector 284 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE Pitchforth, who starved to death in his ten-by-fifteenfoot shack at Cape Kater on the isolated Brodeur Peninsula during the cruel winter of 1927. The following year Sabellum sold its few belongings to the IIBC.* THEONLY SERIOUS LONGTERM RfVAL faced by the HBC in the North was Revillon Fr&res of Paris. Like that of the Nor'Westers who had challenged the Company's hegeniony a century earlier, Revillon's assault lasted for most of four decades and was led by far more enterprising spirits than the bureaucratic duffers who inhabited the 1113C'S middle management. Exactly like the Nor'Westers, Revillon ultimately failed because it expanded too fast, and its backers-unlike the Hudson's Bay Company, which had put aside adequate financial reserves and enjoyed access to guarantees from the Bank of England-were unable to withstand long periods of financial drought. A successor firm to the veteran (172 3) French furrier Franqols Givelet, Louis Victor Revillon's company had revolutionized the industry. It broadened the market by selling fur coats through drygoods shops. Instead of purchasing all its pelts from wholesalers, it established its own trading outlets to obtain the raw product from Russian and Canadian trappers. At the turn of the century, Revillon purchased a string of Mackenzie River posts from Colonel Cornwall, and also established half a dozen stores on the north shore of the St Lawrence and up the Labrador coast. *Another inglorious venture backed by British interests was the Arctic Gold Exploration Syndicate, inaugurated by Captain Henry Toke Munn, forinerly of Pond Inlet. Munn persuaded Lord Lascelles and othei s to back him in seeking gold on Baffin Island, mainly by showing thern art photographs he had taken of soine "naked Inuit girls reflected in pools." KILLING THE COMPETITION 285 Revillon's assault on Hudson Bay, planned for the summer of 1903, was predicated on impressing local trappers by installing one of its prefabricated stores beside nearly everv HBC outlet. The necessary staff and material were gat~ered in Montreal and loajed on the Stord, a Norwegian -built merchant ship, which promptly ran aground at Pointe des Monts in the Gulf of St Lawrence. To get into the Bay before freeze-up, Revillon chartered the 820-ton Eldorado, then employed on the London-Liverpool run, whose skipper, Captain William Berry, had never ventured beyond England's coastal waters. He successfully crossed the Atlantic, picked up the Stord's crew and cargo, then somehow muddled his way through Hudson Strait. The crew and passengers, numbering forty-seven, included Revillon's Montreal representative, a Monsieur d'Aigneaux, who was travelling with his wife, daughter and a governess, a doctor, four clerks and fourteen Quebec carpenters hired to erect the stores. Drawing a deep sixteen feet and carrying 1,450 tons of cargo, the Eldorado, her decks crowded with sections for the prefabricated buildings, lumbered into Hudson Bay bound for Fort George on the eastern shore ot'james Bay. After several close calls, the ship rammed a reef nine miles out of the settlement. "When the tide fell, she listed so badly that her decks became almost vertical," Third Engineer George Venables wrote in his journal. ". . . So serious were matters now that the captain insisted that the ladies, child, and other passengers should go in boats to Fort George, so as to be safe. It was "ell this was done, for on the Wednesday [September 2, 1903] a terrible storm came on, the ship bumped tip and down on the cruel rocks, and finally tore a great hole in her bottom, through which the water rushed in volumes. We saved wbat food we could, and, with some clothes, got away to an island ere the doomed vessel was lost." 286 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE Donald Gillies, the HBC' Factor resident at Fort George, counted the four dozen survivors and quickly realized his spare supplies would feed them for only two days. Ile lent them boats and advised them to hurry South to Charlton Island, where an IJBC steamer, the Lady Head, "as due to leave for London. After a hazardous passage the Eldorado's crew reached Charlton the day after the steamer's departure-which was lucky, because the Lady Head was shortly afterwards wrecked on Gasket Shoals. The unhappy travellers made their way down to Moose Factory in borrowed HBC lighters, then had to travel five hundred miles tip the Moose and Abitibi rivers before they reached civilization. It was a harrowing journey. "When we got tip each morning," wrote Venables, "it was invariabl~, to find that the blanket with which each person was provided was a solid piece of ice, as hard as iron, and we had to get it thawed and free as best we could. . . . We endeavoured to bake some of the flour into cakes each night; but as we had no baking powder you can imagine what the result was like. Our rations at best did not run to more than half a cake each per night, and wc began to feel very weak and ill from being so underfed and so much exposed." When they came out of the bush at New Liskeard, without having lost a soul along the way, a correspondent for the Toronto Globe who interviewed the survivors wrote that they had portaged their "lifeboats" around the rapids through a terrain "as unknown to the partv as if it had been in the heart of Africa." The mishap set back Revillon's Hudson Bay venture, but by 1908, with supplies brought in on the 2,500-ton icebreaker Adventurer, Revillon had seven posts on line, including a dock and warehouse at Strutton Island in the lower bay. The Adveniurer was eventually wrecked in Hudson Strait, but not before she helped erect other KILLING THE COMPETITION 287 Revillon posts at Baker Lake, Repulse Bay and the Belcher Islands.* The French concern eventually operated forty-seven Canadian trading posts, mostly concentrated in the northwest. The firm's huge warehouse in Edmonton, its stock supplied from Montreal aboard a special twenty- six-car freight train, became the Wests largest departinent store, offering everything from food products, china, fabrics and farin equipment to bronze bells and missionaries' chasubles. Revillon was soon doing annual business in excess of $5 million, including supply contracts for the Indian treaties and Mounted Police on the Peace and Yukon rivers, but like the IIBC it had great difficulty supplying some of its western land posts. To move goods from F-dirionton to Hudson's Hope on the Peace River, for example, required taking them by sleigh injanuary as far asAthabasca, where theywere stored for the rest of the winter. In spring they were poled over by scow to Lesser Slax e Lake, where they were stored again until the primitive road to the Peace River became passable. That oxcart passage was followed by another scow expedition to Hudson's Hope-the entire one-way journey having taken eight months. It was typical of the Bay men that, although they had lost their official monopoly in 1870, they still behaved more than a generation later as if they owned the *Revillon commissioned the explorer filin -maker Robert Flaherty to shoot Nanook oft& North on the Belchers and at Port Harrison during the winter of 1920--2 1. The first documentary of its kind to achieve world-wide distribution, the movie was an instant hit, so much so that Americans marketed a new brand of ice-cream called Nanook, while Germans sold Nanook ashtrays. Brilliantly shot and edited, the film helped perpetuate the stereotype of Inuit as happy victims of their environment. 288 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE country. "Only those who have worked for the Company," explained Philip Godsell, "can understand the feeling that existed against the average opposition trader, and the perhaps misguided sense of loyalty which would, literally, cause a Hudson's Bay man to push even his own brother to the wall if he happened to be trading in opposition to the 'Gentlemen Adventurers."' Bill Cobb, who traded against Revillon, echoed the thought. `16 open tip a store against the Bay, that was heresy. Why, you were committing an act against God. It was God who gave the Hudson's Bay, that land!" he recalled in mock anger forty-eight years later, adding, "I laugh about it now, but that's the way I felt-and still do, to some degree." In the field, competition between the two firms quickly turned vicious. Startled Inuit and Indians were treated to the sight of the only two white men in their settlements childishly squabbling over each pelt, spying on one another, outbidding each other's prices' It became standard practice for HBc Factors to decree that any trapper caught trading with Revillon could no longer sell to the Company. The Cree sensed this was a potent threat; then- name for Revillon was Tustowichuk-the "people between them and the Company." The French firm's post managers complained that their customers refused to trade in the daytime lest they be spotted by the HBC traders, who had ostentatiously trained telescopes on their competitors' front doors. Even at night, exchanges at the Revillon posts had to be carried out behind drawn blinds. Revillon's first managers were mostly retired French armv and navy officers and superannuated bureaucrats, more familiar with wine vintages than the crude ways of the Canadian frontier. ['hey underestimated their opponems and patronized their customers. The Bay traders KILLING THE COMPETITION 289 derisively referred to Revillon as "the Frenchmen" and were not above delivering some low slurs. One Christmas at Moose Factory, a Revillon trader was celebrating alone while there was a big party at the Bay post. The Anglican missionary R.J. Renison, later an archbishop, who was visiting Moose Factory, urged the Bay man to go over and invite his rival. After grumbling about the idea for most of a morning, the Factor, a litimourless Scotsman, agreed. But the Revillon man didn't show up. When Remson demanded to know how the invitation had been issued, the burred reply was: "I just asked him who won the Battle of Waterloo-any goddamned Frenchman should know that." Revillon eventually switched to recruiting in Dundee, Scotland. It signed on good men-at forty dollars a month, all found, twice the wage offered by the HBC-but its traders could not compete in the down cycles of the fur trade. Wallace Laird, who was one of them, claimed that lie had never been at a Revillon post "that showed a profit. The cost of goods was so high ... that a generous mark-up was still not sufficient to keep the posts out of the red." By the spring of 1925, Revillon's owners initiated discussions with the IIBC on a co-operative agreement that would reduce expenditures of both concerns. The contract, signed on July 17, 192 6, was in fact a takeover, with the HBC agreeing to acquire 51 percent of Revillon Canada for up to $918,000 during the next eight years. Ralph Parsons was named the HBCs representative director on the Revillon board; the French firm had Canadian assets of $2,981,214 and current liabilities of $879,642 at the tinie. There was no doubt about the HBC's motives for the takeover. "Arrangements should be definitely made, for the fixing of the prices of Furs and Merchandise at all Posts affected directly, or 290 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE indirectly, by the competition of Revillon Fr&res," stated an internal memo prepared for the HBC management. "These prices can be fixed periodically by the District Managers concerned, with Revillon managers. Competition between the companies for employees will be eliminated; thus eliminating salary increases unwarranted for any reason, other than the possibility of injury being done to our trade by a transfer of an employee." Revillon continued to operate into the 1930s as a quasi-independent entity. By then an exasperated Jean Revillon was writing to the HBc Governor: "After more and more consideration on the subject, we came to the final conclusion that the active management of the Hudson's Bay Company's Trading Posts: i.e. Mr Parsons and his subordinates, were so deadly opposed to any competition held out against the Hudson's Bay Co., even though this competition be afforded by the Revillon Fr&res Trading Co. in which the Hudson's Bay Company holds the majority of shares, that they did everything in order to crush Revillon Fr~res Trading Company and the conclusion reached was that it was preferable for this Company to have a single owner." When the Bay argued about the price it would pay for his firm's remaining assets, Jean Revillon didn't hide his anger: "We have good grounds to claim that the present state of Revillon Fr~res Trading Company is due to nilsmanagement on the part of your Winnipeg office," he wrote to the 11BC Governor. "The co-operation in the North, which was an important factor of our 1926 Agreement, and carried most weight towards our accep- tance of it as far as our interests were concerned, was not lived up to by your managers. The results have proved disastrous.... The assets of the Revil Ion Fr~res Trading Company have been stripped and laid bare to the bone, KILLING THE COMPETITION 291 which has been a m ise policy on your part, as it certainly favours your claim when establishing the price of shares." By this time, net assets had been reduced to $1,158,000, and the 1IBC' purchased all of Revillon's outstanding shares for $380,000. Liquidation of the French Ili-in's Canadian holdings was completed during 1937, with twent~-rwo of its seventy-three employees joining the Bay. There then followed a bizarre mop-up operation. The 1113(: didn't intend to stop at having beaten its rival; the Company wanted to obliterate Revillon's every trace, so that no other freebooter would again be pre- sumptuous enough to assume the North belonged to anyone but the Coiripany of Adventurers. "hen Revillon decampe,l, one of its district inspectors, a former French naval captain named jean Berthe, decided to remain in the Arctic as an independent trader. A highly civilized Parisian with a NA ry sense of life's absurdities, he found pleasure in the eternal solitude of the Ungava Peninsula and, gathering a few trading supplies, settled near Burgoyne Bay, on the south shore of Hudson Strait. The Hudson's Bay Company panicked. Determined to hound the Frenchman out of the North, Fur Trade Commissioner Ralph Parsons placed three of his toughest subordinates-Alex Stevenson, John Stanners and Bruce Campbell--in charge of mobile trading posts code-named U-X, U-Y and U-Z. The outfits were dropped at locations near Berthe's camp and loaded into peterhead boats, so that as soon as the French trader made a move in any direction an HBC post could immediately be set up near him to undercut his trades. Thev chased him for three months and finally cornered gerthe at Payne Bay, where the Bay men erected their instant shop to head off the Inuit trappers. After 292 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE two seasons of mounting losses, the French naval captain departed, his purse empty but his dignity intact.* The Revillon episode was a turning point. The Company won, but the cost had been high. The North, like the West, could not much longer remain the private preserve of any commercial enterprise. *A happier tale was the adventure of the American biologist Clarence Birdseve, who purchased Revillon's abandoned post on Sandwich Bay, near Cartwright in Labrador, for a fur-farm ing venture. He watched the catch of native fishermen freeze in -50'1,'weather, the inornent the fish were taken out of the water. "Alonths later, when thev were thawed out," he noted, "sonle of those fish A ere so fresh that they "ere still alive!" Appl i ying similar techniques to neats and vegetables, he graduall ' N, pcrt*Ccted the famous fro ,en food product,; that bear his name. CHAPTER 11 THE NASCOPIE CHRONICLES "Signifying many things to many people and, on occasi . on, everything to a veryfew, Nascopie acquired a unique personality endowed with almost human chai acteristics. -Henny Nixon CHIEF AGENT OF CHANGE in the Canadian North was not a man or a company, but a ship. On July 10, 1911, Lord Strathcona had commissioned construction of a 2,500-ton supply vessel from Swan Hunter of Newcastle-on-Tyne. The coal-burning Nascopie's unique design-her stern cut away like a yacht from above the waterline, a semicircular hull and undercut bow, every steel plate reinforced and slightly curved to deflect the ice-fitted the vessel ideally for the treacherous journeys that would earn her pride of place among the ships that altered the perception of Canada's northern geography.* Not precisely an icebreaker-though often used as one-the Nascopie was designed to open a seapath by sliding over the ice, then shattering it under her own weight. She had a bottom as smooth and rounded as that of a racing shell and no bilge keel, so that ice pressure around the sides would lift rather than crush her. Her bow was fitted *The Nascopie took her name from the Montagnais designation for the local tribe of Ungava and Labrador Indians, whose own name for themselves was Nenenot-"true men." 29S 296 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE with a "shoe"-a sturdy casing riveted to the keel plate that occasionally allowed her to batter ice formations until a crack appeared wide enough to sail through. "Signif~ying many things to many people and, on occasion, everything to a very few, Nascopie acquired a unique personality endowed with almost human characteristics," wrote Henny Nixon, an Ottawa maritime historian. .,\fter her maiden voyage across the Atlantic, the Nascopie was employed in the Newfoundland seal hunt before setting off on her first voyage into Hudson Bay and the Eastern Arctic. When she arrived at the Chariton Island suppl) depot near the bottom of the Bay, local natives, astounded at Nascopie's size, got balls of string to measure her 2 85-foot hull, and later they would stretch out the twine and explain to friends up the coast that the great new ship was "as long as that!" At the end of her 11) 15 voyage, with the GreatWar presenting new problems, the Nascopie was assigned to the BrestMurmansk-Archangel supply run and armed with a three-pounder Hotchkiss, a gun built in 1857 to help quell the Indian Mutiny. The ancient weapon's range was uncertain, but it made as much noise as a six-incher. On June 14, 1917, when the Nascopie was attacked by the German submarine U-28 off Archangel, she drove off the boat with four well-placed shots. Later that year, command of the Nascopie was assumed by Captain Thomas Farrar Smellic, one of the few mariners who had master's papers for both sail and steam. For most of the next thirty years he sailed the largely uncharted waters of the Canadian North, turning his ship and himself into a legend. "There may have been some 'luck' about it," wrote Roland Wild, the Nascopie's lively biographer, "but the happy partnership of Captain and ship was based on a much surer foundation. These partners knew one another, the), each had sturdy beginnings; you could say they had each been built by craftsmen, each knew the THE NASCOPIE CHRONICLES 297 Captain Smellie (right) aboard the Nascopie, zvith fur-trade bead Ralph Parsons, 1933 qualities and endurance of the other-they were as one, not Captain and ship, but a unit." The Nascopie made thirty-four trips to resupply the HBC's Eastern Arctic and Hudson Bay posts, bringing back furs, mail and rotating personnel, serving an area then not otherwise accessible. She went about her riskv business in waters virtually unmarked by navigational aids, sailing through latitudes where compasses were useless because of underwater iron ore deposits and proximity to the north magnetic pole. In parts of Hudson Bay, the earth's magnetism is so powerful that compass needles point nowhere except down; at the entrance to Pond Inlet, the earth's variation is more than 100 degrees, so that ships have to be steered 10 degrees east of north to be heading west. Available maps were so amateurish Captain Smellie once complained that if he followed the Admirolty charts at his disposal, his ship's position would be 150 miles inLind. The distances the 298 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE Nascopie had to cover in the briefseason of open water between the widely dispersed HBC posts were immense; each trip averaged 10.500 miles-Arctic Bay, then the northernmost of the HBC outposts, was 2,800 miles by sea from Montreal. Fach voyage was an adventure. Smellie was tough; he had to be. A steward who served under him recalled a hazardous climb to the bridge as the ship, battered by blizzards and waves higher than her funnel, seerned ready to pitch-pole. The steward managed to reach the captain and shouted in his ear: "Would you like anything to eat?" "Bowl of soup!" Sniellie yelled back. The steward laboriously climbed down to the galley, was instructed to carry the bowl not on a tray but in the hollow of a napkin held by its four corners, and climbed back up to the bridge, olmost losing the soup and his life in the process. Feeling that he had been miraculously spared from the elements to fulfil his mission, he proudly presented the still-steaming brew to his captain. Smellie took one look at the soup bowl and bellowed: "Where~ the spoon?" THE NASCOPIE'S JOURNEY NORTH from her berth in Montreal quickly became a ritual. Her decks, noisy with penned sheep, chickens and pigs bound for traders' skillets, also carried an occasional milk cow. Her holds bursting with supplies, the vessel was so overloaded that shipping officials and Smellie had to play an unusual game. "When the Port inspectors made their routine check before departure," Roland Wild observed, "the Captain would show them the port side first, and give a vague kind of opinion that the ship must be listing to port, since the Plimsoll Line was invisible. When the inspectors repaired to the starboard side, the ship must THE NASCOPIE CHRONICLES 299 have suddenly listed to starboard, for there was little sign of it there either.... Rather than order the ship to be unloaded of a hundred tons or so of vital cargo, they [the inspectors] seemed to have arrived at a remarkable conclusion: the Nascopie was a ship that listed on both sides at the same time." Fully loaded, the ship would sound her siren and, her pennants flying, cast off lines and steam half-astern to midstream. With all the ships in barbour blowing their salute whistles, the Nascopie would puff proudly out to the St Lawrence and set course for Labrador. Aboard would be not only HBC executives and post replacements but also red-coated Mounties, explorers, geologists, missionaries, doctors, nurses, postmas- ters and government administrators of every description. The ninety-day voyage was a race against tides and weather. None of the three dozen or so ports of call had a dock, so the ship anchored off each post while goods were loaded and unloaded from wooden scows. This could be tricky. The HBC's Archie Hunter recalled putting into Chesterfield Inlet on a rough day: "When we arrived no one from shore dared venture out to meet us, with the exception of one hardy soul. Out he came battling the white-capped waves in a Lac Seul canoe until he finally made it to the ship. I still remember his introduction of himself, 'They call me Crazy Mac but you ought to see the rest of them ashore."'* The fox pelts were brought aboard in bales of one hundred, stamped with each trading post's name and a silk-cloth destination label that read: "Beaver House, Great Trinity Lane, London, England." The day of arrival was very special as the residents of each settlement read their annual ration of mail. Then the Crazy Mac had bv this time been north with the HBC for fifteen years without a furlough. He left that season aboard the Nascopie, got off at Halifax, and promptly married a bishop's daughter. 300 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE The Nascopie loading at Charlton Island, 1933 stevedoring started. "At every port where we stopped," complained Ernie Lyall, an old Arctic hand, "we had to work with the crew and hump cargo all the time. I think that's about the time that 'Heavy Bloody Cargo' got tacked on to the HBC initials." Local Inult would help out, and some remembered the inagic of those occasions. "The sight of these great vessels entering the world where we lived made thrills go through our hearts," recalled Alootook Tpellie, a Frobisher Bay artist and carver. -This was during high tide and everyone worked as a unit, just like a circus setting up the big tents and other things to get ready for the opening night. There was laughter among the people, a sign of happiness which never seemed to stop as long as the ship stayed." The traders themselves held a less romantic view. The second-best day of the year was when the Nascopie arrived, they said. The best was when she left. THE NASCOPIE CHRONICLES 301 By early September, winter would begin to set in and the stops became shorter, the unloading even more frenzied. Smellie once steamed for an hour past the largest iceberg on record: an ice island a hundred feet high and ten miles long. In those pre-radar days he had to "smell" the presence of ice in fog or in the dark, and his ship didn't always stay out of harm's way. Smellie had three spare propellers on board, and whenever one was damaged, he would back his ship onto some deserted northern beach at high tide, wait for a tide shift, then change props. Heading north through Baffin Bay or into the riptides of Hudson Strait, ships had no protection from the grey swells, mountains of water thirty feet high, claiming the ocean for themselves. THE NASCOPIE'S IMMEDIXFE PREDECESSOR was the Pelican, a former British man-of-war and slave-chaser, purchased by the HBC in 1901. The 290-ton auxiliary sloop also beat off a German submarine (on August 26, 1918, off Cardiff) and continued in the Company's setvice until 1920. She was joined in 1905 by the Discoveiy, the heavily reinforced exploration barquentine that carried Captain Robert Falcon Scott's 1901-4 expedition to the Antarctic, which made the lost annual supply voyage to York Factory in 1914. Many a brave Company crew undertook the annual supply voyage, and the HBC even fought a major naval battle to protect its sea lanes, but many more vessels departed than returned.* The last HBCsailing ship to ply the Bay, the three-masted barque Stork, went down in a storm off Rupert House in 1908. Ice crushed the Bayeski~mo, while the Bayrupert piled up on Hen and *For Aetails of this epic se,.i eripgement, see Company of Adventarel'S, hardco% er, 1),,iges 12 0- 2 5. 302 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE Chickens Reef, on the Labrador coast.* The fifty-six-ton Fort Churchill, a ketch that arrived at York Factory in the late autumn of 1913 with a load of coal from Falmouth, England, was left unattended at anchor some distance up the Nelson River. She vanished during a three-day easterly -ale, onlv to be found two years later washed up on one of the Belcher Islands. The potential for east-west trade across the top of North Arnerica was first demonstrated in 1930. The 1113C , s schooner Fort James (built in Shelburne, Nova Scotia, as the Jean Revillon) had sailed out of St John's to spend two winters frozen in at Gjoa Haven on King William Island. When the 11BCs western-based supply ship Fort McPherson pulled in and anchored near her, it was the first time the North West Passage had been bridged-even if by mo ships-since Amundsens his tory-making crossing of 1903-6. In 1934, when the Fort James was transferred to the Company's western divl' sion, she went through the Panama Canal and eventually back into the North; she got as far cast as Cambridge Bay-only two hundred miles west of her 1928-30 win tering place. Had she closed that short gap, the Fort James would have been the first vessel in history to cir cumnavigate North America. Both the Fort James and the Fort McPherson as well as the Fort Hearne were later wrecked in Arctic gales. The Company's maritime experience in the Western Arctic wasn't much luckier. After several sinkings of chartered and purchased vessels, the HBC decided in *The H13C manager at ""olstenholme had put away his salary for years to purchase a piano, which went down with the Bayeskimo in 192 5. Two years later lie had saved enough to order a replaceruent, only to have it sink aboard the Bayrupen. He found a ncw hobby. THE NASCOPIE CHRONICLES 303 The Baychimo 1920 to build a ship specially designed for the job, the auxiliary wooden schooner Lady Kindersley. Her ribs were mounted so close together that with planking and sheathing the hull had an overall thickness of neariv twenty-two inches, while her how was reinforced witfi thick metal sheets. She sailed out of Vancouver on June 27, 1924, carrying not only a year's worth of HBC re-supplies but also a powerful government radio transmitter, due to be installed at Herschel Island. Imprisoned by the floes and hummocks off Point Barrow, Lady Kindersle-y had to be abandoned after a month of attempting to free herself. Other ships were assigned to the west-coast run, but few hulls could withstand the battering of the ice around Maska's northern coast. Originally built as a Baltic coaster and taken by the British as part of German postwar reparations, the 11BCs supply ship Baycbimo was the largest vessel to trade in the North West Passage. The 1,500-tonner succcssfully completed nine expeditions to 304MUESTFOR QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE the Companys eight Western Arctic posts, but on her return Journey in 1931 she got stuck in ice off Point Franklin, near Point Barrow. Since she was carrying a million dollars' worth of fur there was no question of abandoning her, but when the vessel seemed in danger of being crushed, Captain S.A. Cornwall ordered the crew to set up a temporary shelter on shore, two miles away. Although some passengers and 11BC officials were flown out by rescue planes, the captain and sixteen of his crew retreated to their makeshift dwelling to await a change in the weather, so that thev might free their ship. On November 24, a blizzard howled in. It turned so feroclous the sailors had to close off their little dwelling, huddling together for warmth and comfort, taking turns sitting next to the gasoline drum that had been converted into a stove. When they dug themselves out three days later, the Baychimo had disappeared. She was seen a few months after that drifting alone through pack ice by an Inuk travelling from Herschel to Nome. Two years later, the Baychinio was boarded by Isobel Wylie flutchinson, a Scottish botanist bound for Herschel aboard the schooner 'Trader. The ghostlv Baychimo had been sighted twelve miles off Wainwright, and the Traders captain had brought his little vessel alongside. "A strange spectacle the decks presented," Hutchinson later noted in her journal. "The main hold was open to the winds, but its half-rifted depths still contained sacks of mineral ore, caribou skins, and a cargo of various descriptions.... Writing paper, photographic films, ledgers of the Hudsons Bay Company, typewriter ribbons-all "-ere here for the taking! In a wooden crate was an unsullied edition of The Times Historv of the Great War in many tomes. Charts of all seas of the world lay scattered upon the decks of the pilot-house.... A breakfast irienu tossed in the doorway indicated that the crew THE NASCOPIE CHRONICLES 305 Of the unlucky ship were at least in no danger of starvation, for there was a choice of some six courses." The 7~ader's first mate determined that the Baychimo's engines were in perfect condition and that all she needed was to have her spare propeller mounted before she could sail away under her own steam, but the weather closed in and the visitors scrambled off the doomed vessel as fast as they could. The sightings continued. In 1936 Captain Parker of the cutter Northland pulled alongside, and in 1961 she was spotted by a party of Inuit between Icy Cape and Point Barrow. A DEW Line supply superintendent from Vancouver named Don Roderick reported seeing her off Cambridge Bay in 1965. That Mly ship--manned by ghosts or men-could survive the awesome force of the polar ice pack for three decades seems beyond reason, but the H13c's Baycbimo did just that, and since no one actually saw her sink, she may be out there still ... SCOTTY GALL, THP HBC TRADE R who had been one of the last crew members to get off the Baychimo, reacted to his ship's fate with the typical aplomb of a good Company man. "Pity," he said. "She still had twenty bales of fur on her." Gall was back north six years after the Baychimo disappearance on what would turn out to be the greatest sea adventure of his career. In the spring of 193 7, the Hudson's Bay Company decided to establish a connecting link between its western and eastern operations by building a trading facility in the Central Arctic at the bottom of Somerset Island~ on Bellot Strait. The new outpost was to be named Fort Ross, after the two British naval officers, uncle and nephew, who had first explored the area in the 1820s and 1830s. The Alascopie's itinerary called for her to pick up some Inuit families 306 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE Scotty Gall on theschoone7- Aklavik, 1937 at Arctic Bay for resettlement at Fort Ross, then rendezvous with the small (thirty-ton) schooner Aklavik at the eastern entrance of Bellot Strait.* *'Fhese were the same Inuit who had been uprooted from their homes at Cape Dorset, Pangnirtung and Pond Inlet by the HBC in 1934 and taken to Dundas Harbour, where the ice turned out to be too tough and thick for either sled or boat travel. In 1936, Dundas Harbour was closed and the Inuit were transferred to Arctic Bay. Now they were being displaced again. THE NASCOPIE CHRONICLES 307 No steel-hulled vessel had ever entered these waters, and no ship of any kind had been here since the visit of Leopold McClintock, the Irish-born Royal Navy captain who found documents and relics indicating the fate of the Franklin expedition while on an 1859 sledge journey from his ship, frozen in near the entrance to the strait. Bellot Stra It, where Fort Ross was to stand, had been discovered byJoseph-lZen6 Bellot, a French naval sub-lieutenant, poking around the North mainly because he was in love with S1rJohn Franklin's widowJane, and hoped to gain heroic status by finding her husband's remains. Barely na6gable, the strait was an important link in the North West Passage, dividing the Arctic archipelago frorn the North American continent. Scotty Gall, who spent forty-three years in the Company's northern service, had learned his navigation in the Mackenzie Delta. "I knew where all the reefs were; I'd hit every one," he remembered. "Some of the Scotsmen who came north were linguists, others studied the Inuit. I was much more interested in finding out how the aboriginals can travel without any navigation aids. I came to believe they have an inherent sense of direction, reading the sun, wind, snowdrifts or the lichen on rocks." It took Gall twenty years to hone his own instincts and crossing Bellot Strait was his greatest test. The passage is twenty miles long and often less than a mile wide. Eleven-foot tides flood in from its western end, causing an eight-knot current. just as he was steering the Aklavik into the strait, his engine (a 35-h.p. Fairbanks-Morse) failed; he replaced a faulty fuel strainer just as the little ship was about to run aground. The motor sputtered to life, but it would operate only at half speed. "The current was running pretty fast," Gall recalled, "and I couldn't get much way-on, so I turned the boat around, pointed my nose into the current, which 308 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE gave me more control against side-slips, and we went through the Bellot back-wards!"* At noon on September 2, 1937, Gall traded his cargo of furs for supplies abo,.)rd the Nascopie, then anchored at Depot Bay, just off the Fort Ross site. The transaction made Gall the first man in history to have turned the North West Passage into a commercial reality. He was not impressed. "It's all bunk about the North West Passage, it gives ine a pain," said he. "We could have done It any time, and gone higher north. But that was no advantage to us. We wei-e traders, and we went where the fur was. There was nobody to the north of us. What the hell good would it have done to run right through the Passage, when there were no Eskimos, and we didn't have any t--ade there?" The Nascopie had not found easy passage because Prince Regent Inlet, which leads to the strait, was choked with blue ice that year. She had a tight margin of only seven days in which to reach Fort Ross, establish the post, and steam out again to free water. JAV. Anderson and Paddy Gibson, a Chief Trader normally in the Western Arctic, went ashore to select the site, having *Known asacracknavigator, Gall also had tl ie reputation of being the worst cook among the HBC's northern hands. I le couldn't even make a pot of tea," recalled \Noodv "ood, one of his colleagues. "He'd eat all his meat raw because he was always hurq~ry and couldn't be bothered cooking it -though he usually killed the anintals first. I remember one time, Scotty shot an owl, and his wife cooked it because it was Christmas, and once served on a platter it looked a bit like turkey. When it was put in front of him, Scotty took one bite, and smacking his lips with pleasure said, 'Oy, it tastes like preniasticated Mouse meat to me.' I never had roast owl again." THE NASCOPIE CHRONICLES 309 first paid silent tribute at the cairn left behind by McClintock, the Admiralty sailor who had made five futile attempts to sail through Bellot Strait nearly a century before. HBC carpenter Clem James, aided by two Compariv traders, Lorenz Learmonth and D.G. Sturrock (who had arrived the same day after a harrowing journey from Gjoa Haven, mainly on foot, carrying a sixteen-foot canoe), erected a store, staff building and warehouse. By the evening of September 7, the work had been nearly completed and the HBC flag was raised over the Company's last new post devoted to the fox trade. Learmonth stayed behind (with interpreter-trader Ernie Lyall) as Fort Ross's first manager. The Nascopie landed her Inuit passengers, and just before she was due to sail away an I IB(,' hand named Donald Goodyear, incongruously dressed in a three-piece suit, topped off with a fedora (because he was on his way out on furlough), rowed himself ashore, determined to help Learmonth finish building the post. The Aklavik tooted her whistle and the Nascopie blew her horn as the ships parted, headed back to their separate oceans, knowing their meeting had made a four-hundred-year dream come true. On shore, Goodyear was waving his silly fedora and Lyall a dishcloth; Learmonth gave a salute. Fort Ross was in business. But not for long. In 1942 and 1943 unusually thick pack ice prevented the Nascopie from resupplying Fort Ross, then manned by WA. Heslop, his wife, Barbara, and a clerk named Darcy Munro, who also operated the post's new short-wave radio. "One evening in September [1943], we sighted the Nascopie about fifteen miles off shore," recalled Mrs Heslop. "We thought our worries were over; but it was not until later that we were to realize they were just beginning. For three days we saw her, or her smoke, on the horizon and it was evident she was 310 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE having difficulty in the ice-pack. That was an anxious three days, but we didn't give up until we finally saw her heading north with black smoke belching from her funnel."* Food was so short that both HBC men spent most of their time hunting. By November, a U.S. Army Air Forces plane was sent in to rescue the staff and leave food for the Inuit. The post was reactivated the following summer, but by 1947 it was clear that Fort Ross was too remote, too expensive and too risky to keep open. It was closed and its Inuit families were moved yet again, this time to Spence Bay, 180 miles to the south. Fort Ross vanished from the Hudson's Bay Companys rosters, but its memory survived. All those involved knew that they had for a brief time been part of a brave experiment on the very edge of the world. Lorenz Learmonth, long after he had retired from the HBC, managed to find commercial passage to Bellot Strait. For a week he rummaged around the ruins of that lonely little outpost, pining for the forgotten dreams of a land that seemed to exist north of hope. CAPTAIN SMELLIE RETIRED IN 1945 and was succeeded by James Waters, who had served as the Nascopies first officer since 1941. On his second run, during the early *Captain Smellie had intended to stay longer, but on the afternoon of the third day, a group of crewmen led by two Newfoundland lightermen confronted him on the bridge. They issued an ultimatum: if lie didn't turn the ship around by dusk, they would refuse to work it because they feared being frozen in for the winter. Smellie recognized the truth, if not the manner, ofthat advice, headed his ship back to sea, and did not Jay any mutiny char4es. THE NASCOPIE CHRONICLES 311 afternoon of July 2 1, 1947, Waters was nosing the Nascopie into Cape Dorset when the ship struck an uncharted reef off Beacon Island. J.W, Anderson, then in charge of the fur trade's Eastern Arctic Division, was aboard and vividly remembered the grounding: "Dashing out on deck, I could see what had happened, but the tide was falling and notwithstanding the reversing of the engines she stuck fast in a perfectly upright position. Well, I thought, if this is going to be a shipwreck, it is quite a civilized one. . . ." Another witness was Peter Pitseolak, a local artist who had customarily piloted 11BC ships into Dorset but on this, of all occasions, had been rebuffed by Waters, who thought he could outdo Smellie by bringing the ship in himself A few hours after the vessel went aground, the captain ordered everyone ashore in lifeboats, but the mood was still buoyant because it was a beautiful windless day and except for her ten-degree list to stern, the ship seemed unharmed. Anderson and the other HBC managers expected the lightened vessel could be refloated at high tide. Helped by kedged anchors, that was exactly what happened-the ship worked her way off the ree~. But in so doing, she grievously holed her hull. The Arctic waters rushed in, flooding her engine room. At 3 A.M. a gale came up, smashing the vessel into another rock. She was now down by her bow, her decks at a thirty-degree angle, her screw high out of the water, her bilge pumps useless. At 5 A.M. the order was given to abandon ship. Captain Waters, standing on shore watching his doomed vessel, asked one of his mates, a colourful Newfoundlander named Willis Warren, to go back aboard and rescue some warm clothes for his wife, who had been travelling with him. "Willis got into a dory Mid rowed back to the ship, climbing tip her stern on a THE NASCOPIE CHRONICLES 313 jacob's ladder that had been left hanging there," the I IBCs George Whitman said later. "This was all done to a gallery of smirking Inuit who had been watching the white men make fools of themseIN es, running their ship into a rock. Warren went below into the captains cabin, vanished fi)r a while, then stuck his head out a porthole and waving a pair ot"Mrs Waters's pink bloomers, yelled: 'Would these be what ve wants, Captam?' The assembly burst into laughter, with the Inuit dancing out their joy, jumping up and down, wildly clapping their hands. Then the ship lur(hed a little and Warren got out of there fast." The Nascopie remained poised on the reef for an incredible three months. Battered bv gales and ice, she showed off her seaworthiness one last time, finallv slipping under at midnight on October 15, 1947. Peter Pitseolak, Cape Dorset's Inuit pilot, quoted her fitting epitaph, voiced by his friend Kululak: "Our big helper lias hit the bottom." CHAPTER 12 NORTHERN GRIDLOCK "There was a big war It was between the Bay and the Germans. The Bay won. " -Octave Sivanertok A PAINTING OF THENATMTY that hung in the Anglican Cathedral in Aklavik until it burned down in 1975 depicted a crowd of Inuit celebrating the blessed event. Clearly identifiable among thern were a missionary, a Mountie and an Mc Factor. The theme and juxtaposition were entirely appropriate to the birth of the modern North except that in many of the really isolated Arctic posts, Bay managers frequently handled both spiritual and legal functions on top dtheir commercial mandates. "The real boss of each settlement ~A as the local Bay man," recalled Ed Spracklin, who served in half a dozen posts. "Everybody came to you for advice, even on family and medical matters. I was also acting as commissioner of oaths and registrar for family allowances." Bay men were not medically trained and their stores carried only such nostrums as Minard's Liniment, Dodd,s Kidney Pills, Perry Davis's Pain Killer (30 percent alcohol), Carter's Little Liver Pills and Gin Pills (which achieved little except to turn the urine green), but the Factors were often faced with medical emergencies. "One time, this Eskimo interpreter of ours at Cape Dorset got a nick in his left elbow, and it turned septic," recalled Chesley Russell, a 315 316 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE 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 bugger 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." NORTHERN GRIDLOCK 317 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 attitude was institutionalized 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 passage 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 quantities 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 Godsell 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. NORTHERN GRIDLOCK 319 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 Passage, 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 shifting 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 chore boys; and the great factors themselves ... once feared as demi-gods, were more often than not the objects of laughter and ridicule for their pompous manners and foolish brass 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 substitute 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 nobody 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 shipped 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 ship anchored off Amadjuak on the south coast of Baffin Island, the spot chosen by one of Stefansson's associates 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 ship 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 assessments 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 Nobel 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 ships 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 passengers who swarmed in every summer to take advantage of the journey, advertised as being "2000,1VULES OFF THE BEATEN TRACK."* Ships such as the Atbabasca River boasted a cruising speed of thirteen knots, electric lights, and luxury salon accommodation for fifty-eight passengers. 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 shore 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 passenger, 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 God!" NORTHERN GRIDLOCK 325 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 Hiroshima. 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 shores 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 shore of Lake Athabasca, while a Cominco prospector named Spud Arsenault 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" Dickins'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 associated 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." The first prospecting flight into the North had actually taken place a decade earlier, when Imperial Oil purchased two German-built 17 5 -h.p. Junkers monoplanes to supply drilling crews during the oil rush at Norman 326 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE ** %, 34 One of'Imperial Oil's 175-h.p. Junkers that made thefirst prospectingflight into the Arctic Wells. The monoplanes got only as far as Fort Simpson, where one of them crash-landed, breaking its propeller. The aircraft was able to take off again after an HBC car penter named NValterjohnson fashioned a substitute out of toboggan boards held together with babiche-glue distilled from moose hoofs. Those early bush pilots became reluctant heroes as they peered over the sides of their open cockpits to verify their bearings, nervously checking their watches against fuel gauges, adjusting their goggles, praying that the far distant dot on the tun dra for which they were heading was actually there. The Inuit, who had never seen a streetcar or automobile, could easily distinguish a Junkers from a Fokker, Norseman, Beechcraft, Gypsy Moth or Beaver, but as one of their elders at Chesterfield Inlet remarked when gaziDg for the first time at a flying machine, "That is a bad thing to know just a little about." In the tradition of the voyageurs who dared to tread where others only dreamed of going, the fliers, most of them beached vet erans of Great War dogfights, transformed the North. Probably the most enterprising pilot on those early runs NORTHERN GRIDLOCK 327 aI W.R. "Wop "May (rigbt) thikering witb bis BdIanca "Pacemaker, " Fort Chipewyan, 193 3 was Leigh Brintnell, whose tiny Mackenzie Air Service won the government mail contract for most of the Western Arctic. His arrangement with Ottawa called for hini to be paid according to how many pounds of mail he delivered to each settlement. lie had been granted the contract by drastically underbidding his rivals, who were certain he couldn't make a profit on existing traffic. They were right. But that didn't stop Brintnell. He purchase~ airmail subscriptions to the Edinontonjournal for nearly every log shack along the Mackenzie, automatically increasing his payload and trebling his income. WR. "Wop" May, who had duelled with Germany's Red Baron and flown under the Ifigh Level Bridge at Edmonton on a bet, became the first idol of Canada's air age, closely followed by Punch Dickins. With its customary foresight, the IIBC refused to participate in a new scheduled air service between Edmonton and the Mackenzie Valley. But it did employ Dickins on contract to fly bales of fur out of Fort Good Hope and in the winter of 1930 financed him on a medical mercy mission into Coppermine. The Companv 328 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE purchased its first plane-a twin-engined Beechcraft equipped with wheels, skis and floats-in 1939, only eleven years after nearly everyone else in its territories had taken to doing business by air. Paul Davoud, the 14B(I's first pilot, calculated that George Simpson's eighty-four-day dash by canoe in 1824 on his famous inspection tour from Lachine to the Pacific would now take only ten hours. Davoud flew I IBC executives on their first aerial inspection tour in the summer of 1940, much to the unwelcome surprise of local store managers, used to getting warnings of visits by Company brass via the staff moccasin telegraph. "We landed at Fort Resolution at five in the morning," Davoud recalled. "The post manager, with about a five days' beard on him, was down on the dock, scratching his belly, wanting to knoA who I had aboard. When I told him I had 'the works'--the chief of the fur trade, head of Canadian operations, and the Governor, over from London-he groaned and was sure he'd be fired. He wasn't, but I don't think he was the same man after that." When the Beeclicraft set down at Fort Rae, one of the local aboriginals was shown through it. Pointing at the plane's luxurious fittings, an HBC executive asked the visitor whether he admired the white man's marvel. "Sure," was the laconic reply. "We paid for it." An incursion into the North of a very different sort was the railway built to Churchill, on Hudson Bay. Proponents of the railroad claimed that exporting grain through the Bay would force the cm to reduce freight rates and cut the cost oftrans-shipping Liverpool-bound goods at Montreal. The project had been kicking around Parliament since 1884, awaiting funds and legislative sanction. Nine charters were approved, but actual construction didn't start until 1910. The line was originally planned to terminate at Port Nelson, near York Factory, and a $6-million, seventeen-span steel bridge was NORTHERN GRIDLOCK 329 erected to a man-made island, where the new harbour was to be built. The First World War intervened, and when the railwa~ was finally completed in 1929, Churchill was its terminus, leaving Port Nelson abandoned, the sub-A-rctic's most expensive white elephant. Iwo years later, the Farnzvortb, a tramp steamer out of Newcastle-on-Tync, loaded Churchill's first commercial wheat shipment. For a time the harbour handled general goods, but soon its only customer was a reluctant Canadian Wheat Board, and the dream of building an ~Ilternative grain-export route faded.* The failure of Churchill was partly due to its inauguration on the eve of the Depression, which also cut deeply into lIB(. profit and the fur trade in general. Arctic fox prices declined as much as 800 percent, and silver fox pelts plummeted in valut from $450 in 192 0 to only $9 by 193 9. The problem with i hat luxurious variety was not only the Depression but the new customers it attracted. Nearly every prostitute in London and Paris suddenly decided she couldn't successfully walk the streets unless she was decked out in a silver fox stole-and with more and more tarts adopting the f ur as a badge of office, the bottom fell out of the market. The Depression cut severely into Company budgets. Operational costs were dramatically reduced b~ the closing of a hundred stores. At one Arctic settlement, coal rat ions grew so short that the HBC manager had to dismantle and burn his warehouse to keep warin. The HBCs presence in the Western Arctic was -rhe train from Winnipeg to Churchill was still operating in the 1990s, but in a typical year it attracted only 5,616 passengers, so that a $1 1.5-million annual federal subsi~v-or $2,047 a passenger for its thirtA -four-hour run-was required. Adam Corelli of the Financial'Dynff oj'Canada calculated that the same trip in a rented Mercede~ limousine m ould cost only S 1,566-if onlV there were a road. 330 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE reduced to only three posts: Coppermine, Cambridge Bay and Tuktoyaktuk. The Depression only aggravated the Company's less than generous staff policies. Post managers were usually moved to lower-paying positions for the last few years of their tenures, so that the pensions due them, caiculated asa percentage of thei r final years'pay, could be reduced. But the HBC's management did come up with the occasional generous and humane decision. When Hugh Mackay Ross was appointed manager of the Saskatchewan district, he wanted to pension off Jock Mathieson, the veteran post manager at Beauval, who hadn't man), years to go in the service and was the main stumbling block to Ross's reorganization plans. Ross sent his recommendation to the Company's Canadian hejdquarters, where his request for removing the old trader was denied. "They had carefully studied Mr. Mathieson's dossier," he later recalled, "and had concluded that because his son was attending the local school, it would be a hardship for the family to be si2nt where no school was available. They further concluded that Mr. Mathieson's abilities as a competent post manager had always been in doubt, but no action had been taken by the Company. The fault, therefore, was the Company's, and not Mr. Mathieson's, and he should remain at Bea uval until he reached Ul retirement." Ross pondered the ruling and after his initial disappointment had to admit that it was a wisc decision, one that inade him feel proud to be a "Bay man." About the only improvement the Company made to its northern facilities during the 1930s was installation of short-wave transmitters that for the first time connected the isolated outposts with each other and the outside world. Except for the annual supply-ship visit and the occasional winter dog team, the Company's servants received no personal or corporate news until these radios NORTHERN GRIDLOCK 331 HBC clerk Charles N. Stephen, with radio equipment at Lansdowne House, 1941 were installed, starting with Arctic Bay, Leaf River, Cape Dorset and Cape Smith in 1937.The twelve-watt Morse code sets were powered by windmill -operated generators and twelve-volt storage batteries that were nursed like colicky babies, kept warm by claiming the place of honour behind each staff house stove. The network grew to fifty-four stations-the country's largest-and was eventualiv converted to single sideband, and later to voice and radio telephones. A more daring departure was the first modern Canadian beaver preserve, established near Rupert House on James Bay. The areas beaver ponds had been almost totally trapped out, leaving the Cree with nothing to trade, when the local I IBC manager, James Watt, and his wife, Maud, persuaded Company authorities to leave the few remaining beaver houses alone, so that the 332 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE animals would have a chance to multiply. Quebec designated a 7,200-square-inile beaver sanctuary, which was so successful that by 1940 trapping could begin again. During the Second World War several northern locations were used for temporary airfields, as staging areas for military inanoeuvres and for Ferry Command operations. The largest undertaking was the great Canol pro- ject, which piped oil from Norman Wells on the Mackenzie River six hundred miles to a refinery built at Whitehorse for use in the North Pacific theatre of war. As the Arctic expert Graham Rowley noted, "In a country where old lard pails had been treasured, 45-gallon drums, not always empty, were discarded." One measure of the HBCs dominant influence among the Inuit at that time was this description of the Second World War, given by Octave Sivanertok of Repulse Bay in a 1979 interview with the CBCs Lorna Kusugak: "There was a big war. It was between the Bay and the Germans. The Bay won." Yet in at least one way, the war years were merely an extension of the Depression. The Canadian government, pressured by more urgent priorities, perpetuated its benign neglect of the North. What changed all that was the precipitous dive of white fox prices from thirty-five dollars to three dollars between 1946 and 1948. With their only cash crop all but wiped out, the Inuit found their social and economic framework altered. They had abandoned their hunting ethic to become trappers, and now, cut off for at least a generation from living off the land, they could not subsist on the low fur price~. Epidemics of such white men's illnesses as measles, influenza, tuberculosis, diphtheria and venereal diseases were spreading across the North. Families were starving and sled dogs dying, further reducing the ability of the Inuit to hunt. There were some work opportunities, such as the opening of a nickel mine at Rankin Inlet, which operated between 1957 and NORTHERN GRIDLOCK 333 1962, employing tip to eighty Inuit, and construction of the ninety-eight Distant Early Warning stations across the North in the mid-1950s. But they were too limited to have much impact. According to a 1960 survey, only 307 Inult (out of a total population of about 12,000) had jobs that year, and only 63 of thern worked for non-government agencies: 58 for North Rankin Nickel Mines Limited, 2 for missionaries and 3 for the Hudson's Bay Company. With such narrow employment opportunities, the Northerners grew increasingly dependent on government welfare. As Ottawa becarne more concerned about their ability to survive, the Inult themselves were being urbanized, ,i process that significantly raised their individual and collective aspirations. Paradoxically, the most significant of these urbanizing influences was tuberculosis, which at one tirne afflicted a third of the Iriuit population. "Fridentic upper respiratory diseases like tuberculosis, emphysema, an(] bronchitis motivated movement of the people into white mens settlements, mainly to hospitals in the South," recalled R.G. Williamson, an itrithropologist at the University of Saskatchewan. "Ne-A, lifestyle expectations were created during their tirne at the treatment centres, as theN watched television and visited white people's hoines in Winnipeg, Brandon, Hamilton,Toronto, and Montreal. As material expectations were raised, the Hudson's Bav Company had to modernize its merchandising metho(fs and expand its lines. It begart to stock tailor-made cigarettes and moved Ironi selling mainly high-protein foods to such high-carbohydrate (and high mark-up) items as sweet biscuits, soft c(rinks, candv, and other funk foods. That w,,is a big change to the old fur trade posts, where keeping 2 ' 2-inch rialls in stockA as thought to be a bit of ~1 luxury." As the economic plight ofthe Inult developed into a political issue and it became evident that the fur trade 334 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE could no longer sustain them, Ottawa inoved north with a vengeance, formally accepting the fact that education and welfare were its responsibilities. Well-intentioned teachers, nurses, doctors, welfare officers and adminis- trators galore arrived in the Arctic. To itionitor the behaviour of the new arrivals, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police increased its northern presence, being charged, among other duties, with distributing family allowances and old-age pensions.* Government handouts were *Some of their patrols were aniazingly infrequent. ",lien an RC.MP constable arrivcd in the Belcher Islands on April 11, 1940, it was the first police visit since 1919. Official calls too "ere rare. "When I went to the Belchers in 1969," said former Commissioner Stuart 11odgson, "it \A as the first public meeting that had ever been held there. As I recall, it was in a little oneroom schoolhouse that had been dumped offin the southern end of the Belchers rather than the north. As a consequence, a few houses were built for the local people, as their children were going to school. Essentially, the main settlement was in the north end of the island. In any event, the meeting started about six o'clock and by midnight there were only myselfand the interpreter left. The rest ofour party had retired. At 2.00 A.M. as the meeting de,~ eloped into a sort of lull, I asked the people (all the locals were there-grandparents, parents, children and babiesthe entire settlement) if perhaps they would like to adjourn the meeting and they said, 'Oh, no.'At 2.30 1 again put the question to them, 'Have you anything more to talk about?' and they said no. I said, 'Well, perhaps we should adjourn the meeting,' and they again replied no, to which I said, 'Why not~'The reply was both astounding and humorous. They simply said that they had never had a meeting before and they thought it was a lot of fun. I was up the next morning at six o'clock. We had breakfast and left at seven to see the people at the north end of the island. When the plane landedand I opened the door, I was astonished to see the same people. They asked, 'Are we going to have another meeting?' The~ had travelled fifty miles overland that night in order to be there for another meeting." NORTHERN GRIDLOCK 335 4 Nurse at work in the Arctic issued not as cash, which was still not a generally accepted means of doing business in the North, but as entries in RCMP ledgers. The police would itemize precisely what goods the people could receive and send the tally over to the FIBC store, which then handed out the merchandise. A typical 1945 monthly family ration consisted of fourteen pounds of flour, a pound of tea, three pounds of sugar, three pounds of rolled oats, two pounds of rice, six packages of Pablum and a gallon of coal oil. Not much to build a dream on, but better than starving. The notion of 336 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE receiving goods free from HBC stores that had previously traded them for furs was disturbing and not always understood. -The Mountie told me I could go into the trading post and buy anything I needed because I had family allowance," recalled Matthew Innakatsik of Baker Lake. "It didn't make any sense because I had never received anything for free before and I was afraid to do it." The combination of nervousness about Canadian sovereignty, the paranoid influences of the Cold War, which gave the Arctic unexpected strategic significance, and the growing awareness in southern Canada that the Inint were severely deprived lent impetus to the government's involvement. Free match-box houses were provided for Inuit families in the main settlements, with electricity and water at nominal cost. The North became fashionable. Experts arrived by the hour, it seemed-scientists and human manipulators, all eager to carry the white man's burden. Minnie Aodla Freeman, a wonderfully wise Inuit from Cape Hope Island, summed up the effect of the influx most succinctly when she commented that the ideal Arctic *Relations between the Mounties and IDuit were not limited to u elfare. "Almost all the single RCM Policemen had native girlfi-iends," observed D-1- Cooch, a Canadian government ornithologist who specialized in on-site Arctic studies. "It was no big deal. But I remember being told about a young constable posted to Pond Inlet who was a very fastidious individual and apparently afraid of women, behaving like a bashU monk. One time, when his senior colleague had to go on patrol to Arctic Bay, he was out about five hours when he remembered something and went back. He could hear noises from the ground-floor bathroom, so he looked in and there was the monk in the bathtub with one of the local girls, scrubbing her back. There was a candle and a bottle of wine beside them and my friend, Cliff, said he didD't have the heart to walk in and disturb them." NORTHERN GRIDLOCK 337 family now consisted of a husband and wife, four children and an anthropologist.*: After 1960, fainilv allowances and old-age pensions were sent directly to the intended recipients. Not only (lid some managers insist that old debts be paid before they extended any credit to their customers (a policy the Company claimed was not contained in their directives), but natives who dared send order forms to Eaton's catalogue department or any other competitor claimed their letters were occasionally mislaid. Even when orders did get through, usually on a cash- on-de livery basis, they could not always be claimed. Jean Godsell, whose hushand was stationed with the JIBC in Fort Smith, recalled a typical scene when the long-expected mail-order goods finally arrived and the customers came to collect them: "One by one, they appeared at the wicket, their dusky faces wreathed in simles which soon turned to black anger when they found they could not take the parcels off in debt, as was the case with the trading stores. . . . Naturally, most of the parcels went back, but others came in on the next plane; still more came in on the steamer, and it was quite soine tirne ere the mail-order houses realized that Marie Chandelle, Rosalie Squirrel, Elsie Lame-Duck et at. were not, despite their substan- tial orders, the type of customers they desired."t She married one- -Milton Freeman, a professor of anthropolo.*,, at the University of Alberta-and went on to write some of the best of the northern books, including SuTvival in the South and Life Aniong the Qallunaat. tThe men had their own problems with mail-order catalogues, especially those pages featuring womens underwear. One trapper, gazing with fascination at the suggestive layouts,wrote awaV for "the lady on the far right of page 59." 338 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE Best of the newcomers to the North was James Houston, a Toronto artist who spent fourteen years on Baffin Island under contract to the Department of Northern Affairs, teaching the Inuit how best to market their soapstone creations. Carving, an intrinsic skill of the tnuit, had been used to fashion out of bone, stone and ivory the snow goggles, parka toggles, harpoons, arrowheads, ice-chisels, spoons, fish spears, talismans and toys that were part of their everyday existence. In 1949, Houston, assisted by Norman Ross, the HBC store manager at Port Harrison, collected a test group of Inuit carvings for the Canadian Handicrafts Guild in Montreal, which successfully sold the items. Gradually a market was built up for the best of the pieces. After a false start trying to produce bookends, ash trays and such, the carvers, under Houston's guidance, let their imaginations soar. By the late 1950s, the carvings had achieved international stature. The work was so successful partly because the carvers' own longing for a return to their ancestors' hunting days, expressed in their art, coincided with the southern buyers' romantic notions of what "Eskimos" were all about. The native artists responded to the material they were working. Their sculptures were not as much artistic as ritualistic, the crystallization of moments in time. "These are not cold sculptures of a frozen world," Houston noted. "They reveal to us the passionate feelings of a people aware of all the joys and terrors of life. They also reveal an enormous freshness and ingenuity, a hunter's sense of observation." Once the soapstone trade was established, Houston and his then wife, Alma, moved to Cape Dorset. "Oshaweetok, a famous Eskimo carver ... sat near me one evening casually studying the sailor head trademarks on two identical packages of cigarettes," Houston later recalled. "He noted carefully every subtle NORTHERN GRIDLOCK 339 Artistand novelistjanies Houston detail of color and Jorm, and he suggested to me that it must be tiresome for some person to sit and paint everV one of the little heads with exact sameness on an endless number of packages.... Looking around to find some way to denionstrate printing, I saw an ivory walrus tusk that Oshaweetok had recently carved. . . . Taking an old tin of writing ink that had frozen and thawed many times ... I dipped up the heavy black residue and smoothed it over the tusk. Taking a thin piece of toilet tissue, I laid it carefully on the inked surface and rubbed it lightly and quickly. Stripping the paper from the tusk, I saw that by good fortune we had a clear negative linage of Oshaweetok's incised design We could do that,' he said. And so we did." That was how Cape Dorset's block printing and sealskin stencil printing industry was born, 340 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE its evocative images later gracing museums and private collections the world over. By 1960, the HBC was buying forty tons of "Eskii-no" carvings a year for resale in southern Canada.* The prints and carvings grew so profitable that the following year a native-run West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative was opened at Cape Dorset to market the art. Nineteen similar outlets were soon opened in other communities, over stern protests from the HBC. "They were strongly against the move," recalled Ben Sivertz, then Commissioner of the Northwest Territories and a co-op advocate. "But the Eskimos took to it like ducks to water. We didn't have to tell therri what to do. They took over from the Hudson's Bay post manager the business of setting carving prices. Jim Houston told me lie was away when it happened, but when lie got back to Cape Dorset he was invited to a rneeting where everybody brought in their carvings. Each one was put on a table and all the carvers wrote down what they thought it should sell for,- they then averaged that out, and that was the set price. They did that on their own in place after place. The pieces were sent to Ottawa, where we dis- tributed them to the Handicrafts Guild and other merchandisers-in San Francisco, Paris, London and anywhere. The money was then sent back to the carvers, and that in fact was how cash on a large scale first came *A less serious Company sideline was the U-Paddle Canoe rental service for adventurous holidayers who wanted to spend part of their summers following the trade routes of the voyageurs or exploring the wilder shores of the continent's sub-Arctic rivers. The Company purchased twenty-eight seventeen-foot aluminum canoes in 1964 and distributed them to posts at likely locations. There were enough rentals (at twenty-five dollars a week) to allow the H13C to break even, and by the time the U-Paddle service was abandoned twenty years later, the Company had a fleet of eightvcanoes, renting for a weekly $125. NORTHERN GRIDLOCK 341 'rhe Hunt, mgraving b.yjuanisialzi, 190 to the North-though it still had to be spent in Hudson's Bay Company stores." As retailing competition grew more intense, so did the scrutiny of the IIBC's methods and mark-ups. The Company maintained that its objective for mature northern stores (those established five years or more) was a 23-percent return on net assets (before interest and taxes). Some outlets exceeded that average and many others, particularly in the more remote areas, fell below it because of higher transportation costs. Testifying before the Northwest Territories Council on 342 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE May 27, 1981, Marvin Tiller, then head of the HBCs northern operation, gave a rare insight into corporate pricing policies. The retail price of non-perishable goods, he stated, included a mark-up of up to 25 percent on top of landed costs, with the margin rising to one-third on most perishable items. He pointed out that stock in the North turned over only one and a half times a year, compared with eleven or twelve times in the South. Instead of trying to refute the accusation that perishables at the HBC's Frobisher Bay store were selling at 70 percent more than comparable items in Montreal, Tiller boasted that "to lay down fresh produce in Frobisher .)t only 70 percent more than Montreal prices is, in our view, a remarkable achievetnent of planning and organization." Goods at the HBC stores were-and are--expensive, but most of the added margin is accounted for by transportation costs. In 1981, a five-pound bag of potatoes at Pond Inlet, for example, sold for a ridiculous $7.10. But its actual freight cost was $5.15. "We are probably regarded as large and prosperous frorn money made out of the natives," Dick Murray, the IIB(:s managing director, complained in 1966. -The fact that in ninety-eight cases out of one hundred our men are able and dedicated, and work under conditions that most Canadians would refuse to work under for any length of time, is simply not taken into consideration." perception of the I [B(: was changing. Clearest summary of that evolution was the observation of Adrian Tanner of Memorial University, writing in Queen's Quarterly. "When I lived in an Arctic trading post community in the late 1950s, where trade with the Inuit was still conducted using Hudson's Bay Company tokens rather than cash, the two subjects which we learned to avoid at the segregated social gatherings of the white inhabitants were religion and impact of the Hudson's NORTHERN GRIDLOCK 343 Bay Company on the native people. We who did not work for the Company found it remarkable that all Hudson's Bay employees, from the old-time traders to newest clerks who had just arrived from across the Atlantic, had a staunch and unquestioning loyalty to their employer and its past actions, and that when a subject like this was raised they seemed to quickly be reduced to irrational argument and wounded feelings. ... By the time I went north again in the mid- I 960s the Hudson's Bay Company fur trade and its effects on the native people had become something of a dead horse which the Canadian public was only too willing to flog, thanks to authors like Farley Mowat, and to some of the native political leaders. However, my own attitude to the recent situation, if not to the past history, had by then become less harsh. The Hudson's Bay Company's oper- ation of its contemporary monopoly in the north seemed to be a model of benign responsibility, in comparison both to the European exploiters in other parts of the colonial world, and to the other 'marginal men' who were by then taking over power in the communitiesgovernment administrators, policemen, missionaries and teachers." *One of the major changes in the Arctic was the introduction in 1960 of legally sold liquor. Previously, with no legal booze available, some of the more desperate Arctic hands, both aboriginal and white, had been swilling Aqua Velva after-shave lotion, Lysol or anti-freeze. HBC employees for a while enjoyed a tastier and more literary potion. Because the ink used by store mana,,ers to mark ledger entries kept freezing in their unheated stores, an enterprising Boston manufacturer introduced a new variety of red ink that contained so much alcohol it didn't turn solid. Once the H13C field hands discovered they could drink the stuff as well as write with it, orders for the scarlet concoction multiplied rapidly But the Company caught on and went back to filling inkwells with less delectable thirst-quenchers. 344 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE "THE IMAGE OF THF CLASSIC FSKEN40 is still that of Nanook of the North, the indomitable hunter clad in a sealskin anorak and polar-bear pants, his harpoon poised for the kill," concluded Sam I lall, an Arctic documentary filin-maker, in a 1987 study. "In the Arctic today, this vision is as ludicrous as that of Caesar, his toga flowing behind him, a bunch of grapes in one hand and a silver chalice In the other, striding through a traffic jam in Rome." That's true enough, but the Inuit still live in both worlds. They left behind the last vestiges of the Stone Age only four decades ago; most were born in sealskin tents by the light of whale-oil lamps. The limit, caught between past and present, must find their refrigerators, VHS recorders and Yamaha trail buggies'lust as unreal as their fathers' and grandfathers' walrus-meat sledge runners, whalebone eye goggles and iglus. All those stately kayaks, umiaks, York boats and peterheads were displaced by functional 14- or 24foot square-stern aluminum canoes, weighted down with 25- or 45-h.p. Evinrudes. For long *ournevs, there were the de I lavilland Twin Otters operated by the many airlines criss-crossing the North; for short trips, snowmobiles. That switch-from dogs to sno,"-mobiles-was the final farewell to tradition. The few dog teams that remained were seldom used, except as rentals to filmmakers or white tourists pretending they were Scott of the Antarctic. It was the whine of the snowmobiles' supercharged 250-cc motors that shattered the Arctic dream. Soon there were more skeletons of dead SkiDoos than caribou carcasses around the community dumps. Local teenagers spent endless hours aimlessly racing the machines in and out of settlements, the unmuffled roar of their engines giving voice to their desperation and their anger. NORTHERN GRIDLOCK 345 In this troublesome context the HBC became a natural target for discontent. Despite the natives' steady incomes, from government handouts, it was a strict Company rule never to grant an Inuk a Bay credit card. At the same time, the Company came to be perceived as an agent of destruction of the old values. "The Hudson's Bay Company ... helped the government practice genocide of Eskimo dogs, by providing the necessary hardware in which Inuit were to become assimilated into Canadian society," charged Josh '1~emotee of Frobisher Bay. "This would also place the Inuit into a credit situation. Whether it was a commercial plot to assimilate Inint is not known, but it seems coincidental that civil service posts would open up where Hudsoil's Bay stores located." Billy Diamond, Grand Chief of the Grand Council of the Cree of Quebec, complairied that as late as 1970 the 11BC store at Rupert House was not paying interest on funds it was holding for its custoiners-yet charging interest on credit overdrafts. "I was just starting out as Chief at Rupert," he recalled, "and you had to buy everything at the Bay store. After vour furs had been auctioned off by the Company, thc money went directly to the store and they told you how much your furs had been worth, though there was no way of verifying it. Then you dealt for goods, but the store kept the balance and paid no interest. Even if you deposited money for safekeeping with the Bay-and I heard of people who had $25,000 with the Company-you got no interest.... It was only my generation that said, 'Listen, there's much more to life than the Hudson's Bay Company. There's a world out there!"' Reduced in their function to local supermarkets, the stores began to expand their merchandise racks, featuring such southern specialties as soft-porn magazines, 346 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE canned lobster, Poly-fil parkas with Velcro pocket fasteners and every possible variety of junk food. The surfeit of Kool-Aid, Coca-Cola, chocolate, bubble gum and potato chips from the HBC store meant that most young Inuit lost their teeth by the time they were teenagers.* The HB(:,,, presence had radically altered the Inuit way of life, and while it was easy enough to be critical of the Companys impact, there was no permanent escape from the malignant forces of the white man's civilization. Within that context the Bay demonstrated remarkable restraint, and many of its local managers earned their reputations for fair treatment of their customers. "I got to know probably twenty or thirty of the Bay managers and I never knew one who was a rascal," recalled Ben Sivertz. "It was life ofa specialized kind and I think that the rectitude and decency of the Bay men was remarkable, though I'm not talking now about sexual relations with Eskimo women. That's one aspect that needs special interpretation. But all that stuff' about how mean they were about the prices they paid for fur, that was Company policy. I am not sure there was any other way to do it." Even Billy Diamond relented in his criticism of the modern HBC. "The Company took a look at our needs and has tried to adapt to what we're doing up there andat the same time they're trying to give us a chance to take control of a lot of things," he admitted. "They used to be the only guys selling gas, outboards and Ski-Doos. We've taken over all that and the local trappers' association is ordering its own canoes and supplies. The Hudson's Bay Company really streamlined its operations to bringing in the groceries, appliances and clothing. *The 500-year-old remains of an Inuit woinan found in 1978 in a Greenland cave had a near-perfect set oi teeth. NORTHERN GRIDLOCK 347 It's no longer a credit outlet." Nellie Cournoyea, an Inuk born in Aklavik and currently Minister of Health, Minister of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources and Minister of Public Works in the Northwest Territories, agrees: " I'm indifferent to the Bay. To us it is just another store with no particular significance." Under the IIBC's-and later the government's-sponsorship, I I fe was certainly better for the old and the sick, and having a box of matches was an improvement on rubbing sticks together to light a fire. But the argument about whether the Inuit were happier then or now can never be resolved. "I know people were happier in the old days," said William Kuptana, an elder at Sachs Harbour. "But I know for sure the~, were not happy every day." Former Commissioner Stuart Hodgson recalled asking Jimmy Kilabuk at Pangnirtung the same question. "I don't know," was the reply. "But I'll tell you this: when I was a young man, I can never, ever remernber being warm." Minnie Aodla Freeman, the Inuit author, placed the Company in its proper perspective when she told a 1980 conference that it had "made easier lives for Inuit since 1670. They were in my home area of James Bay long before I was born, fur trading with my ancestors.... I think one of the reasons why Inuit welcomed the Hudson's Bay Company was the fact that the Company never tried to change Inuit ways of behaving or thinking. Yes, they changed our equipment, to better steel knives, steel saws, steel nails, steel axes and manufactured cloth. Inuit understood it was the furs that the Hudson's Bay Company were after. Inuit hunters had employment through the Hudson's Bay Company. It was the familiar job Inuit enjoyed. We still hear older Inuit today saying that the Hudson's Bay Company is most useful in Inuit lands. . . . Hudson's Bay Company sold Fort Garry tea to Inuit first, before it was sold in Bytown ... pity!" PART III MERCHANT PRINCES CHAPTER13 THE LORDS AND THE GOOD OLD BOYS "In Fnglanel we gave them knighthoods; in Winnipeg they became directors of the Hudson's BaY Company. Director joc Links, IIBC THE TRANSITION OF THE BAY MEN from merchant adventurers to merchant princes was slow, painful and absolute. By the end of that long cycle, the Hudson's Bay Company had become a major retailing empire with no sense of privilege or feeling for history. But in the halfcentury leading up to that lapsed state of grace, the Company's top management went through a series of stops and starts, scrious internal wrangling and several boardroom convulsions. The protagonists in this jousting for control were the governors, deputy governors and their ennobled retinues trying to rule the Company from London pitted against a group of' fiercely proud, down-home Good Old Boys trying to run the Company from Winnipeg. The two groups did battle with the obdurate conviction of crusaders, each side serving the righteousness of its cause. On the surface, it seemed an uneven contest. The British lords and knights were exquisitely aware of the subtleties of their clout and class. Their authority was so persuasive because it flowed not from any divine right or self-proclaimed sense of superiority. They really were the best and the brightest in the upper crust of a society that 351 352 MERCHANT PRINCES took breeding and intelligence for granted, and they genuinely represented the interests of the HBCs shareholders! 97 percent ol"whom were domiciled within the United Kingdom. Arrayed against these British proprietors and their distinguished proconsuls was a tightly knit posse of Winnipeg's finest. Midwestern squires, they were good if limited men, frontier-tough and damned if they were going to kowtow to these haughty strangers wearing spats and with handkerchiefs up their sleeves. Yet they loved being involved with the Company that had once ruled the West and eventually viewed themselves as a kind of apostolic succession, smoothly following one another as members of the HBCs Canadian Committee. That tenure became such a desirable badge of office among the local business 61ite thatjoe Links, the British board's wittiest member, once quipped: "In England we gave them knighthoods; in Winnipeg they became directors of the f ludson's Bay Company." In a very real way, Canadianization of the Hudson's Bay Company was part of the decolonization of the British Empire. Victory through gradualism. In the fiftyeight years between formation of the first Canadian Advisory Committee in 1912 and permanent transfer of the Company's charter across the Atlantic in 1970between the governorships of Lord Strathcona and Lord Amory-a sequence of tippy-toe measures was reluctantly taken to shift authority from London to Winnipeg. Although provision of a domestic registry for Canadian shareholders had been suggested as early as 1908, it wasn't until forty-five years later, in 1953, that it was actually put into effect. On October 16, 1958, the Hudson's Bay Company board convened in Winnipeg, the first time its directors had met outside London in 288 years. It took another half-decade before the British shares were listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange. A THE LORDS AND THE GOOD OLD BOYS 353 11BC Board of Directors' meeting, Winnipeg, October 16, 1958 year later, for the first time the Companys dividend cheques were paid to Canadian shareholders in Canadian dollars instead of British pounds, and it was 1970 before the annual report was printed in Canada. The transfer ol'substantive decision-making authority didn't really begin until 1930, when Winnipeg was granted power of attorney to deal with the Company's day-to-day operations. In 1957, the Canadi~n Committee's members became directors of the mother firm, though it took a further six years before they were allowed to outnumber their British colleagues. "The Canadians were always trying to grab more authority," remembered Peter Wood, for thirty-eight years the Company's senior financial officer, "but the Brits kept hanging on, putting little roadblocks in the way, standing about with long faces, stressing the risks and disadvantages, so that it was difficult to be enthusiastic. They 354 MERCHANT PRINCES were such a distinguished and respected group that it was hard to ignore them. Besides, they held the power." The nature of that power was limited at best, authority and responsibility being divided between two continents, with London possessing the former but unable to impose the latter. It was one thing to draft policies in the hush of the 11BCs City boardroom but quite another to police how-or whether-those directives had been followed in the field. Accountability was always the pivotal issue, yet making orders stick was never satisfactorily resolved. The mesmerizing effect of the HBCs unique history made everyone cautious about allowing authority to be dispersed too quickly or too widely. The Canadian Committeemen had the local knowledge but not the breadth of experience to run a malor trading company; the London directors possessed the necessary expertise but were too far removed from the trenches to have much practical input. The operating heads of the Company in Canada quickly realized that their main leverage lay in how much or how little data they transmitted across the Atlantic, and being astute about it-knowing full well that rationing performance statistics would only make London suspicious-they tried to overwhelm the 11BCs British headquarters with tidal waves of facts. Sheaves of weekly returns enumerated each post's fur intake and each department store's inventory of socks; every transaction was meticulously documented and transmitted overseas. What went missing was any feeling about the exciting new economy sprouting up north of the 49th parallel. That omission was less by design than by the character of the Canadian operation. The Committee, in fact, knew verv little about the new Canada evolving outside Winnipeg's municipal boundaries. Its members stubbornly resisted lifting their sights beyond regional concerns, leaving others, as they haughtily declared, "to THE LORDS AND THE GOOD OLD BOYS 355 go whoring in the East." The dynamics of delay ruled the Company's affairs. THE 'I'ENSION TILU PERMEATED RELATIONS between the British directors and Canadian Committeemen even touched their social lives. Sir Eric Faulkner recalled his firstvisit to Winnipeg in the mid-1950s when lie was the HBC's Deputy Governor: "I was viewed with enormous suspicion by the Canadians and subsequently learned they were told to invite me to their houses for a drink, but under no circumstances to serve me a meal until they'd taken my measure. I went to have a drink with Stu Searle, who turned out to be a delightful man. After a whisky, he suddenlY exclaimed, 'Do you realize I'm not allowed to ask you to dinner? This is bloody nonsense, but since there's no food in the house, let's go out and eat.' We finally changed our minds and had scrambled eggs while sitting on his living-room floor, and that was the beginning of a friendship that lasted all our lives." In a letter to thc last British Governor, Lord Amory, the last Chairman of the Winnipeg Committee, David Kilgour, betrayed the Canadians' real feeling about the visitations of London dignitaries. "I confess," he wrote, "we are probably unduly annoyed by individuals who have that austerc superiority which we Western Canadians ascribe to some Englishmen. . . ." Joe Harris, one of the Canadian Committeemen, was more blunt. "When a North American wants to insult you," he explained to Amory, "he calls you a son of a bitch, laughs with you about it over a drink at hinch, and forgets it by evening. A Britisher, on the other hand, does it in the most thoughtful courteous language that can be devised-and writes it into the Minutes." The Canadians' standoffish attitude was demonstrated in the smallest gestures. Most of the 356 MERCHANT PRINCES Wimipeggers owned lodges in the duck-hunting marshes northwest of Winnipeg, and even though the aristocratic visitors loved shooting, invitations were seldom forthcoming. "It was soon clear that ... the Winnipeg Establishment didn't want them at their lodges and sent them out to Delta for me to take care of," wrote A] Hochbaum, then in charge of the local waterfowl research station. "I remember especially what fine specimens of the human race were Tony Keswick [the HBCs Governor] and Sir Henry Benson [then Deputy Governor]. I kept wondering why Wnnipeg society didn't wish to have them for a weekend. They shot like gentlemen, drank like gentlemen, swore like gentlemen-and didn't mind the outdoor toilets." The British visitors tended to be overpolite, slightly patronizing and more than a little puzzled by the Winnipeggers' provincialism. "I once asked Con Riley, the first time I met him after he was appointed to head the Canadian Committee," Keswick recalled, "exactly what Winnipegwas famous for. I've never forgotten his answer. He said very quietly, without looking left or right, 'Nice people,' and left it at that." Both groups were so internallv cohesive it was difficult for either side to comprehend the other. Except for one attempted coup dVtat in 1963, the British directors were so compatible they didn't bother taking votes on any significant issue. "I was going to say we never voted on anything," recalled Joe Links, a twentv-eight year board member, "but we actually did hold one vote when we were getting some new china for serving tea in the boardroom. Some of us wanted green, some wanted yellow. I think the yellows had it." The British directors received virtually no perks, and none of them needed either the prestige or the token stipend (S,~500 annually). Yet there never seemed to be a shortage of top-drawer candidates. "We frankly had the pick of the best men in the ('try," boasted Lord Amory. "I THE LORDS AND THE GOOD OLD BOYS 357 don't remember any directors whom we thought of turning us down, no matter how high their calibre. AA -hereas the Canadian Committee people were big men on1v in Manitoba, but had little contact with the rest of Cana~a." The executive committee of the British board met at noon every Tuesday (with the entire directorate attending once a month); sherry was served at quarter to one, though several of the more robust members would have preferred gin and tonic. Seated under the portraits of past Governors and surrounded by silver objects, some dating back to 1670, they discussed Company business, mainly reports of the Canadian Committee, which met each previous Thursday. Over lunch they would lapse into a wider discussion of public affairs, occasionally touching some such tangent as dismissing the latest biography of Lord Keynes for being the work of an Oxford man struggling to understand a Cambridge mind. The east wall of the walnut-panelled boardroom was covered with a map showing the Company's posts and operations, visited yearly by the Governor or his deputy. Most shareholders' annual meetings (still called "Courts") were quick and tame affairs'- an elapsed time of seventeen minutes in 1957 was the record for speed. "One frail old proprietor," recalled Links, "used to refer at the annual Court to the previous speaker, equally frail, as 'the adventurer who has just sat down,' probably correctly, since we were 'the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England, trading into Hudson's Bav.- Immediately after the Second World War, bankers became significant on the 11BC board, mainly in the person of Sir Eric Faulkner (later chairman of both Lloyds Bank and Glyn, Mills). He had won a football Blue at Cambridge, participated in the retreat at Dunkirk, fought against Rommel, done all the important things expected of an all-round English gentleman of his generation, yet he regarded his dozen years with the HBC as very special. 358 MERCHANT PRINCES Sir Edward Peacock "During the 1930s when I first went to Glyn's," he recalled, "I thought that if I ever did succeed in getting up the ladder and was allowed to take outside directorships I would love to be invited one day to join the board of the Hudson's Bay Company. By chance fate dealt the cards that way. I well remember saying laughingly at one of our board meetings, 'God, what a Company this is, never a moment of peace. There is always turbulence somewhere."' Sir Martin Jacomb, another distinguished bankerwho also served on the HB(' board, reached a similar conclusion. "Some institutions," he said, "although they are only legal entities, do have real organic personalities. The Bay transmits that feeling to anyone who comes in contact with it." One of the HB(:s great strengths A as the active interest in its financial welfare displayed by the Bank of England. The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street had actually been founded twenty-four years after the THE LORDS AND THE GOOD OLD BOYS 359 Hudson's Bay Company-a fact successive central bank governors were never allowed to forget-but the two institutions remained very close. Half a dozen Bank of England governors and directors had been either gover nors or directors of the HBC, Including SirJohn Henry Pelly, Henry Hulse Berens, (' corge Joachim Goschen, Sir Robert Molesworth Kindersley, Sir Patrick Ashley Cooper, Lord Cobbold and, above all, Sir Edward Peacock. The Canadian-born financier had for two decades been a dominant figure in the Bank of England and later became senior partner of Barings, the London money house the Duc de Richelieu, premier of France, had in 1818 dubbed Europe's "Sixth Great Power," alluding to the continent's economic order being ruled by England, France, Prussia, Austria, Russia and Baring Brothers. Peacock, who became an 11B(' director in 1931 and stayed on the board for the next nineteen years, was also an adviser to the Royal Family and had been inti inately involved in matters financial and otherwise con cerning Edward V111's abdication. His influence on the 11BC , s economic deliberations over two crucial decades was considerable, and it was highly conservative. Because of existing tax laws, the English shareholders much preferred capital gains to income, so that stock splits were more desirable than dividends. The Company's capital funds were grossly inadequate to keep it expanding along with the C anadian economy because until 1960 the HBC refused to borrow. "We all hated hotrowing and considered any loan a blister on the balance sheet," Keswick confirmed. "Mum told us you mustn't overspend your allowance, and that was the British discipline. We were against borrowing because we saw all around us people borrowing tremendously and getting into difficulties, and we didn't want our beloved Hudson's Bay Company to get into trouble. We may have missed some tricks, but we were old-timers and had seen accidents happen before." 360 MERCHANT PRINCES The real paradox was that despite their "blister on the balance sheet" attitude and the rigid corporate directives that flowed from that bias, the London directors were often less averse to risk than the Winnipeggers. "It always seemed to me that we were more anxious than the Canadians to modernize and keep tip with the times," Faulkner recalled. "Few of the Winnipeg directors got around the country or the Company, and so were inclined to miss opportunities. We could never persuade them to travel much outside Winnipeg. They might have a look-in at the Vancouver store if they happened to be there, but we'd often add a week or two to our tours and go to the really remote places, into the Saguenay country or way up into the Arctic, where we were welcomed by the staff who were delighted to see a director, even an English one." THE DICHOTOMY OF THE MENTALITIES at work in Winnipeg and London reached far deeper than that. The Canadian West is a land of long memories. At the turn of the century, Winnipeggers had felt at the very forefront of Canadian civilization. The Winnipeg Telegram proudly reported in its.f anuary 29, 19 10, edition that the city had nineteen millionaires, pointedly adding that Toronto, many times its size, had only twenty-one. An American journalist who arrived the following year waxed enthusiastic about the Manitoba capital as the Chicago of the North, "a gateway through which all the commerce of the east and the west, and the north and the south, must flow. No city, in America at least, has such absolute and complete command over the wholesale trade of so vast an area. It is destined to become one of the greatest distributing commercial centres of the continent as well as a manufacturing community of great importance." THE LORDS AND THE GOOD OLD BOYS 361 Instead, completion of the Panama Canal gradually eliminated Winnipeg as the transportation and distribution linchpin of the Canadian economy's spread to the Pacific coast, although the population of Vancouver surpassed that of Winnipeg only in 193 1.* No longer a potential Chicago, Winnipeg became Canada's Viennaa city-state without an empire. Geared to supply a hinterland half a continent wide, it became an economic backwater, its geographical significance drastically reduced by history's tides. Most Winnipeggers responded to the change by leaving or sending their children to carve out lives and careers elsewhere; certainly the city's most valuable export was its people. Those who stayed either accustomed themselves to living in a pleasant, unspectacular place or-like the Hudson's Bay Committeenien-scarcely acknowledged Winnipeg's demise. Bound together by fear of their own irrelevance, the Bay men dug in. WL. Morton, the Manitoba historian who understood his province better than anyone else, concluded that the local business community-from which *The Panama Canal was on1v one factor in Winnipeg's decline, though a major one. Also at fault was the post-war collapse of the local wholesale business, when prosperity allowed carload lots to be shipped across the West instead of being broken up by wholesalers in Winnipeg, which meant that the three provinces West of Manitoba began to deal directly with the large eastern companies and institutions. As that trend intensified, Winnipeg tapered off to being a provincial capital, even though more cultured than most. At the same time, the financial functions of Winnipeg changed. First, British Columbia banking executives were allowed to report directly to head office in Montreal or Toronto. Later, because of the 1947 oil boom, the same became true of Alberta. The service industries, especially insurance, fol- lowed the pattern of the banks. Until the late 1940s W-innipeg was the regional centre of the entire West for these industries, but it declined rapidly after that. 362 MERCHANT PRINCES the Hudson's Bay Company's Committeemen had been drawn-was "cautious, canny, reactionary, untravelled, fearful of ideas and of imagination." The most unyielding point of dispute between London and Winnipeg directors was location of the Canadian headquarters. In the mid-1930s the British Governor hinted thata move to 'Ibronto might be desirable, to take better advantage of the country's future opportunities. The Winnipeg Committee immediately threatened to resign en masse, and a lame compromise of naming a few token non-Manitoba directors was finally accepted. Still, the Winnipeggers howled in anger and frustration-even though the appointees ranked among Canada's best-connected businessmen. J.W. McConnell, for example ', was a dominant figure in St Lawrence Sugar, Ogilvie Flour Mills, the Bank of Montreal, CPR, Canada Steamship Lines, Brazilian Traction, Dominion Bridge, Sun Life, Inco, Roval Trust and later the iWontreal Star, while another, b.C. Coleman, was senior vice-president of the CPR (as well as a director of Metropolitan Life and Canadian Marconi) and had only recently moved away from Winnipeg. The then resident HBC managing director assured London that these two Eastern members were "of no practical value to the Company" and that "in any case, it was impossible to justify paying them the same fees as the Winnipeg members who did all the work" so that "if the Board wished to keep them, their fees should be reduced to $50 a meeting." As late as 1966, the Canadian managing director, Richard Murray, wrote a four-page, closely spaced memorandum to the then Governor, Lord Amory, explaining that the HBC's headquarters had to stay in Winnipeg "both now and in the future" because it was Canada's geographical centre, had adequate Telex and air services, and that even if executives had to be paid a premium for being willing to relocate there, it meant lower turnover because there THE LORDS AND THE GOOD OLD BOYS 363 would be less "job hopping." What Murray failed to mention was that this was true mainly because there was nowhere to hop to -and that maintaining headquarters in Winnipeg almost guaranteed being out of touch with the mainstream of Canada's business community. "The actual benefits from such contacts," he buffed, "are intangible, vary with individuals, and are impossible to calculate ... [but] this affects a very small portion of the total number of executives and thus cannot be given too Much weight." Not only did the HBCs Canadian pastorate limit itself to a Winnipeg parish but its membership was circumscribed by directorships in a handful of local companies. A dozen 11BC Committeemen who held office between 1913 and 1970 were also directors of Great-West Life Assurance, for example, and David Kilgour, who was the head of both concerns, once assured the British Governor that "the Canadian Committee of the Fludson's, Bay has perhaps very parallel objectives so that it is wholly natural that there should be some duplication between the two Companies." The other -Winnipegbased firms that spawned succeeding generations of HBC Committeemen included Monarch Life, Beaver Lumber, Northern Trusts, Canadian Indemnity, Manitoba Bridge & Iron Works, Osler, Hammond & Nanton and, most important of all, the Richardson group. The successive generations of Winnipeg Establishment men who ran these commercial concerns were entwined corporately, socially and even genetically The Hudson's Bay Company in Canada was run by a clique of buddies with limited horizons and a common mentalitv. Part of that mindset was their determination to breali the hold on the West of St James Street in Montreal and Bay Street in Toronto by establishing strong corporate principalities in Winnipeg. Local control of the f1BC was an essential element in that strategy. 364 MERCHANT PRINCES l3F'FWF,EN 1911 AND 1926, the Hudson's Bay Company built or purchased its fleet of flagship downtown department stores in Victoria, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Saskatoon and Winnipeg, opening smaller versions in Kamloops, Vernon, Nelson, Macleod, Lethbridge, Yorkton and Kenora, all of them initlallv successful as the transcontinental railA ays deposited tens of thousands of new customers on their doorsteps.* Despite the prolifer- ation of department stores across the country, their share of the retail dollar remained constant-at 10.23 percent in 1923 and exactly the same percentage three decades later, which meant fierce competition among the existing players and minimal profit margins. Figures released by Harrv Stevens's 1934 Royal Commission on Price Spreads showed that only the HBC'S coal sales were keeping the retail operation in the black, and PeterWood estimated that the stores had actually never made a profit.t By the time Lord Strathcona had completed his interminable governorship in 1914, the I IBC was accurately *The IIBC was actuallv a latecomer among Canadian departmerit stores. As well as the inajor Eaton's and Simpsons chains originating in Toronto, there werejas. A. Ogilvy's, Morgan's and Dupuis Fr~res in Montreal; Bowring's in ~t John's; Wood Brothers in Halifax; Manchester, Robertson, ildlison in Saint John; Paquets and Pollack's in Quebec City; Charles Ogilvy's in Ottawa; Robinson's in Hamilton; Smith,.,, in Windsor; Goudie's in Kitchener; Smallman and Ingrains in London; Williams's in Regina; Spencer's in Victoria; and "oodward's in Vancouver. tIIBC earnings between 1947 and 1983, for example, totalled $897.5 million, while income from all non-merchandise sources (including land sales, fur auctions and oil royalties) amounted to $954.2 million. That meant a loss of$56.7 million attributable to the department stores in thirty-seven years, (The calculation assumed the stores had to finance their own debt loads and did not take into account the fact that operating the outlets increased their real-estate values.) THE LORDS AND THE GOOD OLD BOYS 365 described as being "more of an historical curiosity than a vital enterprise, because it had failed dismally to keep pace with the Dominion." Although London retained its power under Stnithcona's immediate successors (Sir Thomas Skinner and Sir Robert Kindersley), the Canadian Advisory Committee named in 1912 had no authority beyond helping London keep in touch with local conditions. It included Sir William Whyte, the Winnipeg-based retired vice-president of the CPR's western division, and George Galt (a nephew of Sir Alexander Tilloch Galt, one of the Fathers of Confederation), who had established Blue Ribbon Limited, a Winnipeg wholesale grocery house, and become a director of three of the city's touchstone companies: Great-West Life, Northern Trusts and Manitoba Bridge & Iron Works. The Galt family lived at 460 Wellington Crescent, described as "the finest house from Fort William to the coast," and George Galt remained on the Canadian Committee until 1928. Augustus Nanton, the third of the original Committee inenibers, was a central fig-Lire in Winnipeg financial circles who served on the boards of Great-West Life and Manitoba Bridge & Iron Works and turned the investmerit firm of Osler, Hammond & Nanton into a major player in prairie land and resource ventures.* *The extent of Nanton's participation showed up in the fact that twelve western towns and cities have streets named after him, and there is still a Nanton, Alberta, between Calgary and Fort Macleod. An early nationalist, Nanton protested when an American firm was hired to make a film commemorating the HBC's 250th anniversary in 1920 ,and prohibited the abbreviation U.S.A. from appearing anywhere in the presentation. Xlv'hen Nanton became a key animator in the citizens' corrin-littee organized in 1919 to quash the General Strike, his farm was a target for demonstrators, who burned down the stable. 366 MERCHANT PRINCES Nanton could not exercise much Canadian influence on the HBC because the land and fur-trade commissioners reported directly to London. Even worse, the key depa rtment- store operation was run by Herbert E. Burbidge, "hose father headed Harrods and was a London-based director of the Bay. Only thirty years old wheri he was handed responsibility for the Canadian retail outlets, clearly modelled on the Harrods Brompton Road department store, the young Burbidge moved the headquarters of the retailing division to Vancouver, where he was comfortably settled, and allowed the individual units to fend for themselves. This meant giving up the advantage of mass buying, with the manager of every department in each store free to set his own mark-ups and credit policies. The chain soon became unnianageable-even if in 1914 its profit (Y,63,757) for the first time surpassed that of the fur department (Y.55,008). By 1919, Burbidge, who turned out to be allergic to hard work, was fired and latcr supplanted by Edward Fitzgerald, a former CPR assistant purchasing agent, who was appointed the Canadian Committee's full-time Deputy Chairman. lie had little merchandising experience, found himself the pawn of games played between Winnipeg and London, and within six years returned to the relative calm of railroading. His main legacy was that (luring his stewardship the Canadian Advisory Committee (from now on simply called the Canadian Committee) was granted slightly more authority, including the naming of some senior appointees, but the Company had meanwhile acquired a much more profitable sideline. SIR ROBERT NIOLESWORTH KINDERSLEY, who served as Governor from 1915 to 1925, was also chairman of the London affiliate of Lazard Fr&res, the Anglo-French THE LORDS AND THE GOOD OLD BOYS 367 merchant bank, and it was through his Paris connections that the I IBC gained a unique opportunity. Using Jean Monnet, wartime organizer of the French government's emergency International Supply Committee (and later father of the Treary of Rome that spawned Europe's Common Market), as a go-between, he negotiated appointment of the Hudson's Bay Company as the French government's transportation agency for the duration of the First World War.* The contract would eventually net the Company Y,1,265,000 for five years' involvement, the most profitable single transaction in its long history, but it took a lot of doing. Thrown into disarray by the initial German advances, the French governinent had moved to Bordeaux and was desperately seeking a way of supplying its population with foodstuffs and its troops with ammunition. There being no effective French merchant marine available, Alexandre Millerand, France's war minister, named the HBC the country's chief purchasing agent to arrange international credits and charter the ships required to deliver the goods. The Company's I-percent commission on these transactions was well earned. The Bay Steamship Company, a hastily, set-up subsidiary, chartered 286 merchant ships totalling 1.58 million tons deadweight, which carried 13 million tons of supplies to French ports. In addition to grains from Canada, Argentina, Algeria and Australia and sugar from Cuba, Java and Martinique, their cargoes included coal from England and the United States, groundmits and palm-kernels from Morocco, and airplane parts from Casablanca. By war's end, the Company was operating the world's third-largest merchant fleet, loading 11,000 tons -of *As a reward, Monnet later was granted a 11~640,000 "loan," most of which was written off. Its existence was not mentioned in Monnet's memoirs or in the HBC.% annual reports. 368 MERCHANT PRINCES goods daily-the equivalent of the Nonsuch's cargo every seven minutes.* It had been contracted to carry out similar supply missions for Romania and the White Russian Army (following the Bolshevik Revolution), through an agency at Archangel. The Company's house flag-the Red Ensign with the letters HB.C. on the fly-became a recognized and proud symbol in ports the world over, the more so since German submarines, storms, icebergs and fires at sea sank I 10 of the Bay ships. The maritime commerce was highly profitable but horrendously complicated. Towards the end of 1917, for example, the HBC undertook management of four large Russian liners capable of carrying 13,000 passengers that became international ferries, taking Central Europeans, Belgians, Romanians and Argentines out of Russia before collapse of the Tsarist regime. The German steamer Prinz Heinrich, interned in Portugal where she had been requisitioned by the government, was chartered by the British government, then sublet to the French government, which turned her over to be operated by the 10c. The Company used her to repatriate Russian Jews who preferred returning home to service in the British Army. (Each passenger had to be provided with kosher rations for the long railway trip from Murmansk to Petrograd.) Co-ordinating such complex arrangements and handling assignments for the Company's 145 purchasing *One problem was that the Company soon ran out of titles for its expanded fleet and began using such forms as Bayford, Baykerran, Bayfield, Baymount, Bdysoto, Baychattan and so on. The names, one of the I-IBCs senior officials explained to jean Monnet, should be limited to "10 letters, that is including the first three [Bay], the reason being that they can then be telegraphed as one Word, and this, over the course of a year, makes quite a little economy compared with the names which cost two or three words." THE LORDS AND THE GOOD OLD BOYS 369 The HBCs Baytigern at Brest during the First World War agents went far beyond the HBC's existing knowledge or established facilities. The London staff was expanded from 10 to 120, and to head the operation Kindersley hired, as the HBCs full-time Deputy Governor, Charles Vincent Sale, president of his family's firm of coal shippers, EG. Sale & Sons, whose unoriginal motto was "Coals to Newcastle." Sale and Kindersley had swung many deals together, providing rails to the Japanese for construction of the Manchurian Railway as well as trading arms, cotton, coal and metals between the United States, Belgium and the Orient. Both men were close to Lord Cowdray, Minister for Air in Lloyd George's wartime cabinet, and had made friends with Sir John Anderson, who as Lord Waverley would subsequently become an HBC director. A tall, pink-faced workaholic, complete with white military moustache, bowler hat and wing collar, Sale was pompous and could be fussy. Dora Darby, who was his secretary, recalled that he sometimes came into the HBC offices on Saturdays and "checked the girls' work stations searching for cosmetics. lie put any he found on their desks to indicate they did not belong in an office. He was very strait-laced, and when he was 370 MERCHANT PRINCES in charge, every stenographer knew not to cross her legs in front of a man while taking dictation." Bob Chesshire, who worked for the Company at the time, remarked, "He was a peculiar sort of chap who suffered from a trop- ical liver and was quite likely to pick up a dictionary and heave it at someone he didn't like." THESHARPE'ST BREAK INTHE coNrINUITY of the old executive system in the Company was caused by the war. The immense profits from the French engagement perpetuated the illusion of management by the London Governor and directorate while the end of the temporary profits eventually made all too plain the dilapidation of its Canadian affairs.* Ignoring this underlying weakness, the Company chose this very moment to stage the most elaborate and most expensive pageant in its history. The Hudson's Bay Company celebrated its 250th birthday on May 2, 1920, and Sir Robert Kindersley decided to visit Canadaonly the third reigning Governor ever to do so.t Each Company unit, including every northern post, was given *One business that briefly flourished aromi d that time was bootlegging, Canadian provinces had passed laws prohibiting the sale though not the manufacture of alcoholic beverages, but since each province could enforce laws only within its own borders, booze could easily be transported for sale in other jurisdictions. The HBC immediately established a dozen mail-order houses from Kenora to Revelstoke and installed a Winnipeg bottling plant, capable of turning out four hundred cases daily, to supply its own brands to these outlets. Income peaked in 1917 at $2,260,627. tThe others had been Sir Stafford Northcote, who had briefly visited Montreal and Ottawa in 1870, and Lord Strathcona, though that was a special case because he had been the only Governor in the Company's history to work his way up through the HBCs Canadian service. THE LORDS AND THE GOOD OLD BOYS 371 a grant to join in the festivities and every employee received a month's extra wages.* Philip Godsell, an imaginative veteran who after joining the Company in 1906 had travelled more than 100,000 miles by dog team, snowshoe and canoe, was placed in charge of planning the celebration. It was to be the last great Company occasion, and Godsell made the most of it. On May 1, 1920, K-indersley addressed the Winnipeg staff at a gala dinner in the Hotel Fort Garry. He quickly got the guests on side by announcing a relatively generous non -contributory pension plan and pledged $1,225,000 to its trust fund. "I look to the future of the fur trade with a feeling of utmost confidence," he declared. -The last three years have shown the best results of any years in the history of the Company." The speech prompted loud cheers, several choruses of "For lie's a Jolly Good Fellow," and a new Company song to the tune of "There's a Long, Long Trail A-Winding." The fur traders, ships' captains, department store man- agers, clerks and servants formed a happy, chanting line, marching around the dining-roorri enmeshed in nets of paper streamers.t Climax of the Canadian celebrations was the great spectacle Godsell staged at Lower Fort Garry, once the proud domicile of Sir George Simpson. Indian chiefs and *The Company's assets at the time consisted of eleven major department stores, six wholesale houses, three hundred fur-trading posts, eighty-six steam and motor vessels, twelve hundred canoes, six hundred sledge dogs and 2.5 million acres of desirable prairie agricultural land. t At a dinner for the London staff, Deputy Governor Sale gave a similar oration, handing out 134 long-service medals. One warehouse worker topped the list with sixty years of servitude. In Winnipeg, John George McTavish Christie was presented with a special medal; his family had served a combined 2 3 8 years with the Company. 372 MERCHANT PRINCES their retinues came from every corner of the HBCs former empire-Swampy Cree from Hudson and James bays, Saulteaux from Lake Winnipeg, Ojibwas from the Nipigon country, Sioux from the Portage Plains, and mighty warriors from the Peace and Athabasca valleys. "For a while," Godsell noted, "the atmosphere of earlier and more picturesque days hovered about the Old Stone Fort. Silhouetted against the painted tepee covers at night the shadowy figures carried the mind back to days of long ago. ... Within the walls all was quiet and silent though the tent occupied by the two Mounted Policemen who kept watch was dimly lighted with a coal-oil lantern. An occasional light flickered from the Governor's residence and there was a peculiar tranquillity permeating the old fort and its surroundings, so different from the bustle of the city but a few short miles away." The following morning the Governor took the salute as birchbark canoes, York boats and dugouts sailed by the great stone fort, and cheering Winnipeggers; lined the riverbanks. Salute guns boomed, the Governor's flag snapped in the wind, and Godsell introduced each tribal chief to the six-foot-six Governor, who looked exactly the way a benign despot should look. Godsell had arranged for the Company interpreter to censor the Indians' comments, so that when the Chief of the York Factory Cree, for instance, complained because the Company was not feeding his dogs, the comment was translated into a flowery tribute to "the Great Master of the Company." Long into the night could be heard the screech of fiddles and the tattoo of moccasined feet stamping out the Red River Jig and Fightsome Reel. "As I gazed at the flickering lights of the tepees and watched the shadowy forms of the old Indians passing the pipe once more from hand to hand," Godsell lamented, "I realized with a keen pang that history had been made that day, and that, with its passing, the old fort and the traditions which surrounded it had taken another long step towards antiquity." THE LORDS AND THE GOOD OLD BOYS 373 HBC celebrations at Lozver Fort Garry, May 1920 The most important legacy of the celebrations was Kindersley's decision to establish The Beaver, a magazine "Devoted to the Interests of Those Who Serve the Hudson's Bay Company." It eventually became a superb journal of record chronicling the history of the Northwest. But under its first editor, a Chicago advertising man named Clifton Moore Thomas, The Beaver limited itself mainly to a hodgepodge of curling scores from the Saskatoon store, news of an engagement in Kamloops, photos of an office picnic in Victoria, the results of a pie-eating competition at Fort ii la Corne, word of new tennis and quoits courts for the Winnipeg staff-all interwoven with hair-raising fur-trade accounts and glued together with bad Irish jokes and harmless homilies on how to increase sales.* The Beaz,ers scope and quality improved dramatically under its subsequent editors, Robert Watson, Douglas MacKay, Clifford Wilson, Malvina Bolus, Helen Burgess and Christopher Dafoe. 374 MERCHANT PRINCES Kindersley also signed a contract with Bruno Weyers, a New York business agent who'd had previous dealings with the Company, to produce films. The subsidiary eventually purchased two Hollywood studios and during the next decade produced thirty-seven two-reel films featuring such stars as Buster Keaton, Helen Morgan, James Melton, the Easy Aces and the Pickens Sisters. Some of the films premiered in Broadway's best first-run houses, but the advent of the big Hollywood productions killed the business, and the HBC wrote off its investment.* THE PROFIT WINDFALL from its shipping operations had camouflaged its financial instability, but the Company could not compete in the volatile post-war market because its traditional methods emphasized conservative mark-up policies instead of customer-enticing price cuts and quality of service ahead of high volume. Charles Vincent Sale took over as Governor from Kindersley in 1925 and a year later the new Winnipeg super-store was opened. It covered an entire city block and had all the latest equipment. Its two massive banks of six elevators each faced one another on the street floor in a concave configuration. "The consequence of this layout," noted James Bryant, who worked there at the time, "was that *The Company commissioned a forgettable eight-reeler about itself called The Romance of the Fur Country, and jealously guarded its reputation. When another film-maker produced a shoddy thriller entitled rhe Lure ofthe North, the HBCs lawyers got changes made in the print depicting a heroic-looking free trader being crushed by a brutal (unnamed, but British) fur monopoly whose agents burned his shack, stole his provisions, then dispatched him across something ominously called The Long Traverse. THE LORDS AND THE GOOD OLD BOYS 375 Elevator lobby at Winnipegs new super-s-tore every customer wishing to visit any floor other than the main one, congregated in the elevator lobby. It was so restricted in size and shape that even small crowds caused utter confusion.... Customers ran back and forth to catch elevators, only to have doors close as they reached them. Many became convinced that all the elevators on one side only went up and those on the other side only went down, an idea encouraged by some management trainees who, despite the scarcity of jobs, were not above having a little joke at the customers' expense." Sale, who enjoyed risk and knew the Company desperately needed to diversify, had entertained an unusual visitor in his London offices before coming to Canada for his annual inspection tour in 1926. He was Ernest Whitworth Marland, born at Pittsburgh in 1874 when oil was $2.70 a barrel, who had struck his first gusher in West Virginia and soon founded his own Marland Oil company with headquarters in Ponca City, Oklahoma. 376 MERCHANT PRINCES Applying his practical grasp of petroleum geology and his natural instinct for the hunt, he hit it big in 1911 with the ninth well drilled on land owned by Willie Cries-forWar near the Osage Indian Reservation. He went on to develop Marland Oil into a major company but spent his money even faster than he made it. Marland fenced in a tract of four hundred acres near Ponca and turned it into a pseudo-upper-class British estate, complete with polo fields, peacocks, ponies and hounds. Across the savage prairie of Oklahoma Marland and his pals would spend long afternoons, mounted on British hunters, following British hounds on the scent of British foxes. The son of a Scottish mother and an English father, Marland was so infatuated with Anglophile values that he went to grade school dressed in a kilt, and arrived in the wild Indian country during his oil-hunting days wearing a belted tweed jacket, knickerbockers and spats. He often visited London to recharge these pretensions and OD one such trip made a deal with the Hudson's Bay Company to exploit the mineral rights it had retained (from 1910 onwards) on 4.5 million acres of the Canadian West, checkerboarded across Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. Sale and Marland worked out a simple arrangement: in return for providing the technical knowledge and paying all exploration expenses, Marland was granted a twerlty-five-year option to lease any parcel of land for drilling purposes, with the HBC receiving a royalty on any oil or gas produced.* Three years later, when *Significantly, the partnership missed leasing the Athabasca tar sands, said to hold the world's largest oil reserves, because it viewed them only as a substitute for asphalt in road building. The two companies opened only one filling station, near the liBC's Winnipeg store, which sold Marland lubricating products but gasoline supplied by Imperial Oil. THE LORDS AND THE GOOD OLD BOYS 377 Marland's, personal spending habits caught up with him and he had to amalgamate his company with Continental Oil, the two concerns formed Hudson's Bay Oil & Gas (11130G), with the I IBC owning 2 5 percent (later reduced to 21.9 percent) of the stock. By the mid-1920s, when the shift from Kindersley to Sale took place, chairmanship of the Canadian Committee passed from Nanton to George Allan, who was soon joined by such Winnipeg worthies as James Armstrong Richardson, Robert Gourley, Conrad Riley and Hugh Lyall. They had all the required credentials: Richardson was president of his family's firm, head of the Winnipeg Grain Exchange, a director of the CPR and the Canadian Bank of Commerce, and in the decade that ended in 1929 accumulated one of Canada's great fortunes. Richardson's horizons, unlike those of most other HBC Committeemen, reached far beyond Winnipeg. The Richardsons have always had all of Canada for a playground.* Gourley was the animating force in Beaver Lumber and a director of such other Winnipeg touchstone companies as Monarch Life and Manitoba Bridge & Iron Works, and had been Canadian curling champion. Riley had worked for seven years on the Northern Pacific Railway before moving to Winnipeg to take a job in his father's Canadian Fire Insurance Company. He was, of course, also a director of Beaver Lumber and Great-West Life. Lyall had slightly different connections, being one of the rare HBC Committeemen who was not a director of either Monarch or Great-West, but he did establish Manitoba Bridge & Iron Works, was on the board of Northern Trusts, and president of Dominion Tanners, both *When Richardson died of a heart attack at sixty-four in 1939, the Winnipeg Free Press lowered the flags on its building to half-inast. 378 MERCHANT PRINCES companies controlled by the Rileys. George Allan, who had been a Committce member since 1914, remained Chairman until 1940. True to form, lie was a director of Great-West Life and Northern Trusts, but unlike his predecessors and successors, he devoted most of his time to the Company's affairs. A graduate of Upper Canada College and Trinity University in Toronto, he had co-founded one of Winnipeg's largest law firms (Munson & Allan) and had been responsible for channelling millions of dollars' worth of British investment into the Canadian West. A Conservative MP from 1917 to 192 1, he was a political traditionalist, once complaining in a letter to London that "democracy has its valuable and strong features, but it certainly has its weak ones. I suppose it is natural that during a long drawn out period, activities of crooks, cranks, university professors, school masters and a clergyman with extreme socialistic views [J.S. Woodsworth], miracle workers and pedlars of paradise, should have their innings and their place under the sun, and that the product of their combined efforts should be a Social Credit Party, a CCF Party, a Communist Party and a Labour Party~" London, too, had been undergoing important physical and personnel changes. Governor Sale was coming under increasingly virulent attack for the Company's inability to turn adequate earnings on its huge department stores. Despite these uncertainties, the Company invested the bulk of its wartime profits in a new head office building on Great Trinity Lane, opposite the famed Church of' St Ethelburga the Virgin in Bishopsgate.* Designed by Oscar Faber, Hudson's Bay *It was at this stone sanctuary, dating back at least to 1430, that Henry Hudson received communion on April 19, 1607, before setting off on the voyage of exploration that would eventually provide the Company with its initial base of operations. THE LORDS AND THE GOOD OLD BOYS 379 House was a curious, turreted edifice that needed a large formal garden around it to bring out its lines. The Company also built Beaver House on Garlick Hill in the 1920s, and for the first time in two centuries, the HBCs fur auction could once again be held at its own premises. Inside, there was refrigerated storage space for two million pelts and large fur-grading rooms under double windows with a northern exposure.* The halls and boardroom were decorated with paintings of former governors, narwhal tusks and ship models in cases. After the Hudson's Bay House building was sold, this structure also accommodated the Company offices. In Canada, the Company's stores were being transformed. Through the direct intervention of Deputy Governor Sir Frederick Henry Richmond, managing director of Debenhams, a large London department store, the 1113Cs retailing outlets were placed in the charge of P.J. Parker, a fornier Boston merchandiser who had set up his own store across the road from the HBCs Calgary outlet and had been bought out to obtain his services. A tiny creature who appeared to have walked straight out of the pages of Pickwick Papers, he had rosy cheeks and always wore gloves and matching spats. But Parker was a misanthropic presence who angered his fellow employees with his fusty ways, and he lasted for less than a year. In his place was appointed an obscure British accountant named Philip Chester, who would exercise almost as significant an impact on the Hudson's Bay Company as had Sir George Simpson a century earlier. *To prevent any variation in light quality, the walls and floors of these grading chambers were glazed with sand-blasted nonreflecting battleship-grey tiles. CHAPTER14 TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD The Governor and the HBcs Canadian General Manager understood that, like two scorpions in a bottle, only one would emerge, the victor "TIILE PHILIP CHESTER WOULD TURN OUT to be the dominant force in creating the modern Hudson's Bay Company, neither his tenure nor its success would have been possible without the operational matrix set down by Charles Vincent Sale. Eventually deposed as the HBCs Governor in a shareholder revolt triggered by charges of self-dealing, during his sixteen years in the Company's two top jobs Sale turned its operations upside down. Not only was he largely responsible for generating the wartime profit that financed its growth through the uncertain 1920s but he also transformed the HBC from mainly a fur-trading house and general-store business into a mass retailer. Unlike most of his predecessors, he took more than a passing interest in Canada, spending three months of every year touring the Company's stores, and, as a parting gesture, granted the Canadian Committee most of the authority it had always wanted. At the same time, he widened the Company's horizons by throwing its archives open to historians and hiring a young Oxford zoologist (Charles Elton) as a consultant to study fluctuations in Arctic animal populations. What really brought Sale down was the Depression. The great department stores he had built across the West 381 382 MERCHANT PRINCES were transformed almost overnight from luxurious merchandising palaces into drafty nightmares with huge overheads.'rhe new Winnipeg store alone had an annual carrying charge of $3.3 million, while Vancouver, at $2.6 million, was nearly as expensive. Gross margins had to be increased to 38.5 percent of selling price just to meet overhead costs, making it difficult to turn any profit. Between 1929 and 1931, operating losses in the retail division jumped from $182,000 to more than $2 million. Sale's plight was aggravated by shareholder expectations. "Many of them had acquired their shares in the same confidence of steady returns with which they would have opened a savings account," wrote I IBC archivist Anne Morton, and, "bitterly disappointed, were now out for blood. Sale was the obvious scapegoat." London's initial response to the Depression's onset was to dispatch Lord Ebury, one of its senior directors, to Canada for a first-hand report.* He was appalled at the laxness of some of the staff, condemning P.J. Parker, then in charge of stores, as being unfit for the job. "Amongst his chief weaknesses-apart from Drink-are a tendency to jump into action without proper forethought," Ebury reported. "He fails to appreciate the supreme importance of ... living up to agreements and promises, and he is inclined to be a bit of a 'slick."' *Francis Egerton Grosvenor, 4th Lord Ebury, was one of the most-decorated officers of the Canadian Expeditionary Force in the First World War. I le came out from England and spent the early years of the century in the Kootenays as an assayer for smelters at Trail and Nelson, and after 1910 worked on the Duke of Sutherland's land-settlement plan in Alberta. He joined the 29th Battalion CEF (16bin's Tigers) in Vancouver in 1914, and won the DSO and bar, the MC and bar, and the Croix de Guerre with palm. fie was mentioned in dispatches five times, was wounded, and ended the war staff officer with the 4th Canadian Division. He served on the board of the HBC and another City institution, the Royal Exchange Assurance. TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 383 In contrast, Ebury had nothing but praise for Philip Alfred Chester, who had been assigned to Canada by Sale as Chief Accountant in 1925 after having joined the London staff as a junior two years previously. "Mr. Chester," wrote Ebury, "is, in my opinion, brilliantlv clever and certainly one of the quickest thinking men I have come across in a long time." The visiting peer added a prophetic footnote: "Ile suffers from high blood pressure and needs careful nursing; one of the drawbacks of Winnipeg is thai this man is never free of his work, or thinking or talking shop." Ebury strongly recommended that the Canadian Committee, then headed by George Allan, be given power to deal with the Company's staff appointments and daily operations. His suggestion was confirmed at the Court of proprietors on June 2 7, 193 0, and put into effect by Sale himself during a Winnipeg visit shortly afterwards. The essential element in the reorganization that followed was the appointment of Chester as General Manager for Canada, at an annual salary of $20,000. Although the London board's resolution had conferred on the Canadian Committee "full powers of attorney" and all necessary arrangements "for the due exercise thereof," the true meaning of these phrases would be argued over for the next forty years. "There seemed afterwards to be some misconception of what was really arranged with the then Governor on this side of the water and what apparently was the conception at head office," admitted Allan in a speech to his Calgary staff, "but that was very soon washed away. . . . As I put it, if they desired us to relieve them and take over the management, administration and control, that it might as well be one hundred percent, and that the horns had better go with the hide." The HBCs affairs were clearly in crisis, and its proprietors began demanding a drastic shakeup. In London, 384 MERCHANT PRINCES the fight to unseat Sale and his board was led by a solicitor named Charles Louis Nordon. A highly effective campaigner on behalf of minority shareholders' rights and dividend incomes, he was incensed with the Hudson's Bay Company's dismal earnings record and eventually fought the Company of Adventurers to a standstill. "My father considered it to be one of his greatest legal triumphs," recalled Keith Nordon of his father's clash with the HBC, "in that he was well and truly up against not only an enormous Company but also against almost the whole of the City of London in that, in the big dispute, the City naturally sided with the powerful Hudson's Bay." At one point, things got so nasty that Nordon (who held 740 shares in 1927 and whose family had been investing in JIBC stock since 1873) was physically barred from one of the HBCs annual Courts and had to sneak in through a fire escape. Nordon had first challenged Sale on the fact that between 1920 and 1925, the Company had sold land worth P,1,987,738 while paying outY,1,750,922 in taxesa levy which, when added to administrative expenses, meant the land sales had been a futile waste of potential future assets. It was a perfectly reasonable criticism, but Sale chose to ignore it because Nordon was too insignificant a shareholder. Nordon continued to bombard the directors with meticulously researched queries in the later 1920s so that even proprietors who had at first considered him a noisy nuisance began to pay attention. He was particularly incensed by the revelation that in 1927, which was not an especially bad year, the Company had been able to earn only Y,151,909 on its E6,779,656 investment in the fur trade and sales shops. Having been barred from corresponding with the Company, Nordon began issuing a series of circulars condemning Its fiscal performance and the integrity of its directors. He organized a shareholders' vigilante TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 385 group that included several major investors including Captain Victor Alexander Cazalet (the HBCs largest stockholder with 40,5 00 shares), who demanded action.* The shareholders were particularly frustrated by the Company's practice of diverting profits to something called a "dividend equalization fund," which was really a reserve account, preventing more generous dividend distribution. But it was Nordon's pointed attacks on the Governor's integrity that finally broke Sale's hold and reputation. Nordon had accused Sale of self-dealing in the 192 0 purchase by the HBC, for S~60,000, of a 15 -percent interest in the Merchant Trading Company, owned mostly by the Sale family. Used during the Great War as a purchasing agency for the shipping operation, the firm had continued in business but returned the fIBC almost no dividends. Although it was never identified as such, the HBC acquisition of Sale's shares had been more in the nature of an interest-free loan to reward the then Deputy Governor for his wartime services. Sale's great mistake was to pretend that it had been a legitimate business transaction, thus trapping himself into defending the indefensible. At the 19 3 0 annual Court, Nordon asked that an internal committee be set up to investigate the Company's affairs. Its report, tabled five months later, vindicated Sale but suggested the HBCs stores be run by a newly established, Canadian-domiciled IIBC subsidiary. Since Sale had just approved a similar arrangement, or at least granted the Canadian Committee all the authority it *Four times the British (and once the Canadian) squash champion, Cazalet had attended Eton and Oxford (where he earned four Blues), fought with distinction in the trenches during the Great War, and was later elected a Member of Parliament. He inherited the HBC stake from his father. He was killed with General Wadyslaw Sikorski, the Polish premier in exile, in the crash of a Liberator bomber off Gibraltar in 1943. 386 MERCHANT PRINCES could handle, there seemed to be no reason for him to resign. Yet be left the governorship just before publication of the report, leading contemporary observers to believe there had been a secret deal: that Sale would be officially exonerated from the accusations of self-dealing by his peers in return for clearing up all the suspicion surrounding the Company by agreeing to abandon his post. The resignation took place during an extraordinary Court, held at the City Terminus Hotel on Cannon Street on January 16, 193 1. Company records pointed to a loss of Y,746,334 for the fiscal year, which meant there would be no cash for dividends. With the worth of its assets reduced by an astonishing.V.2 million in the previous twelve inonths-and facing the prospect of an extended economic downturn-the Company seemed well on its way to technical bankruptcy. Shareholders nearly went berserk, calling for the resignation of the entire board and nominating members of the Nordon committee to take their place. Chaired by Deputy Governor Sir Frederick Richmond, the noisy meeting would not allow Sale to speak. When he rose briefly to reassert his innocence in the Merchant Trading affair, he was shouted down and could barely be heard, lamenting: "For my shortcomings I ask your forgiveness." Five other directors eventually stepped down, and were replaced by three Nordon nominees, including Cazalet. A new board was elected, led by the redoubtable Edward Peacock, but the most important item on the agenda was the appointment of a new governor. THE MAN PICKED TO RESCUE THE COMPANY at this difficult moment was Patrick Ashley Cooper, and his selection was no accident. In an act of direct, almost brutal intervention unprecedented in the HBCs long history, Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England, TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 387 personally assigned Cooper to the job, then went on to choose Sir Alexander Murray, one of the City's ablest financiers, tobe Cooper's Deputy.* Incase there mightbe any doubt about the weight of authority behind his nominations, Norman sent a letter to C.L. Nordon not only affirming his personal regard for Cooper but placing the Company of Adventurers in its appropriate context. "I alone sefected Mr. Patrick Ashley Cooper and recommended him as suitable for the Governorship of the Hudson's Bay Company," he wrote. I am not concerned with the affairs of the Hudson's Bay Company except as regards the Governorship and that owing to the prestige and imperial importance of the Company." Norman stressed the same historical link during a private briefing with Cooper. "Your task," said the Governor of the Bank of England to the Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, "is to rebuild a bridge of Empire." A tall, awkward Scot with round tortoise-shell glasses and a crisp military moustache, Cooper could be kind and approachable, though he never softened his attitude of trying to run the firm like the headmaster of a rowdy boys' school. With the sombre suits he favoured draped over his six-foot-four frame, he commanded instant attentionand got it. Born in middle circumstances at Aberdeen, C ooper attended Fettes College in Edinburgh (Scotland's Eton), then read law at Aberdeen and went on to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where his long arms helped him win an oar. Badly wounded in the back while serving as an infantry major during the Great War, he became a City *Yet another of those peripatetic Scottish financiers who held the Empire together, Murray had spent three decades in India, occupying most of its important administrative positions, including a five-year stint as Governor of the Imperial Bank of India. He later became a director of Lloyds Bank and the Bank of London and South America, remaining a solid influence on the Hudson's Bay board until 1946. 388 MERCHANT PRINCES accountant and did so well that the Bank of England began asking him to act on its behalf in helping salvage near-defunct British companies around the globe. At forty-three and married to the beautiful Welsh heiress Kathleen Spickett, he became an important figure in London society, having won kudos for successfully liquidating the Banco Italo-Britannica in Milan and rescuing the Primitiva Gas Company of Buenos Aires. He had accepted the difficult job of turning the Hudson's Bay Company around in the bearpit of the Depression on condition that his initial salary of Y,5,000 be raised when the economy improved. Despite his relatively meagre stipend, Cooper brought the July 1931 proprietors' Court to its feet with the offer to reduce his pay by 10percent. "Are we to devote ourselves," he demanded, "to searching in the past or building for the future?" "Both!" cried out an Adventurer. "No. It cannot be both. You must make up your minds whether you are going to ask us to dig into the past, or go forward into the future, and that is the decision I shall ask you to make. " It was a clever ploy because the Company's proprietors had become so mesmerized by recent troubles they had lost sight of the future. For the next three years that future was grim indeed, with losses totalling E3.6 million. Cooper threw himself into his new job, leaving almost immediately for Canada, eager to meet Philip Chester, the new General Manager. The omens were not good. just before he left England, Cooper was informed by the Canadian Committee that henceforth communications to London would be dispatched monthly instead of weekly and that, oh yes, P.J. Parker, the Canadian operation's highestranking executive in charge of stores, had just been fired. In reporting these changes to the Governor, Chester- speaking through Canadian Committee Chairman George Allan-lamely apologized for not having first TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 389 consulted or even notified the London board. "It was purely an oversight," Allan explained, caused by very great stress of work at the time." Cooper arrived in Montreal on September 3, 193 1, and the first entry in his private diary reflected his sour mood: "Went to Ritz-Carlton. General Manager of the HBC in the Hotel and still in bed." His outlook didn't improve at the breakfast he had next morning in the Windsor Hotel. He ordered "a pot of tea. Dry toast, butter on the side. En,~Iisb marmalade and two eggs boiled three minutes ... three minutes precisely." When the waiter arrived, all was as requested, but there was only one eggcup with one egg perched on it. Cooper, according to his breakfast companion, berated the hotel employee mercilessly, calling him a "stupid colonial" and similar epithets. He stopped only when the waiter, with white-gloved hand and beatific smile, lifted the eggcup to reveal the missing egg, boiled three minutes precisely. The Governor's mood brightened considerably when he was summoned to Ottawa for a private meeting with the Prime Minister, only to find that the Right Honourable R.B. Bennett was, as Cooper confided to his journal, "cordial and helpful, but most critical of the Company, its higher personnel and policy." Still, he stayedat Rideau Hall, the Governor General's official residence, with the Earl of Bessborough and went swim- ming in the Chateau Laurier pool wearing a bathing suit borrowed from CNR Chairman Sir Henry Thornton that had "room for myself and two others." In Toronto he met most of the men who mattered-Sir Joseph Flavelle, Sir John Aird, E.R. Wood, WE. Rundle-and was shown around E-aton's (bv R.Y. Eaton) and Simpsons (by C.L. Burton). He then went off to Winnipeg and a tour of the Company's retail operation, at one point "driving down the main street of Kamloops to examine our competitors' windows." By the time he left, two months later, Cooper 390 MERCHANT PRINCES was not at all pleased with what he had seen. "I was dismayed at what I found," he noted. "As soon as I arrived in Winnipeg, it was perfectly obvious to me that the state of misunderstanding and tension between London and Winnipeg had almost reached an open breach. . . . " Later, Cooper summarized the areas of serious concern he had uncovered. lie had found not one department or subsidiary operation that wasn't losing money; "great and thoughtless extravagance in all directions," he noted in his diary, "a sense of unthinking security throughout the whole staff," and "no general comprehension that the Company was nearing complete collapse. . . ." As if that diagnosis wasn't gloomy enough, Cooper wisely concluded that his main problem would be learning to live with Chester, the thirty-five-year-old General Manager installed under Sale. Chester, the Governor felt, should have a different attitude towards London, one that would show loyalty to the British board and shareholders. Fat chance. MOST FACES BETRAY THE CHARACTER of their owners, reflecting the balance between their generous natures and niggardly emotions. But Chester's facial features were smooth and uncommunicative, like those of the masked man in The Phantom o the Opera-not ugly, but If expressionless, designed to evoke in others emotions complementary to his own. His eyes were as blank as gun barrels, tinted pewter-grey, revealing nothing. His threepiece suits were all the same: immaculately tailored (by Lloyd Brothers in Toronto or one of the bespoke shops in Savile Row), but interchangeable; no one ever remembered anything he wore. Even his handshake was bereft of feeling. "Like taking hold of a piece of cold fish," one Bay employee recalled. "There was no squeeze. You let go quickly, because you got no response." TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 391 Philip Alfred Chester, Managing Director, HBC He grew up in a harsh and sterile place-Long Eaton, an industrial town in the working-class region of Derbyshire, where his mother (a Rhinelander) worked as a governess and his father as an intermittently employed millhand. In 1914, Philip, who was then barely eighteen, volunteered for the King's Royal Rifle Corps. The day he was set to leave for the Front-already dressed in his uniform and ready to board the troop train-his mother wanted to snap a picture of him with her Brownie. She aimed the camera, but young Philip's grandmother 392 MERCHANT PRINCES smashed it out of her hands with the admonition: "Not on the Sabbath!" Chester won a field commission (to Staff Captain) and was severely wounded, both times on January 10, first in France and later on the Isonzo Front in northern Italy. He saved his gratuities and had just enough money to put himself through accounting school, then joined the Hudson's Bay Company's London office. He grew to love the Company, but his feelings were poisoned by his intense awareness that no matter what he did, no matter how suc- cessful within the HBCs hierarchy he might become, its upper-class directors would make him feel he didn't quite measure up, that he was of lowly birth, a man who had emigrated to make his way in a former colony. "However nice they are to you, they'll never accept you, because they know where you came from by the sound of your voice," Frank Walker, his executive assistant and later editor of the Montreal Star, had warned Chester after he had been f~ted at a social function by members of the London board. Years later, Lady Cooper, Sir Patrick's widow, confirmed that diagnosis. "Socially," she recalled, "Chester wasn't in the same group as the other people he worked with. They were all on a higher plane in London. He thought they were always looking down on him, which made him feel mad. He was absolutely off his head. My husband was being invited to stay at Sandringham ... the King would invite him to go down.Then he was made a director of the Bank of England, and Chester hated him more than ever. He'd never even met the Governor of the Bank of England. My husband was moving in those circles-miles above Philip." ButChester knewthe rules ofthe game and howitwas played. Confronted by the icy nuances of the British class system, he decided to lind a suitable exit. He couldn't change his birthplace, but he could fix his speech, and eventually he did. He invented a new persona for himself TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 393 to bypass the upper-class English habit of accepting or dismissing individuals on the basis of their accents. His voice, melodious, incongruously rich coming through those pursed lips, marked him as a certified gentleman. "Ile never achieved the'oink'of an old Etonian," remembered Charles Loewen, the Bay Street broker who married Chester's daughter, Susanne. "His became an unidentifiable English accent, a sort of Alistair Cooke inflection." That transformation, as significant as it may have been to his future, had to be put on hold until Chester could deal with the crisis of confidence at the Company's Canadian headquarters and impose discipline on an organization that had spun out of control. Chester began a major reorganization of the fur department under the direction of Ralph Parsons and later Bob Chesshire, while Western Arctic Manager Dudley Copland win- nowed the number of posts from nineteen to fourteen. He had Company engineers experiment with and use insulation materials for the northern posts, masterminded development of a radio medical network and initiated research into permafrost. In charge of retail operations he placed a Massachusetts-born merchandising specialist named Francis F. Martin. It was not a popular choice. "He was a rude, ruthless, egoistical despot," recalled John Enright, then in charge of the sewing machine department. "Even dress regulations were laid down, with salesladies expected to wear conservative black or navy and short sleeves permitted only if they were at least four inches below the armpit." Chester and Martin would reassign the coal-department manager from one store to run the corset department of another. Even if his methods were crude, Chester shook up the stores' bureaucratic lethargy and moved them into the twentieth century. He insisted that the Company be a leader in personnel and wage administration policies; the 394 MERCHANT PRINCES IJBC was one of the first national companies to name a woman Uoan Whiting) to an executive post. Chester was responsible for starting a preparatory course in merchandising in the C ompany. Advertising was increased; selec- tion and variety beLme as important as mark-ups; self-service food floors were introduced; executive salaries were raised; training and profit-sharing became part of senior employees' fringe benefits. The unprofitable Lethbridge store was sold, and the costbenefit ratio of each outlet was examined and re-examined. A strict rule against hiring relatives of existing employees was put into effect. Decentralized purchasing and consolidated management techniques allowed individual store managers freedom to match their merchandise selection more closely with their own communities' needs, while the central buying office in Winnipeg handled such staples as HBC blankets, sheets, towels, dried fruit and so on. To collect its bills from hard-pressed customers, the HBC employed its own bailiffs. Fred Herbert, who occupied that office in Vancouver, boasted that he was kindness personified while repossessing unpaid-for articles: "If there's kids in the house, I'll never take a stove, but I'll take a radio or gramophone goddamn quick." Within a year of Chester's appointment, store profits were up 60 percent, and by 193 7, though the Depression had hardly abated, most divisions had beg-un to prosper again.* What Chester achieved was to break the psychol- ogy, widespread among Company executives when he *Not so lucky was the HBCs oil investment. Chester had tried wisuccessfillly to sell the Company's share in Hudson's Bay Oil & Gas to the Anglo-Ecuadorian Oilfields Company, and further investment funds in oil and gas exploration were cut off after September 193 1. Three years later, HBOG signed a deal with the Northwest Company, a subsidiary of briperial Oil, and eventually renewed it tojune 1951, to allow the Esso subsidiary to explore the Company's holdingsin return fora 50-percent share in the findings. TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 395 arrived, that it was their right to demand the trade of the public. The IJBCs monopoly had been dead for more than half a century, but they had yet to react to the news. Chester's store inspections were legendary. "He was positively vicious," recalled Bob Chesshire. "He would raise so much hell, you wouldn't know whether you were standing on your head or your feet. He wouldn't miss a thing, find ten things wrong on every floor, had everybody scared out of their wits, because we were all hanging on to our jobs by our eyebrows at the time. He used to place a lot of emphasis on cleanliness of toilets, and one poor store manager got into deep trouble because he hadn't finished having the washrooms painted, so Chester couldn't get in to see if they passed muster." Another time, in the Calgary store, Chester happened to pass a suggestion box. He asked how often it was cleared, and when he was assured it was at least once a day, demanded it be opened. He read every suggestion, found one two weeks old, and sacked the store supervisor on the spot. "Why must I be surrounded by bloody fools?" he often complained to anyone in range of his wrath. One senior executive who had momentarily displeased Chester was astounded to find the General Manager staring at him for a long moment, then pronouncing his verdict: "You know, whenever I look at you, I think we're a man short." George Weightman, who worked at head office at the time, bad been assigned to produce an inventory of HBC blankets. He had trouble collecting the necessary documentation and one afternoon found that Chester had quietly stolen up behind him. "He stood looking silently on for a few minutes and then said: 'You know what's the matter with you, Weightman? You've got more records than we have blankets."' Chesshire remembered being summoned into Chester's office (known as the holv of holies) only to find his temper in full flight. "You!'; Chester began, an accusing finger 396 MERCHANT PRINCES pointed at Chesshire. "You! I told you what to do and they've buggered up the whole thing! Now you're just sitting there, with nothing to say!" Chesshire, one of the few head-office functionaries not actively terrified of Chester, calmed him (town by investigating the situation and reporting back. "Chester made a lot of preposterous statements to deliberately get under your hide," he observed, "because he felt that it was sometimes the only way to get all the facts." Chester was always testing people. Almost every conversation became an interrogation. But anyone brave enough to face him down usually won. "He was sitting in my office when I accused him of not having told me the truth about something," recalled Frank Walker. "'Are you calling me a liar?' he demanded. I calmly replied that to be a liar, he would have had to make a habit of not telling me the truth. Well, he marched out of there, and I didn't see him again until next morning, when he came in to apologize. I said there was no need to apologize; all he had to say was that he hadn't told me the truth. That got him fired up all over again, and he stormed out. He had been willing to be decent, but I was being a son of a bitch and had brought the issue up again. Finally, he came in just before lunch and mumbled, 'Thats all you want me to say, that I didn't tell you the truth?' I told him that he didn't really have to say anything, so he shot back: 'All right, I didn't tell the truth'-and marched out of my office in high dudgeon, for the third time." "There's no question that Chester used his outbursts to get precisely what he wanted, especially from the British board," musedJohn de B. Payne, the HBC official who had hired Walker as one of Chester's executive assistants. "His temper was never vindictive, never personal, just temper really, as in,'I've got an idea and this is the way I'm going to fight for it.' He was driven by an obsession for excellence and in seeking it was as harsh on himself as TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 397 with others." Chester himself, looking back on his stewardship, wrote to E.F. Newlands, secretary of the Canadian Committee: "While I was a tough bird-perhaps too tough on many occasions-it was because of my constant urge to keep a first-class office and to be an example for the rest of the old Company. I had seen and lived in the sad Winnipeg H [ead] 0 [ffice] of the late twenties, which was a disgrace and a big contributor to the mess in which the Company found itself in those years." While most Hi3c employees (who made up a new translation for the Company's initials as "Here Before Chester") viewed him as "living on Mount Olympus, occasionally hurling a thunderbolt," they were fairly often exposed to his exquisite political tactics. "He used to brief a group of us before each Canadian Committee meeting," recalled Pete Buckley, who worked with Chester at the time, "and we'd have to rehearse everything he wanted us to say, so that by the time we presented our case the Committee members could only agree. It kind of shocked me." THF MAIN VICTIM of Chester's temper tantrums was Patrick Ashley Cooper, a target so perfect that if he hadn't existed he would have to have been made up. The Governor and the HBCs Canadian General Manager understood that, like two scorpions in a bottle, only one would ernerge the victor. Once the Company had been turned around, the blood feud between Chester and Cooper over corporate territoriality took on the extra dimension of competing to get the credit for its hardwon return to profitability. For Chester, the great advantage of having Cooper to shoot at was that the British Governor had little sense of humour and never really understood his opponent. He genuinely believed that Chester's mood swings were physiological rather than 398 MERCHANT PRINCES tactical and could never fig-ure out any way of controlling or silencing his Canadian colleague-apart, perhaps, from somehow court-martialling him or challenging him to a duel. The British Governor and the Canadian Manager both became obsessed with keeping one another at bay, studying every nuance of every letter thev exchanged-the slant of the signature, the way the paper was folded-as though it were written in hieroglyphics signalling a wealth of hidden motives and meanings. Each was convinced that only his way of doing things was correct and that anyone who strayed one inch fron-i his particular path to righteousness was a write-off. "They just didn't get along," recalled Cooper's widow. "They disagreed about everything, and each prickled when the other was near. Chester set out to run the Company from Canada, and my husband, from the moment he heard that, put his foot down, saying, 'Never. Over my dead body. It was founded by Prince Rupert. It has always been in London and will always be in London!'They were poles apart." "Chester is so changeable," Cooper bitterly complained to his diary (August 2, 1934). "When he is in control of himself, a pleasure and anxious to do what he can for us ... but then again, swept by brain storms, he takes a ridiculous attitude almost amounting to open opposi- tion to London, fighting over every detail." The diary bristles with complaints about Chester's behaviour. November 27, 1936: "Long talk with Chester. If the English language means anything, he was entirely rea- sonable and satisfactory. I fancy it was all eyewash." January 7, 1943: "Chester's behaviour abominable. He sat with a face black as thunder and contributed nothing except one or two outbursts ... he was very narrow minded and difficult. I was glad however that his ill temper and bad manners were exposed to the board." On his first trip to London as General Manager for Canada, TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 399 Chester expressed his contempt for the annual Court proceedings. "I was given a seat on the rostrum so that I could look over a selection of our proprietors," he wrote to Allan, "and to me, the gathering resembled that of the representatives of a Diocese assembled together for the induction of a ne,% Archbishop, rather than a bunch of intelligent and disturbed shareholders." The two men had little in common except that they happened to have been born on the same island. Winnipeg was such a long way from London in those days, and the Governor seemed untouchable. He led a charmed life. Hexton Manor, his country seat near Hitchin, in Hertfordshire, dates back to 1030, is mentioned in the Domesday Book and has been occupied by only sixteen different families since. If, as Noel Coward once pointed out, the stately homes of England existed to prove that the upper classes still had the upper hand, Cooper's home was a grand example of the genre. Set on a private lake in a 4,000-acre estate, it had twenty-eight rooms and that feeling of elegance-as-a-throwawaygesture that marks the British gentry~ The Coopers were invited to dine with the Prince of Wales at St James's Palace ("Another milestone!" he triumphantly noted in his diary on February 21, 1934); he was named a director of the Bank of England ("From now onwards I enter the Bank as of right, and have a peg on which to hang my hat with my name over it! "-April 6, 193 2); and on January 16, 1935, he and Kathleen went to Sandringham-the first HBC Governor to be invited to a royal residence since Sir Bibye Lake in 1713. ("Down to dinner where I met ... Sir Herbert and Lady Fetherstonhaugh. Lady Meade-Fetherstonhaugh's first husband was Hesketh Pritchard who was at Fettes 7 years before me. I sat on the Queen's left. . . . When the ladies left the room the King called me around to sit by him and was full of questions about the Eskimos.") 400 MERCHANT PRINCES Into the early 1950s, the HBC_ was still reckoned as something of a viceregal presence among Canadian companies, and the Governor's tours resembled a royal procession, with the Coopers treated like visiting heads of state, accompanied by flag-bearers and trailed by a retinue of flustered flun&s.* They would cross the Atlantic aboard one of the great liners, occupying a suite of two bedrooms, sitting room and bathroom on A deck, being seated nightly at the Captain's table. In Montreal, Cooper called on the greatest capitalists of the day, including Sir Herbert Holt, Sir Charles Gordon, Sir Edward Beatty and Arthur Purvis, the head of Canadian Industries Limited, the first Canadian executive to have a private airplane, who won the admiration of his peers for having chaired meetings in Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto on the same day.t Then on to Ottawa. "We were received by the Prime Minister, provincial premiers, *One of the stranger legacies of Cooper's stewardship was his insistence that The Beaver publish photographs ofhim on safari. The magazine regularly featured candid shots of the Governor 11 shooting crocodile from the roofofa launch on the Kafue River in Northern Rhodesia" or the Governor "setting out on a duck expedition in the swamps of the Zambesi at Lealui village, ruled by Kng Yeta Ill." Exactly how this was supposed to raise the morale of the fur traders freezing their butts off at Baker Lake wasn't clear. tOn his 1939 visit, Cooper took a detour to meet Maurice Duplessis, the Union Nationale premier, in Quebec Citv. "The whole performance and atmosphere of his office was very like a provincial government office in the Argentine," he disdainfully noted in his diary [July 18, 1939]. "Unshaven secretaries sitting about and smoking innumerable cigarettes ... I went in and found the typical young Latin politician. Ile made it evident that he had no time to waste on me, for he kept one of the members ofparliament with him.... During our short talk he made a few of his facetious remarks accompanied by winks, for which he is so famous." TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 401 and, of course, staved at Government House-with the Bessboroughs, Tweedsmuirs, Athlones and Alexanders," recalled Lady Cooper. "They would lend us their private railway cars to travel in, and my husband had nicknames for all the young aides who worked at Rideau Hall. It was charming." After a triumphal stopover in Toronto (lunch at the Toronto Club with Principal WL. Grant of Upper Canada College and calls, as always, on the heads of Simpsons and Eaton's), the caravan would roll into Winnipeg. The usual sparring with Chester and the Canadian Committee was followed by a visit to the Manitoba Club, where he gave a yearly address. "There were 63 present including the lieutenant governor, the premier, and almost everyone in Winnipeg of any importance," he noted of his visit on October 7, 1932. "George Allan introduced me with a speech of 35 minutes which was of unnecessary length, the first 25 minutes being taken up with sheer irrelevancies and before the end of his speech people were getting fairly restive. I rose in this atmosphere but was fortunate to find that I was able instantly to claim their attention and I thought that I held it without a break to the end." While in Canada, Cooper believed that he had the right to communicate directly with any Company official, which often caused *Cooper was happy to borrow His Ex's rail car but would far rather have had his own. Repeated entreaties to have the Canadian Committee purchase or lease one for hini were manhilly rebuffed by George Allan, who patiently explained that "we are, of necessity, driving our rank and file pretty hard these days of reduced salaries and wages ... and my own hunch is [that you should avoid] a breath of criticism by any member of the staff, no matter how Bolshevistic he might be.... Democracy in Canada has made great advances and Canadians ... are critical of people of importance from Great Britain and other countries visiting Canada ...... 402 MERCHANT PRINCES annoyance, confusion and misunderstanding. "One thing that particularly riled Mr. Chester," remembered Winifred Archer, his loyal secretary, "was that when Governor Cooper visited Canada and was with, say, the manager of a large store, he would question the Canadian executive on matters not under the control of London. Mr. Chester I-elt this was not only unfair to him -self, but also unfair to the manager." That didn't stop Cooper, and he always made a special point of inspecting the Winnipeg store. On one such occasion, his wife expressed a desire to view the competing Eaton's store, then managed by Bill Palk. "How do you like it?" Palk politely inquired, after she and Mrs Conrad Riley had spent some time touring several departments. "Well," Kathleen Cooper replied, equally politely, 94actually, I don't like it at all. We've just been all through the Hudson's Bay Company store and it's nice and quiet. You can do your shopping in peace. But here, the aisles are crowded and everyone is pushing you around all the time." Palk, who read the riot act to any department manager whose aisles weren't crowded enough to force him and his assistant to walk through in single file, knew at that moment why Eaton's was outselling the Bay. The first Governor to undertake northern inspection tours by air, Cooper posed a special problem for his keepers. The Governor insisted that his official flag be fluttering bef~re he arrived at any Company post.* Many stores, especially in the North, didn't have one, or it had been eaten by rats, and often the FIBC Beechcraft kept circling for some time. Chesshire recalled being stuck in just such a situation, trying to land the HBC plane against an incoming low-pressure front, when Cooper exclaimed: "I can't see the Governors flag flying!" *This was the Company's coat of arnis on a white field, which today flies frorn all FIBC stores. TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 403 Patrick Ashley Cooper and others, v?ith thefirst airplane purchased by the Hudson's Bay Company. Left to right: Harold Winny, Pilot; Patrick Ashley Cooper; Duncan McLaren, Mechanic; Paul Davoud, Manager, Transportation; Philip A. Chester, General Manager HBC; Bob Cbesshire, Nrzv Manager, Fur Trade Department. "But Sir," Chesshire replied, "they don't have a flag." "Well, they should have." "What good would it do?" "The Indians would know the Governor's in town," explained Cooper. Chesshire had no answer for that except to shrug and turn his eyes heavenward. Cooper inspected not just every store but every warehouse. While at Fort Chipewyan, he once found "numbers of horse collars, horse shoes although I ascertained that there were only two horses in the whole district. These have been written off the books but it is an obvious weakness that they are not moved somewhere where 404 MERCHANT PRINCES they can be sold" [September 16, 1932]. One problem with Cooper's northern sojourns was that he demanded a full press corps reception when he returned to Winnipeg. Local journalists obliged the first time but soon found more interesting copy. Murray Turner, then in charge of public relations, solved the problem by recruiting eight tea and coffee salesmen from the wholesale department, handing them cameras-but not filmfrom the retail store, and telling them to pretend they were photographing the Governor's every limb movement as he descended from the aircraft. That made Cooper very happy, but every year when he returned to London, he would puzzle about it. "Extraordinary," he would say. "I have lots of photographs taken when I'm in Canada-and they never let me see them . . ." COOPER'S MOST NOTABLE-and most bizarre-adventure was his 1934 journey into Hudson Bay. " 193 3 was a year of depression and losses," Chester noted when the Governor's decision to go North the following summer was being debated. "Within the Company the prospect of an Arctic pageant was received with misgivings and hopes that nothing would come of it. But as events quickly proved, such hopes were reducing the man and his plan to too simple a simplicity, as in no time at all London and Canada were organizing a voyage that would be the talk of Arctic circles for years to come." The Nascopie was turned over to a shipyard for reconfiguration of her passenger space to accommodate the Governor and his retinue. Bronze commemorative medals were struck featuring the profile of Cooper; hundreds of hunting knives were inscribed "From P. Ashley Cooper, Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, 1934" on one side and "Be happy while you hunt" on the other; and an extra stock of Governor's flags was ordered. TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 405 On July 7, 1934, Cooper boarded the ship at her home berth in Montreal. With him were his wife, her inaid, his secretary (G.R. Macdonald), a piper from the Black Watch of Canada (Pipe Sergeant Hannah) and Michael Lubbock, who was to act as Cooper's executive assistant and speech writer.* Aboard also were Ralph Parsons, the Company's Fur Trade Commissioner, a King's Scout (one a year was awarded the trip by the IiBC), eight Mounties and several new HBC clerks, an archaeologist, an astronomer, an ornithologist and a newsreel production team. A thousand spectators lined the dock as the thirtieth Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company was piped aboard his ship for a six-week voyage into the Company's original territory that none ofhis predecessors had ever bothered to make. The Nascopie, her pennants flying, steamed along the north shore of the St Lawrence, through the Strait of Belle Isle, then up the rocky coast of Labrador to Cartwright and later Port Burwell. The piper first did a round of the decks, frightening the caged chickens and sheep, then climbed into the bow of the ship's cutter and began playing "Oh where, tell me where, is my Highland laddie gone?" He was followed down the ladder by the Governor and his wife, Captain Smellie of the Nascopie and Parsons. "Sir G eorge Simpson in his 3 0-foot canoe, with his beaver hat, piper and singing voyageurs, made no braver picture than this," rhapsodized R.H.H. Macaulay, a Company scribe. "A white motor boat of trim lineamidships, on a high-backed seat, the Governor and Mrs. *The highly educated son of a director of the Bank of England and a former director ofthe HBC, Lubbock was not unduly fond ofCooper. "He was almost illiterate," Lubbock claimed, "so that whenever I wanted him to express rather loffier sentiments, I would insert, 'as the seventeenth-century writer said'-and then put in my own words. I even got quoted in a number of papers, and I knew he'd never dare ask me who the writer was." 406 MERCHANT PRINCES 0~ Patrick Ashley Cooper and Mrs Cooper posing on the ice during the Hudson Bay tour, 1934 Cooper, by the Governor's side the Commissioner. At the small wheel immediately behind the seat stood the 3rd mate in uniform, and by his side a uniformed seaman to tend the motor. Behind them, standing with arms folded, was the Captain, with his gold ribbon and oak leaves, and aft the Governor's flag. In the bow ... the piper keeping time to his 'Highland Laddie' with one brogued and buckled foot, the ribbons decorating his pipes flying in the breeze." The Coopers inspected the tiny settlement, handed out the inscribed knives to the hunters, and mouth organs, toques, beads and rattles to the children, then officiated at the laying of a cornerstone for a new Bay store.* "It is no exaggeration to say," Macaulay reported with all the paternalism he could muster, "that those Eskimos were overcome by this unprecedented shower of "Possibly arranged," as Chester later noted, "by the Post manager to express hopes for a new building; but after the Nascopic left, the ceremonial platform and inscribed cornerstone (a wooden crate filled with rocks and covered with concrete) were sadly dismantled." TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 407 gifts; never before in their lives had such a thing happened, and, in consequence, they could only sit and look at their presents, touching them gently every now and then to see that they were real, and, finding that they were, giving delighted little laughs." As he would at all his stops, Cooper then showed his Inuit audience a film of King George reviewing the trooping of the colour, explaining through an interpreter that this was their King too. There is no record of local reactions to the movie-the first they had ever seen-or to the notion that somebody who usually went around on a horse was their King, but everybody's attention was soon distracted by a kayak race, a square dance and fireworks.* Next morning, as the Nascopie struck her anchor and pulled out of Cartwright on the way to Port Burwell, Cooper got ready for the broadcasts he intended to give just before his arrival or just after his departure at each stop. He would rush to the radio room and, sitting in front of a large microphone, drone on about how glad he was to be here, bow the Eskimos should be more diligent in trapping foxes, how it had taken "many moons travelling" to reach them, and how they must always be loyal subjects of the King who was sponsoring this message. Then, straining even his own considerable limits of condescension, the Governor would conclude with the admonition: "We ... leave you with confidence that you *At Stupart Bay, the Governor gamely climbed into a kayak, got his balance, and paddled around the cove until his legs got cold. One highlight of the journey, recalled by Michael Lubbock, was stepping off at Lake Harbour, where the piper started to wail for a group of elderly Inuit. "I noticed they were in a sort of ring, shuffling around, and it suddenly struck me that they were going through the rudiments of a Scottish reel. It was a most curious spectacle, but of course the Dundee whalers used to come here regularly, and they were doing what they had been taught so many, many years ago." 408 MERCHANT PRINCES will work with our post manager as one large happy family, you following his advice as if he were your father, for he does the things which I tell him and I want you to do the things which he tells you." There were three problems with the Governor's broadcasts: I . Each settlement had only one radio receiver, usually in the store manager's staff house, so that the chances of an Inuk's actually hearing Cooper were remote. 2. He spoke in English, so that any Inuit who did listen would not understand a word Cooper was saying. 3. When Ottawa objected to an HBC official's speaking to Canadian subjects on behalf of the King, the plug was pulled on Cooper's microphone amplifier. As a result, his carefully rehearsed speeches were never heard outside the little shipboard studio. "They kind of went up in the air and never came down," Captain Smellie later confessed with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. Cooper was not aware of any of this-then or laterand earnestly continued to perform his daily stint. The post managers had meanwhile been careftilly briefed to praise him for his non-existent broadcasts wherever he appeared. The voyage's most h istoric event was commemoration of Henry Hudson's voyage of discovery into the Bay, 324 years earlier. Cooper had been charged by Lord Jellicoe of the Royal Empire Society in London to cast a specially prepared wreath (which had been preserved in a huge block of ice) upon the waters near the spot where Hudson was thought to have been abandoned in a lifeboat by his mutinous crew. The previous evening the Captain had asked Arthur Reed, his Chief Steward, to prepare the wreath for launching. It could not be found, and Reed finally concluded it had mistakenly been left behind. "Make a wreath," ordered the skipper, adding, "by tomorrow morning." 'Ib create a circle of flowers held together by red ribbon on a supply ship in the middle of Hudson Bay might have daunted a lesser man, but Reed TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 409 produced a realistic facsimile within twelve hours. It had been fashioned out of artificial blooms painted on and cut out of toilet paper by one of the passengers, mounted in moss that had been brought aboard by one of the scientists. Cooper delivered one of his windier speeches, then solemnly heaved the contraption into the sea, while his piper appropriately played "Flowers of the Forest." "On his triumphant return to Winnipeg the Governor gave a dinner for the C anadian Committee," Chester noted, barely able to rein in his sarcasm. "And after speaking about the great value which the Company, the C.C., and the Fur Trade Department would reap from his efforts, he called up each member to be pinned with one of his medals. To climax the subsequent silence ... G.W. Allan remarked: 'Governor, by God, never before in my long life have I received a medal and I shall always treasure this memorable occasion."' INDRA,Mxric CONTRASTto Cooper's chivalrous if extravagant approach, Chester's life in Winnipeg was remarkably routine. He lived on River Avenue, had an account with Bradley's Taxi, but usually walked to work and taxied home. 1-1 e spent most of his limited spare time at the Manitoba Club, either playing bridge or trading gossip with members of the Sanhedrin. They were an informal group of thoughtful Winnipeggers led by John W. Dafoe, the great editor of the Free Presswho customarily huddled in a corner of the club lounge (which always seemed redolent of ox blood), to dissect world events, talk up free trade, and spread the gospel of Manchester Liberalism. They resented the restraints placed on western development by the Mon treal-O ttawa-Toronto axis and fervently believed that a prosperous West, exercising its financial independence, would strengthen Confederation. They were also an insular and extremely conservative bunch; having weathered the Depression, they vowed not to owe anybody anything ever again, encouraging Chester in his 410 MERCHANT PRINCES determination that the HBC should not borrow money to finance a move into Eastern Canada. When Owen Funnell, the ambitious and capable manager of the Calgary store, formulated plans for the Company to open a branch at the head of the Great Lakes in the grain-export town of Port Arthur, Chester cut off the discussion by proclaiming the community would not grow because the St Lawrence Seaway would never be built. Chester's wife, Isabel, was an Ivey, the youngest child of a wealthy family from London, Ontario, who had made their fortune in Empire Brass and later branched out into life insurance and packaging. She had been planning to spend a season in Paris when she met Chester during a Great Lakes steamboat excursion, and they decided to marry. Their honeymoon at Beaver Point, the Ivey family summer compound on Ahmic Lake, near Burk's Falls, northwest of Huntsville, was an appropriate portent of things to come. The happy couple arrived in style and were met by the bride's two maids, but within two days Chester had decided they were not good enough and fired them both. Chester eventually bought the place and spent six weeks every summer there. "Beaver Point had a magnificent main house with six bedrooms, an enormous stone fireplace, and its own electricity generating plant," recalled son-in-law Charles Loewen. "Chester kept pretending it was just a little country cottage and got very cross when some Boy Scouts, who had paddled the lake in a canoe, came to borrow a can opener and asked: 'Sir, what's the name of this hotel?' He did things with reasonable style, so that at breakfast, for example, there were always ten pots of different jams and you had to go through the ceremony of choosing one. I remember particularly one day having lunch with him on the clock. He was sipping champagne and offered me some. When I told him I'd rather have beer, he looked at me and exclaimed, 'Helot!' Now, that was interesting, because he was calling me a peasant but TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 411 granting me the recognition that I was an educated one, and would know the Helots had been Spartan serfs. He had a fairly sophisticated sense of humour." Life at the Chesters' was not always that placid. They had adopted a son in England named David Andrew, a sensitive, artistic child. He was sent to Trinity College School at Port Hope, was a good student in art, literature and jazz piano, but worked only intermittently as a journalist. So displeased was the father with his intellectual son that Chester kept him at an emotional distance. David's attractive wife, from whom he would later become estranged, was a trained speech therapist but had to take jobs as a cleaning lady to pay the grocery bills. Young David's recurring nightmare was his memory of the time his father forced him to eat some jelly dessert that he was allergic to. When he got so upset he threw up, Chester insisted he eat everything on his plate, including the vomit-but his mother intervened. Despite his frustrations with the British overlords, Chester loved his visits to London. He would arrive on the Queen Mary, stay in a suite at the Dorchester, lunch at the Savoy Grill, and be the dinner guest at various functions hosted by resident directors. The trips tapered off during the Second World War, as nearly everyone was pressed into service. Chester himself served briefly as Acting Master General of Ordnance in Canada's suddenly mobilized defence department but left Ottawa two months later, frustrated by the impenetrable maze of regulations. When he returned to Winnipeg, his wife gave a celebratory dinner party for their friends. As the guests sat down to eat, they found each serving tied up in red tape, and they had to fill out forms in triplicate before they could begin the meal. Cooper also sen,ed his country, as Director-General of Finance in the Ministry of Supply, and in 1944 was knighted for his efforts. The Company's London office was never hit by German bombs, but they came close. More 412 MERCHANT PRINCES than one directors' meeting was concluded with the directors crouching under the boardroom table, and the annual Court in 1944 was disrupted three times by buzz-bombs landing nearby. A spice warehouse just behind Beaver House was hit and burned for a week, giving off a terrible smell. Several fire bombs landed on the frontsteps and roof of the Company building, but they didn't go off.* The staff spent most nights huddled in the building's underground fur-storage vaults, occasionally relieving the tension by chuckling through one of the least authentic Hollywood films ever madeJ Although there was a wartime embargo on importing fur, the HBC maintained the continuity of its operations by auctioning the pelts of British wild rabbits, used in the hat trade. On February 2 5, 1946, regular sales resumed, with E200,000 in turnover the first day alone. The HBC was back in business. *A typical wartime incident was the near escape of a Company employee named AJ. Pullen, who woke up in his southeast London house one Saturday evening just as a hundred-pound bomb penetrated his roof and buried itself in an upstairs floor. He borrowed a saw, removed enough floor boards to free it, attached it to a wire cable, and dragged it over his garden rail- ings into the street. lie then hoisted the bomb-still ticking loudly in his ear-on his shoulder and carried it towards a bomb disposal dump. He was accompanied in this perilous journey by his seventeen-year-old son, Harry, who explained to neighbours that he was along in case his father dropped it. When Pullen finally reached the dump, he was arrested and fined three pounds (which the Company paid) for "removing and tampering with a bomb dropped from enemy aircraft." t Hudson ~ Bay, a clinker produced in 1940 by Twentieth Century Fox, starrej Gene Tierney (as a beautiful Indian princess), Vincent Price (as Charles 11), Virginia Field (as Nell Gwyn), Paul Muni (as Pierre Radisson) and a 309-pound Laird Cregar (as M6dard Chouart, Sieur Des Groseilliers). The movie's grasp of Canadian geography "as as real as the canvas canoes, painted to resemble birchbark, in which most of the action took place. TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 413 Cooper celebrated the end of hostilities by revamping his board. Much to everyone's surprise, but prompted by his directors, he named Chester a British director (replacing Victor Cazalet) and upgraded his title from General Manager to Managing Director for Canada. The Governor also recruited as new board members some of the war's most distinguished graduates. They included Field Marshal the Right I Ionourable the Viscount Alanbrooke, who had served as Chief of the Imperial General Staff and, according to the American general Douglas MacArthur, was "the greatest soldier that England has produced since Wellington"; Sirjohn Anderson, later Lord Waverley, one of Britain's most distinguished public servants, who had served as Governor of Bengal (where he earned the reputation of being the most shot-at man in the world) and wartime Chancellor of the Exchequer;* Alanbrooke's honours and decorations: Knight of the Garter, Knight Grand Cross of the Bath, Order of Merit, Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order, Distinguished Service Order (he was twice a DSO-m 1917 and 1918). He also held the French, Belgian and Czechoslovak Croix de Guerre and the Distinguished Service Medal from the United States, and his wife was from an old f IBC family: a great-granddaughter of Sir John Henry Pelly, Deputy Governor 1812-22 and Governor 1822-52. Waverley's honours: Privy Councillor, Knight Grand Cross of the Bath, Order of Merit, Knight Grand Commander of the Star of India, Knight Grand Commander of the Indian Empire, Fellow of the Royal Society. He attended the universities of Edinburgh and Leipzig, and held an MA and a BSc. He was Home Secretary in the early years of the 1939-45 war, and the little air-raid shelters that dotted British gardens were known as Andersons after him. After the war he became chairman of the Port of London Authority and a director of the CPR. The Order of Merit is limited in number to twenty-four members, with provision for honorary foreign members. General Dwight Eisenhower was made an honorary OM in 1945. The Bath is a much larger order, with many degrees, including several of knighthood. 414 MERCHANT PRINCES and William "Tony" Keswick, a brigadier on the staff of General Montgomery's planning group for the Normandy invasion, whose family controlled Jardine, Matheson & Company, a Far Eastern trading company. The most interesting new post-war recruit was Joe Links, the bead of his own firm of furriers that had been chosen by Royal Appointment Furrier to the Royal Household. A spritely and cultured gentleman with all the social graces and a novelist's eye for detail, he had written authoritative studies of Venice, Canaletto and the fur trade. Links made light of the fact that he was the firstjew to be invited on the board, and when asked whether he had encountered any prejudice, replied, "Of course not, neither then nor at any other time in my life. It's not so much that I was the only Jewish director, I was the English one-the only Englishman among six Scots or sons of Scots. So, perhaps I cannot acquit my colleagues altogether of prejudice." Described by a later Governor as "the most useful board member, his mind worked like lightning and he would always ask the kind of awkward questions that made us wonder why we had never thought of what he had just brought up," Links served on the board for twenty-eight years, an invaluable source of wisdom, burnout and plain good sense. The Canadian Committee also underwent drastic changes. In 1940, Charles Dunning, who had become Premier of Saskatchewan at thirty-six and later served as federal minister of finance, was invited to join. Chancellor of Queen's University, chairman of Ogilvie Flour Mills and a director of eleven other major companies, he was one of the few distinguished non- Winnipeggers to join the HBC Committee. In Winnipeg itself, the Company's corporate traditions carried on through the appointment of Perley Banbury (Beaver Lumber), Stewart Augustus Searle (Searle Grain, and a director of Monarch Life), Colonel Hugh F. Osler (head TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 415 of Osler, Hammond & Nanton and a director of GreatWest Life) and Joe Harris (Canada Packers, Great-West Life and a director of Beaver Lumber).* Originally an executive in his father's meat packing-house (later merged into Canada Packers), Harris was a candid character who had the disconcerting habit of ending most lunches by pushing back his chair and, as he was turning to leave, informing his fellow diners: "Got to get back to the abattoir and stick a piggy." After George Allan's death in 1940, the Canadian Committee chairmanship went to Conrad Stephenson Riley, an unassuming but effective financier who could divert most of Cooper's aggressive ploys with the simple: "Yes, Patrick, I'm sure that would be very nice. But no." A noted oarsman who became a member of Canada's Sports Hall of Fame, he succeeded his father as president of Northern Trusts and was a director of such Winnipeg touchstone companies as Great-West Life and Beaver Lumber. Under Riley, the Cooper-Chester feud quieted down a bit, with the Winnipeg Managing Director temporarily becalmed because of his new title and London appointment, while the British Governor, savouring his new knighthood, felt vindicated and slightly more immune to the Canadian's little plots.t Within a decade, Riley was succeeded by J. Elmer Woods, who would run the Canadian Committee from 1950 to 1964. While he was cut from the same pattern *A prominent member of a well-established Winnipeg grain family, Searle stayed on the Committee for fifteen years, but when he developed the habit of spending every winter in Florida, and thus missing an increasing number of meetings, he was not invited to stand for re-election. t Chester was so relaxed that he even took on an outside directorship (his only one), naturally choosing the Great-West Life Assurance Company. 416 MERCHANT PRINCES as every other Winnipeg Committeeman (he was president of Monarch Life and a director of Beaver Lumber), Woods was an original. He was the ultimate insider, so trusted by Manitoba's political and economic 61ite that for a brief time he was chief bagman for both the provincial Liberal and Conservative parties at one and the same time. He took on the HBC Chairmanship determined to move the Company's head office to its proper address, on Winnipeg's Main Street, and though he didn't succeed, he put in place most of the necessary groundwork. Prompted by Chester, he also reactivated the Hudson's Bay Oil & Gas operation. By the spring of 1943, the firm owned a dozen wells in Turner Valley, representing 10 percent of the field's production. Within the decade, the HBC had invested $8 million in exploration and HBOG had become the second-largest holder of known gas reserves (4.3 million acres) in Alberta, with eighty producing wells. A major exploration agreement was signed with Continental Oil, to expire June 30, 1951. That proved to be a bonanza because Continental at about this time named as its president L.E McCollum, one of the great Texas oil- men, who invested $300 million in land acquisition and oil exploration in the next two decades. A continuing controversy of the 1950s concerned the desirability of moving retail operations into Ontario and Quebec and whether or not the HBC should join other department stores in establishing satellite branches in suburban shopping centres. Chester's position, strongly supported by Elmer Woods, was nothing if not clear: he would never "go whoring in the East," and there was no point going into shopping centres because sales in such urban fringes would only reduce the core business of the Bay's magnificent downtown department stores. "If there were fuddy-duddies in the TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 417 Company, they were to be found in Canada rather than London," claimed Joe Links. "Chester was instinctively opposed to buying other companies, believing the HBC could perfectly well build up any business it wanted and 'crucify' its competitors. Above all, Chester wanted the HBC to stay in the West-certainly to make itself competitive, to enlarge its big downtown stores, to build parkades, and open up new stores in unexploited areas, but not to challenge 'those whores in the East,' where an honest trader with Western Canadian principles would only get his fingers burnt. We in London felt the shopping centre movement gave HBC opportunities with its expertise in operating retail stores of widely differing sizes. Chester's argument that anything that might weaken our downtown stores must weaken the Company was an interesting reversal of a situation that arose in the HBCs pioneering (lays. When the French took to opening trading posts upriver in order to catch the Indians before they reached the HBC posts with their furs, the Bay men on the spot sought authority from London to go still farther upriver. But London foresaw a limitless leap-frogging and decided instead that better prices for furs and better trade goods would do more for the Company's reputation. I once reminded Chester of this story and saw him momentarily waver. If what he was saying had been said by those London bastards of the eighteenth century, then perhaps he might be wrong after all. But he was comforted by the thought that twentieth-century London didn't agree with him: this confirmed that fie must be right." Peter Wood, the HBC's Treasurer, verified this: "If the London people had been overtly against the suburban stores, Chester would have been vehemently for them." It was a costly dispute. Sears in the United States had opened its first suburban store at Aurora, a Chicago 418 MERCHANT PRINCES suburb, in 1928, and by the early 1950s shopping centres with department stores at each end were sprouting up all over America. Woodward's opened Canada's first shopping-centre store at West Vancouver's Park Royal in 1950 after the HBC had turned down an offer from the Guinness family, the centre's developers, to be the anchor store. Four years later Canada's initial double department store plaza was launched in a suburb of Hamilton, with Morgan's and Simpsons-Sears as anchor tenants. Eaton's put its first branch into Oshawa in 1956. George Weightnian, a thirty-year Bay man who eventually became manager of market research, still laments the lost opportunities. "I wrote a long pr6cis summing up the prospects for the Company and made a convincing argument, but when I finished my presentation, Chester just said, 'Young man, you can't see the woods for the trees,' and I thought to myself, 'Well, there you are."' Part of the problem was that Chester was an atrocious driver, seldom drove his car and was not aware of the effect of people's new mobility on North American cities. BY THE EARLY 1950s, Sir Patrick Ashley Cooper, now nearing his sixty-fifth birthday, began to send out feelers about having his term as Governor extended beyond normal retirement. He had a good case and made certain that it was promulgated in the Company's 1951 report. Share values, he reminded the proprietors, had fallen from 131s 3d in 1928 to 22s 6d in 1930, but since 1932 the Company had distributed Y,3 million in dividends and ploughed 98.5 million back into its treasury, raising assets from Y,10.7 million to Y,66.8 million. Cooper had introduced many enlightened policies, such as stressing promotion from within. He established the TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 419 Hudson's Bay Record Society to take over publication of the Company's historic documents. He was the first Governor to hold summer picnics for the London staff at his home, and even demonstrated a sense of humour when he read out to an annual Court a letter he had received. "I got your letter about what I owe," wrote the troubled UIBC customer. "Now be pachant. I ain't forgot vou. Please wait. When I have the money I will pay you. if this was the Judgement Day and you was no more prepared to meet your maker than I am to meet your account you sure would go to hell. Trusting you will do this." I kind of liked Sir Patrick," remarked Scotty Gall, the old Arctic hand, who met the Governor several times. 'T le loved the feudal system, behaved like a baron coming around to inspect his serfs. But he was a keen businessman, too. He knew the right side of the dollar and gave nothing away." That was true enough, and there was no doubt that Cooper had rescued the Company from the Depression. But the post-war era demanded other qualities, and even if it was mostly Chester's fault, relations between Winnipeg and London had deteriorated beyond repair, so that no concerted expansion plan could be put into effect. Cooper's exag- gerated sense of personal vanity had become even less endearing to Canadians than it was to the Londoners, and his Churchillian refrain, that he had not become Governor of the HBC in order to preside over its dissolution, was a brave stance but hardly a policy. During his tenure at Beaver House, Cooper had acquired a collection of silver pieces made in 1670, the year of the Company's founding, and had special carpets woven in Kidderminster by four artisans especially chosen for the job. He also had his portrait painted, and as was then the custom, an extra copy was done for a 420 MERCHANT PRINCES record of the original. Cooper borrowed the copy to hang in his country house and one summer weekend in 1952 told R.A. Reynolds, the Company secretary, he was taking the original home to compare the two canvases. Reynolds had placed a secret mark on the primary painting and was not too surprised when Cooper returned on Monday morning, passing off the copy as the real thing. It was a tiny incident, but it raised questions about Cooper's approach. There had been rumours that he was charging his London flat to the Company and that he accepted generous expense-account advances but seldom reported on them. Whether or not this amounted to any serious abuse of his fiscal responsibilities, it certainly was true that after more than two decades in the Governor's chair Cooper had lost the ability to differentiate between his personal considerations and those of the Company. There were, in those days, very tight foreign exchange controls in Britain, to the extent that executives travelling abroad were allocated ridiculously small spending allowances. The Bank of England agreed to grant Cooper, as HBC Governor, a special exemption to finance his journeys and required entertainments, yet Company auditors discovered that he was withdrawing a similar amount from the Winnipeg office but sending his bills through to be paid in London. Cooper made his own rules and at one time even imported a tractor for his farm with the allowance granted him by the British central bank. The London board members deputized Lord Waverley to persuade Cooper that he should resign. The final confrontation, attended by Tony Keswick (by then promoted to Deputy Governor) and Waverley, left Cooper no escape. Keswick recalled later, "We just said: 'The staff have lost confidence; it's no use trying to build it up. It must come to an end. There must be a change."' TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD FEUD 421 "Do I understand what that means?" asked a distraught Cooper. "You understand what it means." "Yes, I understand what it means. We won't discuss it any more." And so, on November 19, 1952, Sir Patrick Ashley Cooper resigned as thirtieth Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company. Chester had won. CHAPTER15 CANADIAN AT LAST "The British have the rigidity of red hot pokers without their warmth. " -Lord Amory TONY KESWICK, WHO HAD BEEN BROUGHT on the board by Cooper in the mid-1940s, now took over as Governor, and his presence introduced a whiff of China Seas buccanecring to the HBCs deliberations. "He was a big man in every sense, a sharp trader, and I thoroughly enjoyed working with him," reminisced Eric Faulkner, who was for a time his Deputy, "although there were moments when one had to slightly pull on the reins and say, 'Tony, you're going a bit too far. There's too much bullshit in that, you must be more careful."' To such admonitions, mild as they were, Keswick preferred to reply with a parable and a fact. The fact was that during his stewardship, HBC profits climbed 320 percent; the parable had something to do with a myth- ical creature known as the Arctic Robin. "It had been snowing for a long, long time," went his oft-told tale, "and the poor bird, having had nothing to eat, said to himself, 'I think I'll turn up my toes and pack it in.'Just then, a farmer let his bull out of its pen near where the Arctic Robin was sitting. The bull had been overfed and after a while deposited an enormous pile, which allowed 423 424 MERCHANT PRINCES the Robin to have a delicious hot breakfast. The bird, feeling perky again, flew up a tree and started singing so loudly that it attracted the attention of the farmer's son, who fetched a catapult, took aim, and killed the Arctic Robin stone dead." The point of the story, as Keswick loved to explain through snorts of belly-pumping laughter, was that "if you get to the top with the aid of bullshit, you shouldn't sing about it." Keswick came by his merchant adventurer's calling honestly, having been associated for most of his business life with Jardine, Matheson, the Hong Kong trading house. "Both companies, at different times and different places, lived dangerously and had to struggle against larger forces," he pointed out. "Whatever else, the life of a merchant adventurer is full of incidents." One such incident that illustrated Keswick's approach to life and adventure made good his claim that he may have been the only politician ever shot for making a budget speech. In the winter of 1940-41, when he was working forjardine's along the South China coast, the invading Japanese had hived most of the surviving foreign community into the International Settlement, the European quarter of Shanghai. Elected head of the municipal council, Keswick was presenting his annual budget at an outdoor arena in Shanghai filled with five thousand ratepayers when Yukichi Hayashi, a Japanese radical opposed to the foreign presence, rushed on stage, took out a revolver and began firing at him. The first bullet went through his rib cage, causing Keswick to feel genu1nely annoyed. "I told the Japanese fellow, 'For God's sake, stop that.' Then I fell on top of the little chap. Nearly killed him. He tried to send another bullet up my nose and took three fingers off the interpreter's left hand with his last shot. Seemed very upset." His would-be assassin was hailed as a hero in 'Ibkyo while Keswick escaped with only superficial wounds and CANADIAN AT LAST 425 Sir William.7. "Ton-Y "Keswick eventually boarded the last plane to leave Singapore before the Japanese invasion. He had a good war, and later spent most of two decades as a director of the Bank of England. His many honours; included membership in the Royal Company of Archers. "We're the Queen's bodyguard whenever she's in Scotland," he explained. "We have bows, arrows and little swords and stomp about protecting her." Scotland was also the site of his grouse moor, on a 6,000-acre estate in Dumfriesshire, sixty miles south of Glasgow. It was stocked not only 426 MERCHANT PRINCES with game birds, sheep and cattle but also with statues. Haunted by memories of Buddhas spotted in the Far Eastern landscape, Keswick planted, at strategic viewpoints throughout his estate, works of some of the twen- tieth century's most famous sculptors: two Rodins, Epstein's famous Madonna and half a dozen Henry Moores, including his resplendent King and Queen. "I have all the big boys," he allowed, "and they look very well in their natural surroundings against the skybetter than seeing them in some damn museum." Perhaps because Keswick had such a powerful sense of self-worth and came to the HBC without having to prove anything, his thirteen years as Governor were very different from the stewardships of his predecessors. Unlike Cooper, Keswick placed the greatest emphasis on cultivating the staff, trying to raise morale by reigniting their pride in the Company. "He used to come around and sit in my office," recalled Arthur Frayling, who was in charge of London fur sales, "and say, 'Arthur, we're having a bad year, can you do anything for us?' I'd tell him that we would make a decent kick, and he'd put his hand on my shoulder and reply, 'We're counting on you.' That pompous old bugger Cooper would never have done that. He would have sent out four memorandums on how to reorganize the fur division." After his annual trips to Canada, Keswick would write a hundred or more personal letters to the Bay employees he'd met, and eventually knew nearly all of them by their first names. Keswick's most serious assignment was to protect the Company against an attempted takeover by Max Bell of Calgary and H.R. Milner of Edmonton. The episode was referred to in the H13Cs secret internal files as "The Bullfight" because the tactics employed by the Alberta investors were similar to those used in the takeover of the Matador Land & Cattle Company, a venerable Texas CANADIAN AT LAST 427 land outfit that had struck oil. The idea, novel at the time, was to seek representation on the board of the desired company and, with the information obtained, promote an offer to shareholders for control. Once their goal was achieved, the new owners would then sell off parts of the company to pay for their acquisition expenses. Had Bell succeeded, he would have spun off the HBCs retail stores to Simpsons or Eaton's and, in effect, obtained the HBCs petroleum reserves for nothing. An athletic-1coking gent with a sporty brushcut, Bell had made an early fortune in the Alberta Oil Patch, purchased half a dozen daily newspapers, and become a well-known horse breeder and racer. A fitness devotee, he would disconcert employees who had come to see him for a pay increase by walking across the office floor on his hands, urging them to state their case as money poured out of his upside-down trouser pockets. He owned the luxury yacht Campana, a pair of islands up the B.C. coast and several vacation palaces but had Spartan eating habits. "Max's idea of real debauchery," claimed his friend the sportswriter Jim Coleman, "is to have three flavours of ice-cream in the same dish." There had been heavy buying of HBC stock on American stock exchanges in early 1952 and rumours began to grow that a New York syndicate, organized and headed by S.G. Warburg & Company, the British merchant bankers, would attend that year's annual Court to grab control of the Company. Because both the Canadian and the U.S. groups were attracted by the FIBC's oil leases, Company management immediately began to negotiate a new long-term agreement with its exploration partner, Continental Oil, locking the two companies into joint ventures until 1999. Within a year of its original push, the Warburg group decided to unite with Max Bell. That gave the combined group sway over more than 200,000 shares (out of 2.5 million shares 428 MERCHANT PRINCES outstanding), nowhere near a control position but enough to worry management. Keswick decided to deal first with Siegmund Warburg. "I put on a clean white shirt and went to have tea with Mr. Warburg in the interest of 'shareholder relations,'" he wrote to Canadian Committee Chairman Elmer Woods. "After a sip of very indifferently made tea I took the opportunity of expressing my own views on the breaking up of the companies or selling off limbs, especially those with long histories and established success. I left him with no doubt that in principle I would find it very difficult to agree to any such policy and that I personally believed ardently in maintaining the united strength of our grand old Company." After prolonged discussion and some bickering, Warburg agreed to vote his proxies with the board, but Bell held out. He had drawn up a forty-four-page report suggesting how the H13C could improve its profit potential, particularly in oil operations, and on March 17, 1953, Bell and Keswick met face to face. "At times he shouted like an undisciplined or spoilt boy unable to get his way too easily," Keswick recalled. "Curiously enough, the question of taxation never arose as a major criticism, nor did transfer, other than his recommendation that I should transfer myself over and settle down like a broody hen on top of the Canadian Committee. ... It could all be summed up in one generalization: that Mr. Bell feels that we lack drive and progressive management; we do not make the most of our assets-, and that if we did we could treble and quadruple our profits. ... It is good that we have shareholders as keen as this but I am glad there are not too many of them." Bell quite rightly concluded he was not being taken seriously and soon afterwards sold his 11BC stock-at a $500,000 profit. The main impact of his raid was to bring a substantial block of stock across the Atlantic. CANADIAN AT LAST 429 PERHAPS IT HAD SOMETHING TO DO with celebrating his victory over Bell, the first colonial to challenge London's vested authority, but more likely it was Keswick's intuition that his beloved Company could not much longer resist the pull westward and would soon be domiciled in Canada, that prompted him to stage one final, glorious pageant. Who better as the centrepiece of such a grand occasion than the most eminent Englishman of the century, Sir Winston Churchill? The wartime Prime Minister's ancestorJohn Churchill (later first Duke of Marlborough) had during his seven-year reign as the HBC's third Governor restored the Company to glor~,. Nine generations later, the eightyone-year-old Sir Winston had reluctantly retired from active politics in 1955, and allowed Anthony Eden to succeed him with the immortal comment: "I must retire soon. Anthony won't live forever." He was working on his masterpiece 7he Second World War, and while his intellect seemed undiminished his health was poor and he was feeling left out of things. Word had come from Chartwell, his country house, that he might be open to an invitation to join the HBC in some manner because he felt there was no other commercial enterprise with which he could align himself without drawing criticism for favouritism. Lord Waverley had suggested the entirely honorific but appropriately historic title "Grand Seigiieur of the Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's Bay," which had the advantage of playing up to Churchill's approach to the British Empire: its details had always bored him, but he was much attached to its ideal-"the spectacle of that immense estate enhancing the grandeur of England," as Jan Morris described it. Churchill accepted Keswick's invitation but Winnipeg did not. When the Governor mentioned the idea to the Canadian Committee, Elmer Woods replied 430 MERCHANT PRINCES that he thought "any such position would be incompatible with the stature of Sir Winston. By the unthinking public it would be construed as a form of publicity, with unfavourable reactions. . . ." Keswick forwarded copies of the Woods letter to his fellow British directors with the notation: "I have received the attached somewhat typical and ungracious unanimous disapproval," and paid scant attention to the Canadians. He decided the title would be conferred at a ceremony in Beaver Hall, followed by luncheon at Skinners' Hall on April 27, 1956, with the top layer of Britain's social, economic and political establishments invited to attend.* "We had a hell of a job getting him up the Skinners' Hall steps," Faulkner recalled. "He appeared deathly pale and we had seats with little tables every fifty yards or so, equipped with helpings of f fudson's Bay fiftyyear-old cognac. He would take a little slug of it and go on, so that bv the time he got into the hall there was colour in his cheeks and he was happily coherent." Another HBC director, Lord Alanbrooke, who had been Churchill's senior military commander, was astonished at the transformation. "He is a marvel," the former Chief of the Imperial General Staff told Lord Moran, Churchill ',s physician, who was at the luncheon. "Before the Election in 1945 1 said to myself: He is finished. I could not get him to decide anything.... He was burnt out.... That was eleven years ago, and look at him now." *The banquet was catered by Ring& Brymer at forty-two shillings a head, with the menu consisting of Scotch salmon with hollandaise sauce; long fillet of beef with new potatoes and French beans; lemon posset and Savoy fingers-and two wine varieties to wash it down: Forster Fleck-inger Riesling Auslese, 1953, and Chiteau Uoville Poyferr6, 1934. Warre's Port, 1927, accompanied dessert, and Fine Old Cognac was served with the coffee. CANADIAN AT LAST 431 Sir Winston Churchill at Beaver Hall, April 2 7, 1956 Keswick and Sir Edward Peacock proposed glowing toasts to the old man, praising his magnificent accomplishments, pretending the office of Grand Seigneur was more than just a grandiose title. The former Prime Minister went along with the game. He rose to his feet, looking a trifle strange in what he must have imagined was a Grand Seigneur's uniforni-a smoking jacket over a dress shirt decorated by a bright green bow-tie with 432 MERCHANT PRINCES large white polka dots-and mischievously told his delighted audience: "I must be very careful how I use the great power that has been placed at my disposal at this very agreeable and memorable function. If I were perhaps to interpret it too literally, it might need a leng-thy explanation and I might not receive the full accord which it is in all cases desirable should be given to it and also given to the Grand Seigneur. I will not, therefore, attempt any strong action as a result of the post to which you have called me until and unless I have had further experience. . . ." Churchill concluded his remarks with a touching benediction. "This honour will be appreciated all my-," there was a long pause and his voice tightened, "-all my remaining life." Sensing they might not see him again, members of the audience grew still. The Grand Seigneur turned to leave. He stepped gingerly frorn'the speaker's dais and, when he reached the bottom stair, faced the hall and gave everyone present a long, searching look; then his features broke into a cherubic smile. The ovation was deafening, lasting the long moments it took for the head table party to escort Sir Winston down to his car.* *After the ceremony, Churchill wanted to know if he could do anything for the Company. Asked whether he might donate one of his paintings, the former Prime Minister replied that this would be difficult since he'd given them all to his wife. When Joe Links went to see Lady Churchill, she explained that while Sir Winston had painted about six hundred canvases, only twenty-five of them were any good, and she didn't want to give the Company either one of his bad ones or a very good one. They finally settled on "the twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh," a Marrakesh street scene that still hangs in the FIBC Governor's office, now in the Simpson Tower at the corner of Bay and Queen streets in downtown Toronto. CANADIAN AT LAST 433 HAVING VNNQUISHED BELL and toasted Churchill, Keswick's main preoccupation became getting along with Chester. His style was certainly more accommo- dating than Cooper's. After visiting London late in 1952, the kVinnipeg-based executive sent the Governor a comforting note. "I cannot attempt to describe the wonderful contrast of my first visit under your reign," lie wrote; "it was so happy and enjoyable that I'll hop over any time, even for forty-eight hours." But Chester had by then been battling London for nearly a quartercentury, and his suspicion of British motives had inarinated his brain, so that despite his early good intentions he could not stop fighting. "It was easy to follow Cooper," Keswick recalled, "because he was a puffed-up hot-air merchant. But my main task was handling Chester, who was very able, a piledriver intolerant of people not willing to work twenty-four hours a day, but he had a great capacity for sulking. At some ofour board meetings, I could see him starting to lose his temper, and I'd say, 'Phil, you're turning black.' It was enormous fun." On one occasion while en route from Toronto to Vancouver, the plane in which the Governor was travelling experienced extreme turbulence in an air pocket over Winnipeg. "We all had to fasten our lap straps," Keswick recalled, "and the passenger next to me, who must have known who I was but hadn't uttered a word during the flight, said out of the side of his mouth: 'Phil Chester must be down below."' Even the London board members who admired Chester found him difficult. Deputy Governor Faulkner complained that "on his black-face-days, he was almost impossible to deal with." Yet Faulkner also believed that "Chester had saved the Company. He was a difficult man to like but easy to respect." That was a generous verdict because Faulkner's introduction to Chester had not been promising. "When I first went on the board, I 434 MERCHANT PRINCES arrived in Montreal and had breakfast with Chester at the Ritz-Carlton," he remembered-only too well. "I needed to blow my nose, so I drew a handkerchief from my left sleeve, where I always carried it. Chester saw me and said: 'It may offend you deeply, but for Christ's sake, don't wear those suede shoes in Canada, because the only people who wear suede shoes here are not the sort of people we would have as directors of the Hudson's Bay Company. Secondly, last week four Royal Canadian Navy captains returned from a course in the United Kingdom. They went on television, and when one of them blew his nose into a handkerchief he'd taken out of his sleeve, Canada went up in smoke, thinking this man's been corrupted. So, don't keep your handkerchief there and take off those shoes.' I remember thinking to myself, 'My God, what have I walked into?"' Still, the Compariv under Chester's regime prospered. On August 29, 1946, he had been promoted to Managing Director and granted a $15,000 bonus, but not even that show of confidence satisfied him. "He would chip away at London's authority, chip away at it the whole time," HBC financial officer Peter Wood remembered. "They always said, 'We'll give in on the little things, but we're not going to give in on the main points.' By the time Chester had chipped away a hundred times, he had grabbed a fair amount of authority." Records of the time reveal that despite Chester's constant complaining, lie made not a single policy proposal that wasn't eventually approved by London, while the British directors seldom pressed him to do anything against his will. Yet the feud continued unabated. The enlarged Canadian membership on the London boardin 1957 and 1960-required new appointments that dramatically improved the calibre of the Canadian Committee. C. Gordon Smith, the scion of a wellknown grain family with the appropriate Winnipeg CANADIAN AT LAST 435 credentials (directorships in Beaver Lumber and Monarch Life) joined the board, as did James Richardson, who became chairman and the fourth-gen- eration member to head the family grain firm. (This particular Richardson later became minister of national defence in the Trudeau cabinet.) Two other previously named Committeemen, Stewart Searle and Joe Harris, J . oined the parent board. But the most significant catch was Graham Towers, the former (and first) governor of the Bank of Canada, who during his twenty-year reign at the central bank had become universally recognized as the countrys most respected economic thinker. In his time, Towers had preserved an unsullied reputation for business prescience, but he never lost his shy and self-depreciating presence. At one time he found himself at a Maritimes hotel without enough cash to settle his account. When a suspicious cashier demanded identification before he would cash a cheque, the Bank of Canada Governor tried with considerable embarrassment to avoid revealing who he was, but finally pulled out a dollar bill and reluctantly showed the startled hotel employee his signature, then decorating Canada's paper currency. As the Canadian Committee grew in stature, the British board was undergoing a similar metamorphosis. The distinguished but largely decorative Lords Waverley and Alanbrooke departed, while J.E.H. Collins, a thirty-six-year-old financier who later headed Morgan, Grenfell, the London banking firm, moved in, as did Henry (later Lord) Benson and Lord Heyworth. Collins put in a useful decade and a half on the board, questioning policies with youthful vigour, but it was Benson and Heyworth who caused the most troubleand, in retrospect, the most regret. A distinguished Coopers & Lybrand accountant who had served as a colonel in the Grenadier Guards, Benson was a born 436 MERCHANT PRINCES troubleshooter, having chaired three dozen commissions and inquiries. 'rough and unsentimental, he took a good look at the HBC and decided the make-up of its non-executive board of directors was all wrong. To help him with what he felt were the required reforms, he recruited to the board Lord Heyworth, the recently retired head of Unilever, one of the world's great trading companies. Heyworth had worked for the AngloDutch soap and food multinational in Canada, had married a Canadian and was vitally interested in improving the HBCs administration. The pair set down the necessary steps to reorient a firm whose earnings and performance record they felt had been deplorable. They recommended that the Company's most able operating executives be appointed to a revamped board that would include half a dozen Canadians of Graham Towers's stature; that the Company be immediately Canadianized by transfer of its charter across the Atlantic; and that the HBCs Canadian headquarters be moved from Winnipeg to Montreal or Toronto. The hidden item on their agenda was that Keswick, whom they considered too old-fash- ioned and too compassionate to wield a broad enough axe, be shoved aside and replaced by Heyworth as a fulltime Governor with clear executive powers to modernize the Company and turn it Canadian. The rest of the board demurred, and even if nearly all of the directors would later admit that Benson and Heyworth had been right, not much happened. What brought the impasse to a head was the move by Keswick to fill a British board vacancy with Lord Cobbold, the retiring governor (1949-61) of the Bank of England. A subsequent Lord Chamberlain of the Royal Household and later a permanent Lord in Waiting to the Queen, Cameron Fromanteel Cobbold CANADIAN AT LAST 437 was the perfect personification of the trend Benson and Heyworth had been protesting against: perpetuation of the Company's creaky command structure by the naining of yet another distinguished non-executive director with little knowledge of Canada and less of retailing to a board already top-heavy with such creatures. "Benson and Heyworth," Links later recalled, "argued that far from adapting ourselves to change, we were determined to perpetuate the traditional, dccorative, and entirely ineffective board of the past. All of us agreed there was much to be said about the approach of appointing executive directors, but little to be (lone about it until the right people could be found. Interestingly, the Canadian members were aghast at the prospect and demanded that Benson and Heyworth resign immediately. There was no difficulty about this-neither of them wanted to stay under existing conditions. Heyworth just walked out of the board meeting but Benson, cerebrally superior to anv of us, stayed behind to tell us not what he thought of the Canadians but what the Canadians thought of us, one by one. There was no malice in this, nothing more than a sense of duty to ensure that we did not continue under any delusions." Keswick won that round ("They had no notion of the strength of the man they were up against," his wife later declared). It was a remarkable reflection on both men that after it was all over, Benson remained Keswick's personal accountant. Yet it was a hollow victory. Looking back on Benson's thwarted coup dYtat, Peter Wood enthusiastically sided with the departed renegades, "They were absolutely right," Wood maintained. "If their advice had been followed, the Company would have moved to Canada ten years earlier and it would have been very different. For one thing, we could have got into the first instead of third generation of shopping 438 MERCHANT PRINCES centreS, which would have meant grabbing a lot of the most desirable locations. We could never do that as long as Chester was around." HAVING CONSOLIDATE'D ills POWEIZ and position, by the late 1950s Chester had changed. The provocative complainer of the Cooper period had been replaced by a far more equable and cultured presence who had become a fervent Canadian nationalist. He regarded his past battles with London as having been a microcosm of Canada's struggle to free itself from foreign domination, and in Winnipeg's case to become less dependent on the overwhelming influence of central Canadian bankers. He was part of the small but powerful circle of Manitoba capitalists-the Richardsons, the Rileys, the Gourleys and others-dedicated to halting at Winnipeg the flow of money eastward from British Columbia and the Prairies, which was why they launched financial service institutions and insurance conipanies. Within that context Chester grew frustrated by his confinement to his Winnipeg circle and, incongruous as it seemed, enjoyed nothing so much as his semi-annual visits to London. Corporately, he desperately wanted to be the architect of the Company's patriation to Canada, realizing that it had become silly to have the HBC run from London. But personally, he loved the stays in his suite at the Dorchester Hotel, his dinners with the cultured members of the HBC board at Claridges and the St James's Street clubs, or at Greenwich. He enjoyed especially spending weekends at the country home of Joe Links, playing poker and discussing modern art, "He was totally dedicated to the HBc and everybody, both in London and Canada, knew it and respected him for it," Links reminisced. "We all liked his company, and above all, trusted him." CANADIAN AT LAST 439 Chester did not plan to attend the Company's May 1959 Court because most of the board was due to be in Winnipeg during July in connection with the Queen's visit for the Rent Paying Ceremony. He did, however, go to London in February and etither caught pneumon1a or suffered a mild stroke. On his way home, he convalesced at Toronto's Park Plaza Hotel for a week. On July 23 at a Canadian Committee meeting in Winnipeg, one of the subjects discussed was enlargement of the Company board that would have made more room for Canadians while retaining the requirement that eight directors-including the Governor and Deputy Governor-should be U.K. residents. Chester stood alone in opposing the restriction, and when he recognized there would be no movement on the issue, orally submitted his resignation. He was on the platform at the Rent Paying Ceremony at Assiniboine Park the next day and even gave a large garden party at his home immediately afterwards. Although his resignation did not officially take effect until September 30, he never again set foot in Hudson's Bay House.* RICHARD MURRAY, WHO NOW BECAME the HBC's Managing Director, possessed the one quality that could never have been ascribed to Chester: he was a diplomat. *Chester's final bonus and pension payment amounted to $505,000. The pressures of work removed, Chester lived another seventeen years. Although he resolutely stayed away from the HBC and didn't even shop at its Winnipeg store, in 1976, when he knew he was dying, Chester returned to the Company fold. He requested that his burial service be celebrated byJack Dangerfield andjoan Whiti ng, HBC executives who had become Anglican priests. And so it was. 440 MERCHANT PRINCES High-strung, romantic and compassionate, with a wideranging mind and a set of beliefs stronger than the discipline required to contain them, he tended to be indecisive and dithering. Yet Murray was, in a way, the perfect trans-Atlantic gentleirian-in awe of the Establishments on both sides of the ocean, yet their willing and capable instrument. Ile got along with the Canadians who mattered as well as with Keswick, and after one of the Governor's C anadian visits wrote him a typically effusive letter: "The atmosphere was indeed extraordinary, when vou arrived; in fact, it defied description or analysis. Your direct, constructive and friendly approach to all issues and personalities in the short time you were with us did a tremendous amount of good." Murray was a true Bay man, outrageously proud of working for what he described as "the most hellishly modern old-fashioned company in the world," and boasted that the Winnipeg headquarters staff often came to work at 7:45 in the morning, although the office didn't officially open until 8:30, just to get an early start.* He wasn't a retailer, and swore he never would be, but loved what he called "the trading part" of the Company and was known to comfort employees complaining about their jobs with the slightly incongruous sally: "How would you like instead to be a vice-president of General Motors in charge of designing tail lights?" *Murray fitted right in Aith the Compam,'s Scottish traditions, although he had been born in Winnipeg. When he was out driving, he not only tried hard to make sure that the money he put into parking meters covered only his required time, but if he miscalculated and returned before the meter had expired, he'd sit in his car until it did. CANADIAN AT LAST 441 A graduate in liberal arts and law from McGill University, Murrav volunteered for the Royal Canadian Navy and served as a corvette signals officer, then joined External Affairs and was almost immediately posted to the Canadian Embassy in Washington. He worked under Lester Pearson, Hume Wrong, Clifford Clark, Norman Robertson, Wynne Plumptre and John Deutsch, the intellectual giants who dominated Canada's post-war recovery, and emerged from that magic apprenticeship as both a patriot and a Liberal.* Unable to meet the expenses of his growing family on an External salary, Murray joined the HBCs fur department in Montreal and within two years was named head of the New York fur-sales operation. Thrust among the street-wise Jewish traders of Seventh Avenue, he surprised everyone, including himself, by successfully turning the FIBCs auction house into a major profit centre that set the trade's pace and prices. By 1955, he had been transferred to Winnipeg as Chester's chief of staff and heir apparent. Murray's first major move as Managing Director was his 1960 decision to purchase Henry Morgan & Company, a Montreal-based, family-owned department store with ten outlets and annual sales of $48 million. The move, financed with a rights issue and an increase in equity share capital, broke Chester's most sacred *During the 1962 general election, when the upstart Quebec wing of the Social Credit party threatened the Liberal party's bastion, Murray was watching the outcome on television in the viceregal suite of the Royal York Hotel in Toronto with a group ofHBC executives. As a news flash appeared on the screen that a Cr6ditiste had captured the traditionally Rouge seat of Quebec East, Murray jumped to his feet and shouted, "It's a national disgrace! " 442 MERCHANT PRINCES Y. R. "Dick" Murray, Managing Director, HBC commandment that the Company not go "whoring in the Fast." Since Morgan's owned five shopping-centre branches, the purchase signalled the Bay's first venture into the suburbs, a move that Chester had also vehemently opposed. Morgan's staff organization and downtown store turned out to be riddled with problems and neglect, while Montreal's carriage trade, which had sustained the main store, promptly switched to shopping at Ogilvy's. "Those wheat farmers from Winnipeg moved CANADIAN AT LAST 443 in and catered to a wider market," Aird Nesbitt, who then owned Ogilvy's, disdainfully declared. "Now the Morgan family buys in our store." Despite its hold steps eastward, the Hudson's Bay Company retained its reputation as "the sick man of the Canadian retail business," its image tarnished by age and conservatism. There was growing evidence that the acquisition had been a desperately costly way to break into the East; $12 million had been spent to modernize its stores, and the chain had still to produce any profit. ,,A stroll through any Bay [department store unit] in the 1950s and 1960s indicated that the ingrained and rigid policies of the 1930s were not about to be abandoned overnight," reported James Bryant, a department store chronicler. "In a Bay store in the Boulevard Shopping Centre in the east end of Montreal, six years after the Bay had taken it over from Morgan's, the luggage department consisted of one camper's trunk and one suitcase. On them leaned a lonesome bicycle, the total stock in that category." Murray hired a top U.S. retailing consultant, Alfred H. Daniels, a former head of Federated Department Stores, to survey the scene. He found deep variances between both stores and departments. "There were no common denominators," Daniels reported. "You could have a fairly good shoe department in Vancouver, and the world's worst in Winnipeg. The Victoria store should have been sunk; it was a disgrace. None of the tricks of merchandising that *A condition of the purchase was that Bart Morgan, the chain's chairman, be allowed tojoin the HBC board. He was welcomed, but Morgan seldom showed up, attending only 13 out of 147 HBC board meetings between April 13, 1961, and November 1, 1968, mainly the immial all-expenses-paid trips to the London annual Court. He almost never went to Winnipeg and was eventually dropped. 444 MERCHANT PRINCES had been developed in the previous decade were being used, or even heard of in many instances. They didn't know how to make a profit-the whole emphasis was on cost control. Don't spend a cent. They didn't even have records on profitability, so that prominent space in a store might be given to toothpaste and shaving cream, on which you hardly made a dime, while cosmetics, on which you can make billions, were in the rear corner or some goddainn place.The Bay had no understanding of the fashion business. They had a lot of klutzy guys who could have been there or at Rupert's Landing, and had almost no important women or Jews in the Company. Yet they had the best name in the business, and problems that were both definable and rectifiable." One of the rectifiable factors was finally moving the Bay into the shopping centres sprouting outside Canada's main cities. The rush to the suburbs had dramatically reversed the long-term (lip in department stores' sales, so that by 1967, more than a third of their increased turnover was coming out of the suburbs. Apart from the Morgan's acquisitions, the Hudson's Bay Company's first shopping-centre branch-a Morgan'swas opened at Eglinton Square in Metro Toronto in 1963, but it was a further six years before the first western suburban store went on stream, in Richmond, outside Vancouver. That store turned a profit in its first year, but it almost wasn't built. George Weightman, a Company marketing executive, had taken Murray on a tour of Richmond, parts of which lie very close to sea level and in those days had ditch drainage. "There were these wide canals along the sides of each road, perpetually filled with water, and every house had a footbridge for access," Weightman recalled. "After I had been driving Dick Murray around for a few hours through the rain between these canals, he drew himself up to his full height, gazed at the watery view, and declared, 'As CANADIAN AT LAST 445 long as I'm Managing Director of this Company, we'll never build a store in this swamp!"'* At about this time, Murray presided over a sad historical event. York Factory, the great tidewater headquarters on Hudson Bay where the HBC had perfected the fur trade as a world-scale enterprise and the base from which the first trader-explorers had set out to probe the Company's inland empire, was turned over to the federal government as a national historic site. The object of a major naval engagement, invasions and bloody battles, York Factory had changed hands between the French and English ten times, eventually becoming not only the centre of the fur trade but also the venue for the annual meeting of the Council of the Northern Department of Rupert's Land, the body charged with governing the greater part of what would later become Canada. At one time, the depot had consisted of more than thirty buildings that included a haberdashery, ironmongery *The Company followed up its free-standing suburban store in Richmond by opening later the same year its first western shopping-centre outlet at Lougheed Mall in Burnaby, also adjoining Vancouver, and in 1973 it built a shopping mail around its Richmond store. The failure to turn a profit at Morgan's made Murray gun-shy of any further expansion and inhibited any move to the suburbs. The Eglintorl Square store was an exception-complete -A ith a "parkade," which now sits useless and dilapidated. Murray was finally persuaded to add another Montreal suburban store in CMteauguay. It was approved by the Canadian Committee, and Murray, who was going to the United Mngdom for the annual Court, decided to stop off in Montreal on the way and look at the site. Ile was appalled by what he saw-a sparse collection of blue-collar housing developments bordering the Mohawk reserve-and he pulled the item off the agenda for the Board meeting in London. Chiteauguay ruined his appetite for further suburban expansion and lowered his confidence in the judgment of Bay retail management. 446 MERCHANT PRINCES and even a perfumery, but in the 1930s all the structures but one were torn down for firewood. All that remained was the three-storey depot building, the "Big House" on the shore of the Hayes River, its hundred vacant windows yawning in the early sunsets. After 2 7 5 years of trading, the Company had abandoned the post in 1957, and now it was cutting the final ties. Even the handing-over ceremony didn't disturb York Factory's hibernation: it was conducted at Lower Fort Garry, more than five hundred miles to the southwest. But York Factory couldn't entirely shed its heritage. The government did next to nothing with it, and the Big House started to be overrun with looters and loiterers, duck hunters who would come in off the Bay and set up bowling alleys on its main floor, using leftover cannon balls and empty beer bottles as pins. There was always the danger of fire; above all, it didn't seem right that this ghost of a wilderness metropolis should be given up to neglect and the ravages of nature. At least that was the feeling of Doug MacLachlan, a Winnipegger who had served briefly as an HBC apprentice clerk at York Factory in the late 1930s. A tight-end on the Blue Bomber championship football team of 1947, MacLachlan later ran his own fur-trading post at St Theresa Point on Island Lake in northern Manitoba, but his heart belonged to York Factory. After Ottawa took over, he became the desolate post's only permanent resident, tending the place, collecting relics (more than five thousand of them-candlesticks, strap-on skates, scissors and guns), guiding visitors, trapping to keep alive and setting up a chapel on the depot's second floor. "Sometimes you arrive at a place, and you feel as if you'd been there before," MacLachlan reminisced. "When I first got to York Factory, I knew where everything was, even the location of buildings no longer standing. It was kind of peculiar, but [ felt that it should be properly protected, CANADIAN AT LAST 447 that there was something valuable here for the whole country." When the Canadian fur-trade historian .,krthur J. Ray visited York Factory in the summer of 1982, he was discouraged by what he saw: "This summer marked the 300th anniversary of the founding of the first York Factory. At the end of each century the post has faced crises. In 1782 it was sacked and burned by the Comte de La P6rouse. In 1882 it was experiencing the trauma of readjusting to new economic and environmental circumstances.... In 1982 it is the heritage of the post that is threatened. Unless an aroused (and interested) public makes a concerted effort to make sure that appropriate actions are taken to save the architectural and archaeological heritage, too little will be done too late. I am not optimistic. I have a sinking feeling that the post is in its twilight years." At the government turnover ceremony, Murray had joked about the absence of either adventure or profit in the exchange, but another decision caused a lot more harm to the Company's historical reputation. His man- agement committee, concerned about lack of a national identity-Morgan's in the East, the Bay in the Westand a reputation for high prices and unfriendly service, persuaded Murray to hire a team of New York image- makers to come up with a solution. The result was the replacement of an inconsistent collection of mainly green signs and grey bags proclaiming in Old English script "Hudson's Bay Company" with a bright yellowish ochre designation in modern typeface that flatly stated "The Bay." An executive recalls that Murray had to be dragged along, protesting about tradition, and he personally vetoed a scheme for Beatle-influenced psychedelically coloured trucks. By the mid- I 960s, Murray had a more serious worrv. His friend and mentor, Tony Keswick, decided to retire from the Governorship (though not yet the board) 448 MERCHANT PRINCES because, as he told friends, he would not personally preside over the Company's departure from Britain. Such a transfer had become an urgent necessity. Canadians on the British board had been officially notified on October 26, 1961, that none of the London members opposed the transfer except Keswick, who wished to go as soon as the time seemed propitious. Apart from the obvious efficiencies in having the Company run from the country where it transacted 90 percent of its business, tax considerations required the shift. At the 1965 annual Court, his last, Keswick bewailed the fact that under new British regulations on overseas trading companies, taxes on dividends would increase by about 2800,000 a year, affecting shareholders' pockets in both the United Kingdom and Canada.* Having given his farewell address to the shareholders, Keswick would not allow anyone to tender him a retirement dinner as was the custom with departing Governors. He wrote to Murray that he was remaining on the board, but wanted to leave the Governorship "as quietly and as innocently as possible without any fuss whatsoever." In Keswick's place arrived Lord Amory, destined to be the Hudson's Bay Company's last British Governor. Recently retired as British High Commissioner in Canada, Derick Heathcoat Amory had spent most of three lively decades in Conservative politics, having been minister of pensions in the post-war Churchill government and chancellor of the exchequer under Harold Macmillan. fie had a distinguished military record that included twenty years in the Devon Yeomanry, where he trained as an expert in airborne *Company documents revealed that in the preceding twenty years the HBC had suffered a tax disadvantage of approximately Y2,500,000 by retaining its United Mngdorn tax residence. If those taxes had been reinvested in the Company at 6 percent, its earnings would have been E3,750,000 higher. CANADIAN AT LAST 449 warfare and during the dark (lays of the See, War broke his leg in a parachute jump at th .Nrnhem in the Netherlands. Taken prisoner, A- y was about to have his left leg amputated when the Nazi doctor noted a pin identifying the Englishman as a master of the hunt. The two inen swapped foxhunting stories as the German worked to save the limb.* Amory lived modestly in a drab sixteen-guinea-aweek bachelor flat at Marshain Court, where he ironed his own shirts and made his own breakfast, although he could have afforded much more as chairman and part-owner of a large textile firm, John Heathcoat & Company. Shy and naturally secretive, he delivered a stern lecture to Roy Hodson of the Financial Times for "sensationalizing" news of his appointment to the HBC Governorship because the story had run under a twocolumn headline. He loved limericks and could deliver amusing speeches.t Eric Faulkner remembered the first time Amory was asked to speak at a Canadian HBC function: "We'd had about ten speeches already and everyone was absolutely speech-drunk when somebody called on Lord Amory, and to my horror he got to his feet. He had a habit of nibbling at the corner of his handkerchief and he started *The wound nevei completely healed, and in November 1967 Amory had an emergency hip replacement. While still in hospital, he wrote toMurray: I am now comingto life again with a new hip designed on most modern lines-stainless steel with plastic embellishments. I shall no doubt leave a trail ofsparks behind me as I stride along unless I carry a grease gun for lubrication." f His favourite was one of his own: There was a young lady of Kent, VvIo knew ven~ well what it meant, When asked out to dine, Given cocktails and wine. She knew what it meant, but she went. 450 MERCHANT PRINCES in his owlish way to talk about visiting our Montreal store and having had some difficulty disengaging himself from the chap who sold socks. Nobody knewhow to react; there was a deathly hush, and I thought, 'Oh God, it's the first time the Canadians are seeinghim. What are theygoing to make of him?' But he went on and on, talking about the sock salesman until some chaps began to realize he was pulling their legs, and there were a few titters. Soon the whole place was rockingwith laughter. Theymade him go on for twenty minutes and after that, he had the whole top Bay executive in the palm of his hand. It was an extraordinary performance by a cunning old man." Amory had been put in place because his influence with British politicians would grease the ways for the HBC's transfer. In that transaction, Dick Murray turned out to be an essential partner. The Canadian Managing Director had first demonstrated his political clout in 1960 when the Diefenbaker government introduced a 15-percent tax on dividends paid by branches of foreign companies operating in Canada. By quietly nurturing his contacts, Murray got the bill altered to exclude companies carrying on trade in Canada before July 1, 1867-an amendment that applied only to the HBC. Circumstances were conspiring to accelerate the Company's trans-Atlantic shift: a 14-percent devalua tion of the British pound to $2.40 made the investment in HBC shares more attractive to Canadian shareholders, and the prospect of British membership in the European Economic Community, now that the Germans sup ported Britain against the continuing French veto, had loosened Westminster's iron grip on the status quo. The Company's three hundredth anniversary, May 2, 1970, was chosen as the ideal symbolic date for patriation. Peter Wood moved temporarily to London and soon had all of' the Compan ' v's accounting ledgers and sys tems transferred to Winnipeg. CANADIAN AT LAST 451 At Amory's request, Joe Links did much of the preliminary negotiating with the Privy Council Office, conferring with lawyers and stock-exchange officials concerning the 92.6 percent of HBC shares then held in the United Kingdom. He recalled stalking the corridors of the Treasury-not his first visit, "but first as emissary of a former Chancellor of the Exchequer-, it made a difference. The question we always asked ourselves was to whom control should be transferred, once permission was granted. To have transferred to a weak board and management would inevitably have resulted in a takeover followed by a break-up of the Companv's assets, so that it would have ceased to exist. Could tfie Company have continued and prospered without a takeover bid, or fended one off, under the management available before 1970? We shall never know, but it did not seem likely to us. Why, then, did we not find the management we could hand over to, or go to Canada and run the Company ourselves? On this, perhaps, we shall be judged, as well as the wisdom of vesting control in a board of non-executive, part-time directors. As is so often the case with anomalous, unplanned developments, success or failure must be judged by whether they work. The HBC was certainly not a failure. For most of the twenty-five post-war years it was a success. Had we taken a different course it might have been more successful still. But the risk of failure was too daunting to contemplate." When Lord Amory was taking the final poll on whether or not to go for transfer, he asked each board member for his views, and they agreed-but as Amory went around the table, all eyes were on Keswick, still a director and known for his antipathy to allowing the Company to leave England. The former Governor sat up a little straighter in his seat, tugged at the handkerchief in his sleeve, and in a clear, strong voice gave the verdict: 452 MERCHANT PRINCES Joe Links "Mr. Governor, I would go. I would go now.- Although double taxation was held out publicly as the main reason for the transfer, several other factors contributed to the move.. Despite the British board's Keswick, who was knighted in 1972, later reminisced about that momentous day. "I had very mixed feelings. It was a bit like your child departing, you feel sad, but only momentarily because you know it's the right thing to do. I recognized that it should be done but didn't feel politically competent to handle the transfer to Canada. Politics is not my game. I'm just a dirty little merchant adventurer, with an eye on the main chance." In fact, Tony CANADIAN AT LAST 453 reservations about the quality of Canadian management, it was increasingly ludicrous to believe that an absentee board of part-timers could direct a modern retailing operation an ocean and half a continent away. It had become obvious that to stay in the race, the HBC would have to expand its retail operations significantly, which meant undertaking some serious public financing. In such transactions, the Companys dual citizenship was sure to depress credit ratings. Since no British trading company with a royal charter had ever moved abroad-and since the Canadian directors didn't really wish to lose that privileged status-some new corporate formula had to be discovered. The nian who found it was David Guest, a senior partner at Blake, Cassels & Graydon, the Toronto legal factory, who drew up a new Canadian Charter (to be granted by Elizabeth 11 in her capacity as Head of State of the United Kingdom and Canada) that would simultaneously keep the Company incorporated under the Royal Charter of 1670 and turn it into a Canadian corporation, subject to nearly all the standard provisions of the Canada Corporations Act.* Outlining the effect of Keswick would probably not have voluntarily sanctioned the departure of his beloved Company for foreign parts in a thousand years. He retired from the board not long after the fatal vote and sold all his stock but never left the Company in spirit. Of all the modern I IBC Governors, he alone magnified the grandeur ofthe I 113Cs past without using it to reflect glory on himself. *The Queen granted a new Charter, the old one remaining but with a supplementary charter attached. The crucial work was done by the Clerk of the Privy Council in London. The Company's main exemption from the Canada Corporations Act was that the 1113C would never have to use the word "Limited" in its name, because it is not and never was just another incorporated enterprise with limited liability. In his search for precedents, Guest found that the Victorian Order ofNurses and the Dominion Drania Festival had been granted similar privileged status. 454 MERCHANT PRINCES Guest's approach, Murray wrote to Amory that it meant the "transfer is a historical move with certain economic consequences, rather than an economic move with historical consequences." That wonderfully meaningless phrase appealed to the Governor's sense of irony; he immediately wanted it translated into Latin and used on the crest of the new Canadian incorporation. Before Guest had thought through his formula, both Michael Pitfield, the Clerk of the Privy Council in Ottawa, and Britain's Solicitor-General, the Right Honourable Sir Dingle Foot (eldest brother of Michael Foot, later leader of the Labour Party), had considered transfer impossible without winding up the Company in England first, which would have disrupted its continuity, cost much in new incorporation expenses and had dire tax consequences. When initially confronted by HBC officials advocating the transfer, the two men, who up to that time had not spoken, used the same metaphor to describe why they thought it could never be done. As if on cue, they said it was not technically feasible because it would be "like trying to reverse the immaculate conception." Following that rebuff, Murray recalled going to see Pitfield with the Guest opinion. "I had never met him before, and I stumbled into his office, as I often do, without having organized my sentences, but when I showed him Guest's letter, he read it, and like Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady telling Eliza Doolittle that she's got it, he said,'My God, he's right. Itcan be done."' Prime Minister Lester Pearson had written a personal letter (drafted by Murray) to Prime Minister Harold Wilson advocating the HB(,s transfer, and most of the outstanding questions seemed to be resolved when a new issue came up. Sam Bronfman, acting through Harris & Partners, a Toronto investment dealer, launched a takeover attempt to acquire 100 percent of the 14BCs stock. Murray met the Bronfmans' CANADIAN AT LAST 455 intermedliary, Noah Torno, who had become a minor partner in the Seagram business when his Danforth Wines was bought out in 1948, and told him that on no account would the Canadian government countenance a takeover of the FIBC. Torno backed off, but the incident triggered a series of unexpected events.* To prevent other takeover attempts, Murray started to lobby Ottawa for a special amendment that would not allow any investor to hold more than 10 percent of the Company's stock for a five-year period. A comparable ownership rule already existed for Canadian banks, but no other private-sector company enjoyed a similar privilege. The board had reluctantly accepted the notion, but there was one holdout: David Kilgour, who had succeeded Elmer Woods as head of the Canadian Committee in 1904. President of Great-West Life, son of a judge, father-in-law of a future prime minister and a pillar of the Winnipeg Establishment, Kilgour was debonair and worldly yet obstinately ambitious. During his three decades at Great-West, he had become used to behaving like a Chief Executive Officer and saw no reason to change his ways when he took on the HBCs Canadian Committee chairmanship. That quickly brought him into conflict with Dick Murray, who as Managing Director was charged with running the *It was not the first time the Bronfinans had taken a run at the HBC. In 1952, Allan Bronfnian, Sam's younger brother, approached Governor Cooper to buy Hudson's Bay Oil & Gas for Royalite Oil, which then managed most of the family's energy investments. C ooper turned him down but described the encounter in his diary: "The Bronfinans, who began as bartenders and bootleggers, have made a fantastic fortune and they seem to buy new companies almost every day... I liked him and would have asked him to lunch, but Elmer Woods has advised me that Phil Chester hated him so much, he would have been most unhappy" [Alay 30, 1952]. 456 MERCHANT PRINCES Canadian operation. The rift between the two men soon widened beyond repair.* Operational difficulties aside, their positions had hardened on the 10-percent ownership rule. Murray was now dedicated to achieving the five-year limit, while Kilgour had dug in at a full ten years and was personally lobbying John Turner, then the federal minister of 3ustice, who had married his daughter Geills. That not only subverted Murray's efforts at working through the proper Ottawa channels but also roused the ire of Amory because lie and other board members were convinced Kflgour's real motive for backing the longer term was to guarantee himself a quiet decade as the HBCs first Canadian Governor. Amory had already indicated that a Canadian would be named to head the Company immediately after patriation, but no one had yet been picked. K-ilgour considered himself the ideal candidate, being familiar with the HBCs Canadian workings-and being dangerously close to the end of his stewardship at Great-West I~Ife. (Control of the Company had been purchased by Power Corporation in 1969, and Paul Desmarais, the Montreal conglomerate's chairman, was known to be unhappy with Kilgour's style of management.) After Kilgour had been involved in several minor attempts at trying to usurp the authority of both the Canadian Managing Director and the British board, Murray's patience broke, and on February 14, 197 0, he wrote to Amory requesting that Migour be immediately dismissed because he "had not only failed in his *Their relationship turncd so nasty that Amory called a special board meeting in the viceregal suite of the Windsor Hotel in the autumn of 1969 to discuss the impasse. Most of the directors backed Murray. The two men reluctantly shook hands; but nothing was really resolved. CANADIAN AT LAST 457 responsibilities as a director and as Chairman of the Canadian Committee, but had indeed violated the trust placed in him as the premier of the Canadian directors charged with special responsibilities for loyalty and cooperation with the Governor of this Company." Two weeks later Amory wrote to the Canadian Committee Chairman, demanding that he submit his resignation at a forthcoming Montreal board meeting because, as he put it, "not only is there a lack of mutual confidence between you and the Managing Director but increasingly between you and me." Kilgour refused to quit. Amory got tough. He sent a cable informing the recalcitrant Chairman that if he didn't offer his resignation he would be retired involuntarily. Kilgour kept his peers on edge until the last minute. They had misjudged their man. He may have overreached himself, but he was too proud to be humiliated by the swarm of former colleagues now baying for his blood. So as the first order of business at the March 6, 1970, directors' meeting he resigned with a flourish, wishing the Company a long, happy future, and walked out. Not quite. A week later he wrote a stinging rebuke to Amory, denying all of Murray's accusations. "We reached exactly the right conclusion," he wrote, "but I was unhappy with the 'saturation bombing' you felt was required in getting there.... There was an amusing cartoon in the New Yorker a few years ago of a mild little man sitting at a Board room table with about a dozen big, redfaced, blustery Directors. He was shown breaking into their debate with the remark, 'Haven't you forgotten that I own 51 percent of the stock?' Some of us at times forget that in the Hudson's Bay C ompany Britishers own over 90 percent." Amory, ever the gentleman, replied: "During the unheroic years in which I served in the Army, I was taught that when in doubt deploy maximum fire power! However, I hated doing it and if I did 458 MERCHANT PRINCES overestimate, I can only ask you to forgive me.... It was, I think, one of your fellow countrymen who said that'the British have the rigidity of red hot pokers without their warinth."' Both men agreed to consign their vitriolic exchange "to the flames" so that it would not, someday, turn up in the Company Archives. When Amory made that request of Murray, who had been sent copies of the correspondence, the Managing Director enthusiastically agreed. "Your 'for the fire and ashes' exchange of letters with David Kilgour was waiting for me when I got home. Thev are returned for shredding in Mrs. Harron's hungry fittle machine," he wrote to the Governor. There remained only the matter of choosing an appropriate farewell gift to the departing Canadian Chairman. Having been asked what he would prefer, Kilgour suggested a Canadian painting and a trip to the Arctic with his wife, Mary. In response, Murray immediately set a $2,000 limit on any canvas that might be purchased and had cost accountants do runs on what kind of expense would be involved in the northern expedition. "I am not too happy to have Mr. and Mrs. Kilgour go on a working trip," he wrote to Amory, "since [his] views on the English directors are so embit- tered. . . . I would prefer to see him go on a goose hunt in our Grumman Goose." Kilgour was not thrilled about the wild-goose chase because he was told he couldn't take Mary along, and suggested that the two of them accompany a regular northern inspection trip. That idea threw Murray into a total panic. "It is incredible," he wrote to Amory, "but he can be as difficult (almost) in retirement as he was before. He has written to request a trip to the North with his wife-we thought we had gone rather far with the Goose Hunt offer." Murray eventually got an auditor's opinion that any northern journey by the retiring chairman would be a CANADIAN AT LAST 459 taxable benefit, and In a curt letter on July 8 he withdrew the offer. Kilgour replied in kind: "God forbid that I should be involved in over-generosity by the HBC. I am going north, but completely happily on my own, and a painting from HBC would, on reflection, not be something I would welcome-so please forget it." Kilgour's stormy departure left open the issue of who would succeed Am~ory and become the Company's first Canadian G overnor. The clear choice of board members had been Donald Gordon, the dynamic former Bank of Canada deputy governor and chairman of Canadian National Railways, who had joined the HBC board in 1967. But he died within two years of his arrival, and the Bay insiders had to look elsewhere. In 1970, after only three hundred years, the Hudson's Bay Company recognized the existence of Toronto and appointed its first director from that trading post, A.J. MacIntosh, a senior partner in Blake, Cassels & Graydon. And it was from '16ronto that the majority of the British directors wanted to recruit their first Canadian Governor. He was Allen Thomas Lambert, the high-school drop-out who had oined a Victoria branch of the Bank of Toronto at sixteen and was now chairman of the Toronto-Dominion Bank. "Lord Amory approached me and it was not something vou would turn aside lightly," Lambert recalled. "I would have had to give the Company at least 40 percent of iny time and I wasn't able to resolve in my own mind how I could do that and still be fair to the bank." Other suggested candidates included Senator Hartland de Montarville Molson, the former chairman of his family's brewing company, and Major-General A. Bruce Matthews, chairman of Excelsior Life Insurance, but in the end the job went to yet another Winnipegger: George Taylor Richardson. The sixth Richardson to head the family business, he was a tall, imperial man who exuded a kind of easy 460 MERCHANT PRINCES institutional grace. Although he seemed on the surface to be the ultimate corporate bureaucrat, whose proudest boast was how many members of his companys twentyfive-year Club were third-generation Richardson employees, there was an adventurous side to him as well, known only to his closest associates. An experienced helicopter pilot, Richardson would guide his Bell Jet Ranger across the Canadian landscape, swooping down on some lonely IIBC post, skimming over the nocturnal terrain of the endless prairie, following the moving lights on highways and train tracks, hopping across the Rockies, and finally, like some giant mechanical hummingbird, dip his skids in the Pacific. A Bay man even as a youngster, Richardson ran a trapline near his old family home on St Mary's Road at St Germain, near Winnipeg, catching and skinning ermine, mink and the odd coyote, which he sold to the I] BC. He lived there with his elegant wI fe, T is, hunting, riding his horses and puffing his arm] I Rea Belvedere cigars--guarded all the while by a rainbow of peacocks, gugalating trumpeter swans and a domesticated flight of ptarmigan. The governance issue having been settled (though Richardson was not sworn into office until November 26, 1970), the Canadianization of the Company moved into its final phase. The cabinet in Ottawa had stamped the terms of the transfer (including a five-year, 10-percent ownership clause) on February 26, 1970, and two months later Lord Amory had received notification from the U.K. Treasury approving the move. On May 28, the British proprietors convened at Beaver House for the last time. The I]Bc had been founded on May 2, 1670, in Whitehall Palace, when Charles 11 handed Prince Rupert the Charter, naming him and his fellow Adventurers "true lords and proprietors" of all the sea and lands of Hudson Bay and its drainage system-a grant that turned out to enclose a land empire of 1.5 million CANADIAN AT LAST 461 square miles, 40 percent of modern Canada plus several states of the northern United States. Now, three centuries later, the Company still mattered (it ranked fiftysixth among U.K. firms in 1970) and, more than that, its uninterrupted existence was a reminder of the days when Britain had been great-just as its departure served notice that Britain was not quite so great any more. "The die is cast, we're on our way to Canada!" exclaimed one of the elderly Adventurers after Amory proclaimed the transfer to Winnipeg; only four hands had been raised in proiest when the Governor called for a vote. That evening, the directors adjourned to Nelson's Tavern at Greenwich, where the supply ships that ventured to York Factory had once been waved farewell. Joe Links had devised a menu replicating those early feasts, many toasts were proposed and many more were drunk, and while there may have been personal regrets, the mood was one of exhilaration. They had kept the faith, these quirky Scotsmen and their English cousins who privately respected history while publicly appearing to exist only for profit, kept the faith and dispatched the Company to its modern domicile, intact, ready to benefit from the breath of fresh life in a new world. THAT SAME DAY IN OTTAWA, Governor General Roland Michener had been host to a small ceremony at Government House at which the HBCs new Canadian Charter was signed into law. Because the move required simultaneous proclamation on both sides of the Atlantic, there was some concern about delays. Ron Basford (born in Winnipeg, of course), who was Registrar-General of Canada at the time, asked his executive assistant, Tex Enemark, to handle the details, including the business of affixing the Great Seal of Canada on the new Charter. Enemark telephoned Louis 462 MERCHANT PRINCES McCann, the Deputy Registrar-General, who explained that he could get the charter from Government House, once it had been signed by Michener, and bring it back to his office to imprint the Seal, then return it for Basford's signature. "I asked McCann how long it would take," Enemark recalled, "and he said perhaps forty-five minutes at the outside, but that would have meant that the Hudson's Bay Company would have been homeless for most of an hour, so I said, 'Well, why don't you take the Great Seal up to G overnment House and make the impression there?"' "Because it's bolted down," McCann replied, never having been confronted with such an order before. "Why not unbolt it?" "It weighs 350 pounds!" "So, get a truck." Although McCann firmly believed that the security of Canada depended squarely on the Great Seal's remaining bolted in place on the twelfth floor of the Canadian Building in downtown Ottawa, he did recognize that this was a special occasion and agreed-though he insisted the entire operation be classified as top secret and an armoured vehicle be rented from Brink's for the transfer. The HBC was represented at the brief ceremony by Graham Towers, the former Bank of Canada Governor who had served on the board; David Guest, the lawyer who had thought up the patriation formula, was also present. There, too, was the Great Seal of Canada, resting on top of the Governor General's writing desk, which was almost collapsing under its weight. "At this point, a noticeable change overtook McCann," Enemark remembered. "Here was a middle-level civil servant who had spent his whole life immersed in the monotony of the shuffling of the paperwork of officialdom.... Now, suddenly, there was this great national event wherein the oldest incorporated company in the world was going CANADIAN AT LAST 463 through the metamorphosis from being British to being Canadian, and there was Karsh's brother, Malak, taking pictures, while Louis was telling the Governor General, the Registrar-General and the former Bank of Canada Governor about where to sign. McCann became quite animated, showing His Excellency how to turn the screw on the Great Seal with such zest that I thought the desk would collapse for sure. After several attempts, the impression of the Seal was placed on the document, and the job was done." And that was how the Hudson's Bay Company came to Canada at last. *At the (late of its Canadian incorporation, the HBCs assets consisted of nine ships, three airplanes, 585 trucks, 33 large and medium-sized department stores, 218 northern stores, three of the world's largest fur-auction houses, merchandise worth $65 million, a payroll of 15,000, plus a 21.9-percent interest in 41 million acres of oil and gas rights across the Prairies. That was a considerable increase from its original stake in the country, three hundred years earlier, when the Company's total assets consisted of a leaky ketch, one abandoned canoe, three pairs of used snowshoes and fourteen employees. But then it also owned 38.8 percent of Canada--compared with only .0017 percent by 1970. It took a further four years for the Hudson's Bav Company NrchiNes to be transferred from London. Shirlee Smith, the Keep(.-r of the Archives, was posted to London in October 1973 and supervised the transfer of 4,200 linear feet of records, which were shipped in six twentv-ton containers, divided among different ships for safety across the Atlantic. In the fall of 1974 the documents were deposited in the Provincial Archives of Manitoba, where thev are housed in an environmemallv controlled vault on the s econd floor of the Manitoba Archives Building. This significant archive is consulted by national and international scholars and the odd journalist. CHAPTER 16 McGIVERIN'S RUN He a1h,red the IIRC's corporate cultureforever. ONE OF THE UNIA RITFEN CONDITIONS set by London before agreeing to the IIBC's transfer was that a top retailer be hired to run what had become the Company's core business. No one was more anxious to recruit the right person than Dick Murray. 'rhe managing director was a great Bay man but a lousy merchandiser. Murray's restless energy and infectious enthusiasm had guided the smooth Canadianization of the Company, but it had also burned him out. (Suffering from nervous exhaustion, he signed himself into the Mayo Clinic but soon recovered.) More dedicated to the glorious idea of the Company than its often grubby daily realities, he began to have trouble making decisions. He would get his staff to work up proposals for construction of a shopping centre branch, approve their submission, then take it to the board and vote against the project. At the same time, he was facing an internal dilemma about the leveraging staff accountants were injecting into the Company's balance sheets. (Borrowing charges, instead of being shown under inerchandising costs, were attributed to the overall operation, which made the retailing results look far better than they actually were.) Murray's choice to head the department storesthough he must have known he was also picking his own successor-was Donald Scott McGiverin, then a 4o5 466 MERCHANT PRINCES Winnipeg-based group vice-president with Eaton's, who joined the Bay as Managing Director, Retail Stores, in September 1969. Born in Calgary (where his father spent the best part of his fifty-three years with Dominion Rubber, which later became Uniroyal) and educated in Winnipeg, McGlverin began working at Eaton's (selling men's shoes at $1.85 a day) on weekends and holidays, leaving only to earn an MBA at Ohio State. He was never good at sports. Referring to his lack of co-ordination, his father once remarked that his son "ran like a crowd." In Toronto, Donald quickly worked his way up the Eaton's corporate ladder, becoming a prot6g6 of Chairmanjohn David Eaton, and in 1961, at only thirty-seven, was appointed to the company's board, the youngest non-Eaton ever to be so favoured. Five years later he was transferred to Winnipeg and placed in charge of western operations. One reason McGiverin worked so hard was his tragic home life. He married Margaret Ann Weld in 1950, and they had a son (Richard) and a daughter (Mary). In 1957, they were living just north of Toronto in Thornhill, which at that time had run-off ditches paralleling the streets. Richard, who was then four, had dressed up to celebrate his grandfather's birthday and went out to watch the water flow by. He lost his footing and drowned while his mother watched helplessly from a kitchen window. She never got over it and died eleven years later. Mary suffered from a rare disease of the spine called scoliosis that required special care including years in a body cast. Though she later fully recovered, her condition took its toll on McGiverin's spirit. In Winnipeg, McGiverin at first had little intention of taking the Bay offer because he assumed he would have a shot at the top slot in Eaton's. But in the spring of 1969, when John David Eaton retired, his sons instead picked R.J. Butler, who was far less experienced. MCGIVERIN'S RUN 467 McG iverin took his daughter on a long European cruise aboard the Michelangelo, and somewhere under the Mediterranean moon decided that the Hudson's Bay Company was his destiny. That option was made considerably easier by an offer from Eaton's to work for Butler in a newly created but ill-defined post as vicepresident, corporate development. "These guys were sending me east to do something I wasn't interested in," lie told a friend. "I'm a sock salesman, after all. Corporate development, whats that? It probably meant dealing in property, but I did only two real-estate deals in my life-when I sold my houses in Thornhill andVVinnipeg, and lost money on both-so I didn't feel qualified." McGiverin and Murray worked well together, each glad he wasn't doing the other's job. During the next three years the Company purchased the AJ. Freiman department-store operation in Ottawa as well as 49.9 percent of the GAV. Robinson firm in Hamilton, and eight suburban stores were opened. In the fall of 1972, after an Edmonton board meeting of Hudson's Bay Oil & Gas, Murray was called into the hotel suite offIBC Governor G eorge Richardson and his Deputy, Alex MacIntosh, a tough'Foronto lawyer named to the board in 1969.* They unceremoniously presented Murray with a memorandum that not only listed in precise, almost hourly detail the newly outlined duties of the job he had held for thirteen years but also spelled out in humiliating terms that he was henceforth not allowed to discuss any aspect of retailing with anyone except McGiverin, and that, effective immediately, he couldn't even enter an 1113C department store without McGiverin's permission. On a recent visit to Montreal, Murray had entertained at lunch a French-Canadian *Maclniosh's fainily mottois "Touch not the cat without a glove." 468 MERCHANT PRINCES executive who had just been hired by the Morgan's subsidiary. It had been a friendly, welcoming gesture, especially so since Murray was the only HBC executive who could speak French, and he wanted the newcomer to feel at home. But Richardson and MacIntosh used that incident as proof of his interference in the retail department. "It was grubby, grubby," Murray recalled. "So I just said, 'Oh, for God's sake, I quit.'" On November 17, 1972, McGiverin was appointed president of the Hudson's Bay Company. He hit the ground running. "At our first management meeting," he recalled, "we committed ourselves to becoming the preeminent department store in Canada." The Company had a long way to go. The year McGiverin took over, retail sales generated per square foot of store space were a dismal $57, compared with $88 for Woodward's and $100 for Simpsons. The stores were run according to a pathetically outmoded decentralized buying and distribution system, with each major unit having its own warehouse and purchasing agents. The HBC was very much the weak sister of Canadian retailing. A born-again pragniatist with little concern for the Company's traditional survival syndrome, McGiverin set out on a massive acquisition spree to establish The Bay as the leading national retailer. Trying to catch up on two decades of hesitation, he projected the HBCs presence into suburban malls by accepting nearly every developer's proposal that came along. At the same time, he *Murray later became head of the government's Foreign Investment Review Agency and, later still, president of the Federal Business Development Bank. He then retired as a gentleman adventurer, dividing his year between seaside dwellings in Maine and British Columbia. But the Company is not forgotten; above the bathtub in each of his houses hangs a full-colour painting of the Nonsuch, the ship that started it all. MCGIVERIN'S RUN 469 took over a major real-estate company (despite his selfconfessed ignorance of the subject) and began to assemble and build his om n shopping centres and shake up the I IB(,s oil investm~nts in a huge gamble that almost paid off, In the decade and a half of his dominance he expanded Company sales tenfold from $502 million to S4,829 million, and even if the impact of his stewardship was muffled by the recession of the 1980s, he altered the I IBC ,s corporate culture forever. But the bill was staggering. McGiverin, fully supported by the board, which was loaded with financial experts, leveraged the Company to the hilt so that its once modest "blister on the balance sheet" became a fes- tering boil. Under McGiverin, the 1113Cs debt grew exponentially from $70 million to $2.5 billion while the number ofissued shares nearly doubled. The pain resulting from the huge debt became intense when prime interest rates peaked at 22 X percent in September 1981.* McGiverin's pi iority assignment was to create a major retailing presence in Toronto, the countrys largest marketplace. One problem was that he alone among his planning staff had ever lived there, and everyone except for his comptroller (Donald Wood, who was from Niontreal), was a Witimpegger, totally unaware of the Ontario city's retailing geography. "We wanted to be at Yonge and Bloor because we would then be sitting on the crossroads of the subway system," Wood recalled, "but market research was of little help because they gave us a *In early 1973, three Canadian brokerage houses, Richardson Securities, Harris & Partners and Wood Gundy Lin-tited managed a syndicate that floated $100 million in convertible HBC debentures. 'rhe proceeds were delivered to McGiverin in the form of a huge cheque embossed on the back of a stretched beaver pelt, certified by the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (see illustration on page 470). 470 MERCHANT PRINCES When underwritersfor a new $1 00-million debenturejor The Bay made payment on July 21, 19 73, they appropriate4y chose a beaver pelt on which to write the huge cheque. Left to right: Irwin Nightingale, Assistant T-easurer, HBC; Lionel Goffart, Blake, Cassels & Graydon; Donald Fraser, Richardson Securities; lain Ronald, Treasurer, HBC; Peter Wood, Vice-President, Finance, HBC: Howard Bennett, Richardson Securities; Jim Pitblado, Harris & Partners, Donald McGiverin, President, HBC; Pat Vernon, McCarthy &McCarthy, _7ohn O'Brian, Harris & Partners. potential sales range of $15 million to $30 million. We opted for a $60-million, 260,000-square-foot flagship department store and made the final decision in the recreation room of Don McGiverin's house on a Sunday morning in the fall of 1971, with most of us not quite sure where Bloor and Yonge actually was." That dramatic choice meant that McGiverin himself had to *The final decision on Bloor and Yonge made by the HBC board on November 19, 1971, was not unanimous. Rolph Huband, Company Secretary, recalls that "in my thirty years of attending Board and Canadian Committee meetings, almost all decisions have been by consensus with no opposition, but a vote was taken on both Bloor and Yonge and on the Freiman purchase, with three directors voting against in each case." MCGIVERIN'S RUN 471 move to be near his massive investment, and that in turn meant the end of Winnipeg as the Company's operational head office. Completion of the giant Toronto unit was celebrated to the rocking cadence of the Grease Ball Boogie Band on August 1, 1974. At the official opening a week later, so many customers Jammed in to inspect the first downtown department store opened in the Ontario capital in forty-four years that after two hours the doors had to be shut and escalators closed down.* McGlverin subsequently expanded the Company's national activities by purchasing the 30,000 credit-card accounts of Montreal's bankrupt department store Dupuis Fr6res, creating an 11BC travel agency, establishing a sixty-three-outlet catalogue-store operation under the Shop-Rite banner, and acquiring 35 percent of Eaton's life insurance and mutual ftind marketing agency, renamed Eaton Bay Financial Services Limited. But the most interesting non-retail diversification was the deal in 1973 with Siebens Oil & Gas. Through a subsidiary, the Company still held mineral rights on 4.5 million prairie acres; but depletion allowances had run out, and McGiverin decided on a potentially more profitable-though much more riskyinvestment. It involved turning the HBCs rights income over to Slebens, a company then active in North Sea exploration, in return for 3.2 million Siebens shares (35 percent of the total), mainly to come from its treasury. A brainchild of Don Mackenzie, a savvy Calgary oil *The HBC honoured the launch by promising to donate three black beavers to the Metropolitan 16ronto Zoo. But the Company's trappers had done such a thorough job that none of the subspecies could be found in Canadas backwoods. Three ammals were finally located at a breeding ranch near Salt Lake City, Utah. They were purchased for $2 00 and shipped north. 472 MERCHANT PRINCES consultant,~Nho had joined the FIBC board a year earlier, the deal caught investors' imaginations because it gave The Bay, which had money but few proven oil reserves, the chance to share in a big potential strike, and it gave Siehens, which had potential oilfields but little money more cash for exploration. Not long afterwards, McGiverin purchased control of Markborough Properties, which owned a real-estate portfolio worth at least $100 nil Ilion. In a dramatic lastminute struggle with Robert Campeau, McGiverin outbid the developer from Sudbury mainly because hysterical Markborough shareholders wanted anybody but Campeau to buy their company. They kept The Bay in the bidding and stormed Royal Trust offices five minutes before closing to get back the stock they had already pledged to the swashbuckling financier. Ironically, McGiverin, whose hiring as a first-rate retailer had been a condition of the U.K. directors for transferring the Company to Canada, was soon spending most of his time on corporate affairs, acquisitions and strategy, while Ronald Sheen, an uninspired executive who had been bypassed for McGiverin in 1969, ran The Bay department stores t hrough most of the 1970s. By the spring of 1978, McGiverin had gathered around him a top-flight takeover team of financial experts including Peter Wood, John McIntyre, lain Ronald, Donald Wood, Rolph Huband, Peter Nobbs and Douglas Mahaffy, while Marvin Tiller, aided by George Whitman, provided locomotion for the Northern Stores Div]sion. McGiverin himself, usually jacketless, feet up on his desk and incessantly puffing on Camel cigarettes, had grown into the job, running the Company with good humour but little charisma. Dependent more on logic than emotion, he conducted the business not so much by issuing orders as by making suggestions-and repeating them if they weren't followed up. Irish in manner rather MCGIVERIN'S RUN 473 than Scottish- outgoing and breezy, not introspective and gloomy-he liked to pretend that he was really a small-town boy, hitching his pants up towards his armpits, telling stories with a grin on his lived-in face and rhapsodizing about the weekends he spent "getting a little plastered" at his "hut in a swamp" at Palgrave, Ontario. (He actually lived in a luxury apartment in the Manulife Centre in Toronto's upscale Bloor and Bay retailing district, and much preferred spending weekends at the Lyford Cay resort in Nassau, where he had a house.) One of his few eccentricities was that he never sold any of his cars, which he considered old friends. He still had his first purchase, a 1930 Ford coupe, but mostly drove his 1963 Falcon, his 1962 Cadillac convertible or the 1972 Lincoln-bought to celebrate his appointment as the HBCs president. He never got caught up in the Company's history except as a source for after-dinner anecdotes, and stoutly maintained that "you don't make money by reflecting on a glorious past.... There are no inuskrat traps hanging from the rafters any more." THE YEAR OF THE BIG CHANGE WAS 1978. McGiverin's acquisitive impulses reached their crescendo as, in a series of stunning corporate coups, he more than doubled the Company's revenues-as well as its longterm debt. There were a few disposals: the sale of a minority interest in Glenlivet Distillers of Scotland to Seagrams for $6 million, realizing $4.4 million in profit; sale of the HBC's 3 5 -percent interest in Siebens Oil & Gas to Dome Petroleum at $38.50 a share, generating a $94-million gain for a five-year hold, though the dream of striking it rich in the North Sea never materialized. In early June, word came through from George Richardson's Vancouver office that Joe Segal, chairman 474 MERCHANT PRINCES of Zellers Limited, which operated cut-rate department stores, wanted to discuss some new merchandising concepts with McGiverin. When the two men met, Segal came right to the point: his great merchandising idea was to buy the Hudson's Bay Company. He proposed purchasing 51 percent of the issued shares at $28, about $7 over current market, though part of the value would be in Zellers shares. An astonished McGaverin replied that any offer would have to be for 100 percent, and ail cash. Shortly afterwards,jim Pitblado, chairman of Dominion Securities, the country's largest brokerage house, phoned McGiverin to inform him that Dominion Securities would be acting for Segal, but only if it was a friendly takeover. Then came the kicker: Segal informed McGiverin that he had consulted his associates and that a 100-percent, all-cash offer was on its way. Segal matter-of-factly confirmed that he had the necessary funds ($450 million), and agreed to meet McGiverin in Winmpeg on July 7 to complete the takeover. The Company of Adventurers went ape. Flying to that meeting (aboard the Company's new HS-125-400 $2-million jet), McGiverin and his advisers hurriedly pored over intelligence reports they had gathered about Segal. Born in Vegreville, Alberta, he had dropped out of school at fifteen to work in the Credit Arcade clothing store in Edmonton ("a quarter down and a quarter a week"), was a labourer (luring construction of the Alaska Highway, then lost his entire savings in an all-night poker game. After two years in the army, he was demobbed in Vancouver and launched a small army and navy surplus outlet, starting with some naval exhaust fans built to operate through portholes. He sold them off to tailor shops willing to have round exhaust holes cut in their store fronts. Subsequently he opened a clothing outlet called Fields near Woodward's main store. That was the beginning of a highly successful western chain MCGIVERIN'S RUN 475 that later included a hardware operation (Marshall Wells). Ile eventually used his Fields holdings for a reverse takeover of Zellers, a Canadian variety chain that had been sold in the 1950s to WT. Grant, a U.S. mar- keting giant. At the time, Canada's business Establishmerit thought so little of Segal that the news of his takeover pushed down Zellers' already depressed stock $2.00 to a new low of $2.50. But within two years, Zellers was in fine shape and Segal was wealthy enough to purchase Vancouver's most beautiful house.* Before he left Toronto for the Winnipeg meeting, McGiverin had tried to find out who was backing Segal and soon traced the Bank of Montreal as the most likely suspect. 'vNhen he got Fred McNeil, the Montreal's chairman, on the telephone, nearly everything McGiverin asked was met with stone-cold silence. Finally the HBC president demanded, "May I assume that your bank is behind this takeover bid?" "If I were in your position," McNeil replied, "that is the assumption I would make. But I didn't say it." The Winnipeg meeting began warily. McGiverin and his advisers had concluded that only one move would defuse Segal's takeover strategy: a pre-emptive bI d for Zellers. "I recognized the Hudsons Bay Company as a sleeping giant with a tremendous, understated balance sheet," Segal later recalled. "The Company would have been the Rio Vista, his palace at 2170 Southwest Marine Drive (sold to a Singapore billionaire in 1990), had its own terraced Italian garden, waterfall, tranquillity ponds and galleried conservatorv where he grew grapefruit-sized lemons and melon-sized grapefruit. The mansion itself had ten fireplaces, eleven bathrooms, a sunken ballroom, a full-sized tavern with suede walls, not to mention a banquet-sized dining chamber, a billiards room decorated in tartan, a fidl-scale spa and so on-all done up in a mongrel mixture of elegance and Disneyland. 476 MERCHANT PRINCES joe Segal, principal HBC sbarebolderfor a time greatest leveraged buyout in history. Its breakup value was huge, except that I wouldn't have broken it up but would have maximized the value of its assets-and that meant merging it with Zellers to create the largest retailing entity in Canada. I didn't particularly care which of the two companies emerged on top, as long as it was done." About halfway through Segal's presentation, his financial man, John Levy, mused-as if he'd )ust then thought of it-"Of course the real way to do it is for The Bay to take over Zellers." McGiverin was delighted the suggestion-which was to have been his trump card-had been made. Three months later, on October 3, 1978, The Bay bought 57.1 MCGIVERIN'S RUN 477 percent of Zellers for the equivalent of $1, 0 a share, with Segal receiving 452,177 HBC shares and a lump of cash for his 13 -percent holding in the chain. For his $76-million purchase price, McGiverin obtained control of the 155-store Zellers and the 61-unit Fields chain. The transaction temporarily made the Vegreville entrepreneur the HBCs largest shareholder; becoming the first Jewish Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company was within his grasp. But in two months, Zellers and Segal were overshadowed by the largest deal in the HBCs history. SIMPSONS AND THE HBC had always been one another's favourite buyout targets. They each specialized in quality merchandise, considered themselves the country's best department stores, but unlike Eaton's had no national customer constituencies. To combine the western dominance ofThe Bay with the eastern presence of Simpsons seemed a perfect match. Back in the 1920s, Sir Augustus Nanton of the HBCs Canadian Committee had approached Sir Joseph Flavelle on the possibility of a merger, but the Simpsons chairman declined on the grounds that he was reluctant at his age to launch new ventures. In October 1936, Philip Chester and George Allan, then running the Canadian operation, were hastily summoned to London by Governor Patrick Ashley Cooper. When they arrived, Cooper informed them he was about to complete negotiations for a merger with Simpsons and that the Toronto department store's chairman, Charles Burton, and its investment adviser (also a major shareholder), Harry Gundy, were on the way to London with the documents, ready to be signed. At a meeting the following morning, also attended by HBC director Sir Edward Peacock, Chester made a fervent plea against any such move. "I talked for about forty 478 MERCHANT PRINCES minutes," he recalled, "about Simpsons, the HBC Stores, the ruinous effect of the deal upon the future of HBC in Canada, and so forth.... As we filed out, Peacock called me aside and, putting his arm around my shoulder, said 'Don't you worry,' and left. A few days later Burton and Gundyarrived and proceeded to Hudson's Bay House to see Cooper. By accident or design, they were left in a small anteroom cooling their heels for well over an hour, saiN Cooper for a few minutes, and left in a state of fury and consternation."* The next attempt, in 1968, was much more sophisticated, involving G. Allan Burton, who had that year succeeded his brother Edgar as chairman of Simpsons, and Lord Amory, the HBC's last British Governor. Dick Murray had brought the two men together, and Amory felt quite excited by the prospect, since the combined chains would account for 22 percent of Canadian department-store sales. "There might be something really big for our old Company here," he wrote to Murray. "Anyway, if we do not like it, we can sing in Elizabethan stvle, 'With a hey nay ninny nonny-no!"' Simpsons then had a market value of $280 million compared to The Bay's $320 million. In the minds of the HBC executives, there was no question whether this should be a merger; it was to be a takeover, pure and simple. Two main problems had to be overcome. The first was corporate. In 1953, Simpsons had signed an agreement with Sears, Roebuck & Company of Chicago *The following notation appears in Chester's unpublished his- tory of the Company: "Some years later Charlie Burton wrote the story of his business life [A Sense of Urgency, published by Clarke, Irwin in 1952]. He told me it contained a chapter on these events with HBC and I urged him with all the power at my command to cut this out.... When the book was published I was thankful to see he had done so." MCGIVERIN'S RUN 479 to form a new enterprise, Simpsons-Sears Limited, which took over Simpsons' mall-order operation and launched an intensive drive to open branches in suburban malls. Among the many conditions of the partnership (which included a provision that Simpsons-Sears could not operate stores within twenty-five miles of a Simpsons outlet) was a firm undertaking that no Simpsons shares could be transferred without Sears' permission. When Burton visited Chicago, Sears executives granted him a hunting licence to follow up the possibilities but also made it clear they would retain veto power over the results. The other problem was personal. Allan Burton, DSO, CNI, ED, LLD, OSJ, KCIJ, had a proud pedigree, overdeveloped social graces and a keen sense of his own importance. His love of horses (he was joint Master of the Eglinton Hunt for twentv-three years) led him to a commission with the Governor General's Horse Guards.* He fought with the regiment in the Second World War (winning a Distinguished Service Order on the Italian front) and later took over command.t Burton transferred his sense of military precision to Simpsons, trying, not always successfully, to operate his main store like divisional headquarters and its branches like outlying regiments-and he was not about to give up command easily. He ran Simpsons as a family concern, even *The Burtons were pivotal members of the Canadian Establishment. Their youngsters played department store together with the Eaton boys in their Forest Hill recreation rooms, running a pretend shop named the Seaton Company. t"The war toughened me up a great deal," he maintained. "For one thing, I overcarne my quite Doticeable stutter. That was from talking on a field wireless sixteen, seventeen hours a day. When I first starte d in action, I used to have to write out every single message before I tried to transmit it." 480 MERCHANT PRINCES though the Buttons and all the directors and senior officers together owned a mere 1.8 percent of the sh-ares. Burton saw The Bay offer as a way of both increasing his companys retail reach and making the combination so powerful it could never be overshadowed by Sears. The two sides decided to meet in secret on neutral ground at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York on January 15, 1969. Their venue was a large dining-room decorated like the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, with a long green baize table down the middle and delegations seated on either side, as if they were negotiating a peace treaty. Burton had written out several "military appreciations" of the situation, and concluded that the new retailing giant emerging out of the deal should include all of the HB(:s operations and be owned 40 percent each by Simpsons and the f IBC, with Sears tacked on for the remaining 20 percent. The Bay executives wanted to include only their stores, combining them with those of Simpsons and Simpsons-Sears into a package-owned 40 percent by The Bay, 40 percent by Simpsons-Sears and 20 percent by the Canadian public-all operating under the Hudson's Bay Company banner. Those deep differences guaranteed failure, and when it came, Burton blamed the impasse on the HBCs unwillingness to include its oil and gas holdings in the deal. In fact, the idea had been killed by Sears executives in Chicago who insisted they would not go along with any arrangement that didn't guarantee them 50 percent of voting shares. A decade later, in 1978, coming off his successful takeover of Zellers, McGiverin examined Simpsons afresh. That had been a banner year for Burton. Simpsons-Sears was celebrating its silver anniversary, and in June he had entertained his twenty-five-year employees with a Sunday picnic at his country home. A month later he was host to an anniversary dinner for Edward Telling, chairman of Sears, Roebuck, the world's largest retailer MCGIVERIN'S RUN 481 Simp.vons Cbairman Allan Burton with annual sales of $18 billion. During dessert, Burton brought up the fact that he felt his company was vulnerable to takeovers and that it might be best to move towards an outright amalgamation of Simpsons with S impsons- Sears. Six weeks later Telling agreed, and on August 16 the merger was announced. The new coniparty, with assets of $3.2 billion, would be Canada's seventh largest, and although Sears, Roebuck would retain a controlling interest, Burton would remain Chairman and Chief Executive Officer well past retirement age. The scheme required only the approval of the Foreign Investment Review Agency, which then had to confirm all major takeovers, before being implemented. "There was really no alternative for The Bay but to try and buy Simpsons because had that merger been 482 MERCHANT PRINCES completed, Canada's retail trade would forever have been dominated by Sears," recalled HBC Governor George Richardson. -The timing was not our own, but it was now or irrevocably never, even if it extended The Bay more than we would prudently have done had the circumstances not been forced on us." McGiverin and Peter Wood were enthusiastic, but some of the acquisition team, notably lain Ronald and Doug Mahaffy, as well as his top merchant, Evan Church, were opposed, pointing out that most of the earnings increases of Simpsons were attributable to SimpsonsSears, while Simpsons itself had grown weary, topheavy and unprofitable.* Martin Jacomb, a British director, strongly opposed the idea of further borrowing and the overheated expansion, although he supported the proposed takeover. Richardson phoned Russ Harrison, chairman of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, and instantly secured a standby credit line of $70 million.t Burton had initiated the merger talks with Sears to protect himself and his family against a takeover. Watching the HBCs rampaging growth, he realized that his store might be the next target. It was. At eight o'clock on the cloudy morning of November 17, the *Joe Segal, who was opposed to the acquisition of Simpsons and whose position in the HBC would be diluted by the shares issued under the takeover, resigned from the HBC board shortly after the deal's completion. tAii influential factor was a McLeod Young Weir report by Ray Bettridge claiming that Simpsons shares were severely undervalued, with the stock market assessing the firm as being worth $241 million ($5.13 a share) while the real value of the Simpsons-Sears stock alone held by Simpsons was $248 million-and that took no account of the department store's impressive facilities and valuable real estate. MCGIVERIN'S RUN 483 telephone rang at Limestone Hall, the four-hundredacre farm that was the Burtons' main residence, near Milton, Ontario. The Simpsons chairman and his wife, the broadcaster Betty Kennedy, were about to leave for Florida. "Allan," said McGiverin, "this is Don. We're going to be making an announcement this morning, and I wanted to speak to you first. Our board has authorized The Bav to make an offer for your company. The specific ierms will be rnade available on Monday." Good soldier that he was, Burton pressed his clipped white moustache into the mouthpiece, and calmlv replied, "Thanks for letting me know." McGiverin had actually been trying to get through to Burton for the past ten hours. He couldn't trust anyone else to place the call and seemed unable to find the number or to dial the right combination of digits when he finally got it. "What do you do?" Burton later complained to a friend. "A guy calls you up at eight in the morning and says he's going to take you over.... It screwed up the whole day." Thoughts of Florida forgotten, Burton rushed downtown to confer with what he had already named his "war cabinet," which included lawyer Jim Tory, and [an Sinclair, Tom Bell and several other top company directors. He reached Earle McLaughlin just as the Royal Bank chairman was boarding his Jet for Bermuda and asked him for a $500-million credit line. McLaughlin's reply was brisk and to the point: "Canadian or American?" Coming from the Company that had said nothing public for most of three hundred vears, McGiverin's tactics were refreshing. He announced the details of The Bay's $3 1 0-million offer for Simpsons (at $8.2 7 a share, 2 7 percent over market price) on CTVs Canada AM and made himself constantly available to the media, which quickly became caught up in the "Store Wars" battle for 484 MERCHANT PRINCES control.* Each side issued earnings figures, equity and growth potentials, and lobbied hard in Ottawa to influence the Foreign Investment Review Agency. In an imaginative defensive move, on December 11 Simpsons declared a dividend payable December 14 consisting of its entire holdings of Simpsons-Sears. This was supposed to blow the HBC bid out of the water as it reduced the value of the Simpsons shares to less than one-third of the HBc bid of $8.27 (Simpsons shares hit a low of $2.3 5 in December 1978). But in their haste to pay out the dividend, the Simpsons group had violated stockexchange rules on notice of dividends and got themselves in trouble with the regulators. The Toronto Stock Exchange normally sets an ex-dividend date five days before payment, but Simpsons paid the dividend only three days after its declaration, which was clearly against the rules. Trading in Simpsons shares was suspended on December 14.t On the saine day, Trade and Commerce Ministerjack Horner announced the FIRA approval of the merger. McGiverin didn't miss a step, sweetening his offer (to *Three of Toronto's most prestigious law firms were engaged in the Store Wars battle, but with a twist. When Don McGiverin phoned Alex Maclntosh to line up Blake, Cassels for The Bay, he was sheepishly told that not expecting a Bay move, they had some months earlier agreed to represent Sears in its merger negotiations. So McGiverin recruited McCarthy & McCarthy-Peter Beattie for the corporate work and Donald Macdonald, a former Liberal cabinet minister and later High Commissioner to the United Mngdom, for government relations. Tory, Tory acted for Simpsons. t Burton wrote in his private diary that evening: "I no longer feel in charge because there are just too many legal manoeuvres going on from several directions at the same time. We must put our faith in Jim Tory and God.. ~ " MCGIVERIN'S RUN 485 $388 million by including the dividend as well as the Simpsons shares) and declaring lie was still going after Simpsons and to hell with Ottawa. Then, in the final hours of Sunday night, December 17, just before the hearings into the Simpsons irregularities by the Montreal and Toronto stock exchanges, Chicago torpedoed Colonel Burton. "In terms of an alternate merger proposal," Sirnpsons lawyer Jim Tory told a surprised group of reporters before the hearings started, "a disagreement with our American partners could not be resolved. It's a sad (lay for us." Burton, for once abandoning his code that the worse things are the more cheerful the commanding officer must look, could only gasp: "The toughest blow . . . a partnership of twenty-live years, out the window. . . ." He went home to Limestone Hall that night, walked among the pawing horses in his stables, watched the Canada geese bed down between the big stone house and the pond, and saw the moonlight glistening cold and blue on the icy fields. Then he went to bed but just lay there, wondering what had happened to the world of loyalty and civilized behaviour that had sustained him until now. What had happened was not simple to explain or understand. Certain conditions had been attached to the original deal, allowing Sears, Roebuck to back out. The main escape clause stated that if any third party accumu lated more than 10 percent of the merged company's stock, Sears could withdraw its approval for the merger. Burton and his family had started out owning less than 2 percent of Simpsons, and he had diluted his position by the dividend so it was entirel ' v likely that a financial institution such as Royal Trust could-even inadver tently-accumulate 10 percent and activate the escape clause. Without Sears reversing its conditions, the deal was not feasible, and Burton lacked the clout-or shares-to persuade Chicago. 486 MERCHANT PRINCES Burton and Tory did their best. The Simpsons chairman was on the phone almost constantly with Sears chairman Ed 'Felling, all but begging him to lift the I 0-percent restriction or at least give the issue a breather until after Christmas, when the Simpsons chairman could formulate fresh defence strategies. Tory meanwhile had been calling Jack Kincannon, known in the company as "a professional son of a bitch," then Sears' chief financial officer. By early Monday morning, Tory was tracking Kincannon and several other Chicago executives on their car phones as they were driving to work, making desperate appeals to have "that damn provision" waived. "We couldn't get them to move," he recalled. "We kept postponing the hearing to ten and then eleven o'clock, but at the end f told them, 'Okay, look, if you're not going to support its, we're walking away from the hearing, and we'll take what we get."' What Simpsons got was the dubious privilege of running up the white flag and surrendering to Don McGiverin. Sears insiders gave a slightly different version of this dramatic exchange, pointing out that they had used the 10-percent provision as a handy escape clause because they lacked confidence in Burton, in Canada and in the idea of trying to run downtown department stores. They were angry that under the agreement Simpsons reached with the FIRA, their voice in Canadian retailing would have been considerably diminished. Just as in 1968, they were happy to have Simpsons' management do anything it wanted-providing Chicago had the final veto power. They had used The Bay's raid as an excuse to cut their links with Simpsons, convinced that a freestanding Sears operation in Canada meant less trouble and more profit. Allan Burton's life was never the same after that. "It's different," he wrote in his diary. "I've been my own boss MCGIVERIN'S RUN 487 for thirty years, roughly, and I think that once you're not in the public eye and not in a top position, there is a very subtle erosion of power that you didn't even dream you had.... I don't think wealth can buy happiness or peace of mind, or anything else. But having the means to produce situations of happiness for yourself and other people is a very satisfying thing. I can conceive being happy within a cabin. I don't need all this. I'd like to have a nice wife like Betty; and I'd like to have a good horse, and a few things . . ." Just before Chi istmas, 1978, the final handover was completed. By the end of that year, Donald McGiverin had achieved his goal. The Hudson's Bay Company had become Canada's pre-eminent retailer. Now he could enjoy his new corporate stature, consolidate things, get back to walking around the floors of his stores chatting up the staff, have some fun. Little did he suspect that the Company he had built into the country's retailing giant was about to fall under the tight-fisted control of a most unexpected outsider-Lord Thomson of Fleet. PART IV FAREWELL TO GLORY CHAPTER17 YOUNG KEN The worlds eighth-richest individual ... Tbanison acts and looks its ifte were a s-Inall-town bank-teller living near tbe poverty line. IIF SHAMBLES THROUGH LIFF, his limb movements a study in xA,kwardness, doing none of the things one would expect a man of his means and opportunities to venture and enjoy. Deferential to the point of absur- dity-and stingy to a point far beyond that-Ken Thomson has turned self-effacement into an art form. His astonishing communications empire swirls about him, throwing off $4.4 million a week into his personal dividend account, employing 105,000 on four continents, and threatening to become the world's largest media company. It already ranks fourth-after Gerinany's Bertelsmann, Capital Cities ABC and Time Warner, Thomson publishes 175 newspapers (with a dailv circulation of 4.5 million)- -more than any other firm-and sells an incredible 40,000 other editorial products, including 145 magazines, 188 weeklies, and assorted books, directories, newsletters and softwear packages. There's no corporate kingdom quite like it anywhere. Besides the Hudson's Bay Company and his publishing holdings, Thoinson owns a real-estate arm (Markborough, with assets of $2.3 billion) and an overseas travel subsidiary that accounts for 40 percent of England's package toLir business and owns five hundred Lunn Poly "holiday shops." He also is sole proprietor of Britannia Airways, the United Kingdom's second-largest airline, 491 492 FAREWELL TO GLORY which in 1990 carricol six million passengers aboard fortv, jets. (Sixteen more are on order.) Because the Thonison companies' debt ratios are unusually low and their credit lines are virtually unlimited, Ken is in the enviable position of being able to buy any $5-billion competitor. That would overnight make him the world's media king. By nud-1991, Thomson's personal equity holdings were worth $7.7 billion. The July 22, 1991, issue of Forbes, which annuall~ tallies the wealthy, ranked him as the world's eighth-richest individual. The listing placed Thomson well ahead of Gerald Grosvenor, sixth Duke of Westminster, who is Englands richest man, and such celebrated moneybags as Italy's Giovanni Agnelli, Hong Kong's Li Ka-shing, the Gettys, the Rothschilds and the Bronfinans. f le is also the richest Canadian. Unlike these and other worldly figures who qualif~-as rich and famous--and behave as if they wereThomson acts and looks as If he were a small-town bank-teller living near the poverty line. He spends vir- tually no money on himself and divulges no public clues to ~is private thoughts or personal motivations. Compulsively shy of personal publicity and seldom interviewed ~xcept about his art (and for this book), he would much prefer to be invisible, and he in fact almost is. "The lowest profile," he contends, "is the very best to have." Although he seems scarcely aware of it, Thomson is caught in a time warp between the high-tech world of his communications conglomerate and the unbending Baptist ethic of rural Ontario where he simmered up. "We were raised on the principle that you kept yourself to yourself and that only the members of your close family were your true friends," recalls his niece Sherry Brydson, who grew up with Ken. "You played it close to YOUNG KEN 493 your chest and believed that only with family could you let your hair down. Ken has taken it a step further. He's got to the point where he doesn't let his hair down with anybody." Thomson, even in his dealings with longtime business colleagues, demonstrates that air of impenetrable reserve. It is entirely in character that his office, on the top floor of the Thomson Building at the corner of Queen and Bay streets in downtown Toronto, has a vertical moat. Public elevators run to the twenty-fourth floor, but only pre-screened and thoroughly vouched-for visitors are allowed into the private elevator that ascends to the twenty-fifth level, shared by Ken Thomson and John Tory, his chief corporate strategist. Thomson's office houses part of his art collection, including most of the 204 canvases b~ the Dutch-Canadian artist Cornelius Krieghoff that he owns-hanging there, looking about as comfortable as nuns in a discoth~que. G athering Krieghoffs is Ken Thomson's most visible dedication, but his real cultural hero is a somewhat less exalted artist in a very different discipline: Clarence Eugene "flank" Snow, the Nova Scotia-born country singer. Thomson regularly visits flank at the G rand Ole Opry in Nashville, owns all his records, has been to Snow's house in 'rennessee, and once presented him with a gold Hamilton pocket-watch that had been a family heirloom. Ken Thomsons psyche is so difficult to penetrate because he behaves like an accomplished actor, able to detach himself from whatever crisis might be occupying his mind. Occasionally, very occasionally, a show of passion will flicker across his shuttered face, only to be withdrawn quickly, like a turtle's head back into its protective shell. Exceptions to his customary reticence come unexpectedly. 494 FAREWELL TO GLORY Ken Thomson and his hero Hank Snow (centre) A FEW SEASONS AGO, Posy Chisholm, a sophisticated and vivacious Toronto socialite who looks smashing in hats, has a profoundly developed sense of the absurd and possesses a remarkable memory, found herself at Heathrow, about to board British Airways Flight 93 to Toronto. When she spotted Ken, the two acquaintances decided to travel together, though Chisholm had to trade down a class, wondering why Thomson was too cheap to travel in style and comfort. "You know why I'm flying horne?" Thomson asked, when they were settled in their narrow seats. "No, I don't, not really," Posy replied. "To give Gonzo his evening meal," the press lord matter-of-factly explained. "I've been away from my dog for five days now, and I miss him so terribly. We were half an hour late leaving London, and I'm really nervous they might give him dinner without me." "Oh, Ken," Chisholm tried to reassure her agitated companion, "they'll make up time across the ocean." YOUNG KEN 495 "Gonzo is crazy in many ways, but very, very lovable," Thomson went on as Posy, crammed into steerage beside the fretting billionaire, began looking longingly down at the heaving Atlantic. "Gonzo is the sweetest (log. He's everybody's pal, especially mine. He's a Wheaton terrier, the colour of wheat, off-white. Actually, he's got a little apricot." "How about some champagne, Ken? No? Oh well... " "Gonzo leads a good life. I plan my trips abroad around him. I never go to annual meetings unless I've got him covered. I couldn't put him in a kennel; he's a member of the family. He seems to have an understanding of what's happening all the time. We communicate. We know what the other is thinking. We love each other." "I suppose you take him walking. . "Oh, I take him out all the time. Early in the morning, late at night, and every time I can in between. If I can't get home for lunch, my man goes up and walks him. He might be there right this minute. Gonzo's got to have his exercise." "Doesn't he have a garden?" asked Posy, grasping for relevance. "He doesn't want to stay out all day. Gonzo's a people dog. He likes walking in the park and then he wants to come back inside." It was going to be a long flight. Chisholm remembered a friend's joking that if she was ever reincarnated, she wanted to come back as Ken Thomson's dog. So Posy told him, hoping the idea might amuse the single-minded tycoon. "Well, she'd be well looked after," was the serious reply. "I tell you, Gonzo's a big part of my life. I know that sounds awfully funny. But it's a fact. I think of him all the time. I look after him like a baby." 496 FAREWELL TO GLORY "What about your wife-does Marilyn love Gonzo too?" "One time, I was looking at Gonzo, and I said to Marilyn, 'Geez, he wants something.' "She said, 'We all want something.' "'Yes, but he can't go to the refrigerator and open the door. Gonzo can't tell you he's got a pain in his tummy. We've got to look after him, anticipate everything he wants. It might be a bit of food he needs, maybe to go out or just a show of affection."' At this point Thomson leaned forward to emphasize the significance of what he was about to reveal. "I tried to figure what Gonzo was really after," he confided. "It's a game we play." "So, what did Gonzo end up wanting?" Posy Chisholm half-heartedly inquired-purposefully fumbling under her seat, hoping that was where they kept the parachutes. "A bikkie! " exclaimed the world's eighth-richest man. "That's what Gonzo wanted-a bikkie!" There followed a lengthy silence. Thomson seemed satisfied there was little point trying to top that remarkable bit of canine mind-reading. About half an hour out of Toronto, he started to get restless because the 747 had been unable to make up the original delay and was not going to arrive at 1735, as scheduled. He put on his coat and complained so bitterly he might miss getting home in time for his dog's feeding that Chisholm suggested she take his luggage through customs and drop it off at his house-while he dashed through the terminal, bound for Gonzo. KEN THOMSON SIGHTINGS ARE LIKETHAT. If he knows and trusts the person he's with, he will talk about his dog or his art collection, but that's it. He leaves few contrails. YOUNG KEN 497 "The smartest thing those who have more than anybody else can do is not to flaunt it," he says. "It's resented and it's in terribly bad iaste. It shows a poor sense of prioritv. "Everybody has their own ways of doing things," ~e allows. "It's all a matter of temperament. A lot of people who make money fast spend it fast. It's very difficult to live a simple life and love your dog as much as I do. I spend as much time as I can with my family, walking Gonzo, watching a fair bit of television. I like to get in my car and fill it up with gas. So if you add up running the business with all the personal things I do, there's not an awful lot of time and energy left after that. I am as happy as can be." Walking your dog and filling your car with gas may well be the path to eternal happiness, but those who know Thomson best insist that he is not as content as he claims. "He's not a man doing his choice of things," insists his niece. "If he had two or three brothers, he would never have chosen-or been chosen-to run the family empire. I get the impression of someone doing his duty. He is intensely loyal and was very attached to his father, so when my grandfather said, 'I'm going to start a dynasty and you're going to carry it on,' Ken said, 'Right.' It didn't really matter that he might have preferred to be the curator of an art museum-and now he's training his son David to take over, just as his father wished. Ile's doing it with good will but not much )oyEvery morning when he wakes up he must say to himself, 'I'm unhappy being a businessman, but wait a ininute, it's bringing me all this other stuff like my art collection that I couldn't otherwise have-so its a trade-off.' " Everything Ken Thomson says and does is to underline that he's fundamentally decent, that he would be quite happy to have his epitaph read: "What a Nice Guy." lie is a nice guy, but he is much more than that-and despite his pose as the ultimate innocente, his 498 FAREWELL TO GLORY self-assurance can be devastating. For instance, he readily conceded in early 1980 that "there is a limit to how many papers one man, or company, should own," insisting that his own firm had yet to grow to such "ludicrous" extremes. "We will know ourselves if and when we do," he reassured the dubious commissioners on the 1980 Royal Commission on Newspapers. Thomson then controlled one of the largest concentrations of press ownership in any democratic country. The best evidence of Ken Thomson's success in perpetuating his anonymity is that most Canadians, even fairly sophisticated businessmen, still regard him as the youthful and untried inheritor of the publishing empire built up by his father, Roy Thomson. They dismiss the current press lord as "Young Ken," an immature figurehead whose main accomplishment was to be his father's only son. "Young Ken" is in fact sixty-nine years old. "I'm not young any more, but I don't really mind being called 'Young Ken,"' says he. "My dad was such an unusual individual that nobody can expect to be anywhere near a carbon copy of him. He was one of a kind. He channelled his ambition in a single direction and everything emanated from that. Now it's a different world we live in." Ken has force-fed his father's business empire from annual revenues of $725 million in 1976, when he took over, to $11.5 billion a decade and a half later. The total equity value of the companies he controls has sky-rocketed from less than $1 billion to more than $11 billion, exponentially surpassing Roy Thomson's impressive rate of annual growth. In 1989, following sale of the Thomson Group's North Sea oil holdings for $670 million, its publishing and travel assets were combined into an umbrella YOUNG KEN 499 organization (the Thomson Corporation). Ken uncharacteristically boasted that it would allow him to set his sights on any target. "I can't imagine any publishing company anywhere in the world that would be beyond our ability to acquire," he gloated. KEN THOMSON LEADS A DOUBLE LIFE, and enjoys neither. In England--and most of non-North America where titles still mean something-he is Baron Thomson of Fleet of Northbridge in the City of Edinburgh, the peerage bestowed on his father on January 1, 1964, two days before he lost his Canadian citizenship for accepting a British title. "I regret giving up C anadian citizenship," Roy Thomson said at the time, "but I had no choice. I didn't give it up. They took it away from me. They gave me the same reward you give a traitor. If I had betrayed iny countrv, that's the reward I would get-taking away my citizenship. Canada should allow titles. If you get a title from the Pope, there's no trouble accepting that." During their visits to England, Lord and Ladv Thomson live in a four-bedroom flat (purchased for E90,000 in 1967) in Kensington Palace Gardens, off *Roy Thomson turned down Prime Ministerjohn Diefenbaker's 1959 offer to appoint him Governor General of Canada. "It wouldn't have suited me verv well because I'm too much of an extrovert for that," ROY declared at the time. "I can't conceal mN, feelings very easily. I talk too much, everybody says, but I talked myself into more deals than I ever tAked myself out of, so I'm still ahead of the game. At any rate, it worked out for the best. Since then, I've got a hereditary peerage. And I'm a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire, that's a GBE, which is the highest degree of the Order of the British Empire. That entitles you to be 'Sir.' If I hadn't got a peerage I'd be Sir Roy, so I'm right at the top of the heap." 500 FAREWELL TO GLORY Bayswater Road.* A secluded street with extra police protection, this is where many of the ambassadors to the Court of St. James's have their residences. While abroad, the introverted Ken and Marilyn Thomson of Toronto are transformed into the introverted Lord and Lady Thomson of Fleet, using their titles, with two sets of clothing and accessories as well as stationery and visiting cards. "I lead a dual life and I'm getting away with it," Thomson declares. "It actually works." One place it doesn't work is in the House of Lords. Ken has never taken up his father's seat in Westminster's august Upper Chamber, nor does he intend to. The older Thomson glowed with pride the day he received his title. After celebrating by queuing up at Burberrys for a cashmere coat reduced from Y,75 to Y,40, he had his official coat of armst carved on his office door, and when one elderly London dowager persisted in calling him "Mr Thomson," he barked, "Madam, I've paid enough for this goddamn title, you might have the good grace to use it."t Having been elevated to the House of Lords, Thomson seldom attended its sessions and didn't particularly enjoy it when he did. "I've made a lot of money, but I'm not the brightest guy in the world, by a hell of a long ways," he once commented. "I've found that out since I've been in the House of Lords. About *During the Second World War the flat was used for interrogating high-ranking Nazi officers. t It features the bizarre image of a beaver blowing an Alpine horn under the inotto, "Never a Backward Step." tThe reason for the granting of a tide is never promulgated, but in Thomson's case it was thought to have been mainly for his initiative in donatingY5 million to establish a foundation to train Third World journalists. It is still active and recently helped revive the New Cbina Daily. YOUNG KEN 501 90% of the things they discuss there, I'm a complete ignoramus about. I've got a one-track mind, but I bloody well know my own business." "For Dad, the title symbolized what he had achieved from nothing, and he made me promise I wouldn't give it up," Ken recalls. "He told me he'd like to see me carry it on because he rightly suspected I was the type of person who might not want to. I remember telling him, 'Well, Dad, I think you're a little naughty to ask me to do that. Because everybody should have the right to make his own decisions in this world. But after what you've done for me, if you really want me to, I'll make you that promise.' Now, I didn't promise him I'd use the title in Canada or that I'd take up my seat in the House of Lords. So now I'm happy to have it both ways." Another of the inheritances from his father was the attitude that while making money was holy, spending it was evil. The Thoinson style of penny-pinching-father and son-goes well beyond sensible parsimony. "Nobody has any sympathy for a rich man except somebody thats richer again," Roy once ruminated. "I mean, hell, I eat three meals a day and I shouldn't. I should probably eat two. And I only have so many suits of clothes, and I'm not very particular about my dress anyway, and I can't spend, oh, not a small fraction of what I make, so what the hell am I doing? I'm not doing it for money. It's a game. But I enjoy myself I love work. I like to be successful. I I ike to look at another paper and think, Jesus, if only that was mine. Let's have a look at the balance sheet." Roy Thomson's approach to spending was best summed up in the marathon bargaining sessions he staged when he was renting space for his Canadian head office at 425 University Avenue in downtown Toronto. The landlord, a promoter who had a Scrooge-like reputation of his own to uphold, despaired of reaching any 502 FAREWELL TO GLORY Ist Lord Tbomson of Fleet reasonable rental agreement because Thomson's offer was so far below rates charged for comparable space elsewhere. When the press lord finally wore him down, the building's owner gasped in reluctant admiration, "Mr Thomson, you really are cheap!" To which an indignant Roy Thomson responded, "I'm not cheap! You're cheap! I'm cheap cheap!" The photographs of the original Lord Thomson weighing his baggage so he wouldn't have to pay extra on his economy flights across the Atlantic, going to work on London's underground, or lining up for cafeteria lunches created a comic mask that somehow took the hard edge off his business deals. His outrigger spectacles, with lenses as thick as Coke-bottle bottoms, magnified his glinting blue eyes as he peered at the world with Mister Magoo-like good humour, hiding his touch of icy cunning. Thomson carefully cultivated the image of himself YOUNG KEN 503 as the living embodiment of the profit motive on the hoof Seated next to Princess Margaret at a fashion show, he spotted a lam6 gown on one of the models. "My favorite color," he told the Princess. "Gold!" During Thomson's much-publicized 1963 encounter with Nikita Khrushchev, the Russian dictator teasingly asked what use his money was to him. "You can't take it with you," said Khrushchev. "Then I'm not going," shot back a determined Thomson. Ken Thomson's scrimping habits are equally mingy, if less well known. Although he is a member of six of Toronto's most exclusive clubs-the York, Toronto, National, York Downs, Granite and Toronto Hunt-he prefers to have lunch by himself at a downtown yogurt bar, if he's not home walking Gonzo, that is.* He does most of his shopping on department-store bargain days. Murray Turner, a former HBC executive who knows Thomson slightly, was shopping in the Loblaws store at Moore and Bayview when he heard a shout, "Murray! Murray!" and saw Thomson beckoning to him. As he reached the side of the world's eighth-richest man, it was obvious that Thomson could hardly contain himself "Lookit," he exclaimed, "lookit this. They have hamburger buns on special today. Only $1.89! You must get some." Turner looked in disbelief at Thomson's shopping cart, and sure enough, there were six packages of buns, presumably for freezing against a rainy day. "I'd walk a block to save a dime at a discount store," Thomson readily admits. On the same day he spent $641 million on a corporate takeover, Thomson met George Cohon, the Canadian head of McDonald's, and asked him for a toy Ronald McDonald wristwatch. *He occasionally frequents fancier restaurants but takes the uneaten portions home in a Gonzo-bag. 504 FAREWELL TO GLORY Cohon sent him one of the free timepieces (used mainly for internal promotions), but the verv next day Thomson's secretary was on the phone claiming the watch had gained four minutes over the past twenty-four hours and asking where His Lordship could get it fixed. Cohon ordered another watch sent to him, but the messenger had strict orders to bring back the original gift. The press lord appears to dress well (his shoes are from Wildsmiths on London's swank Duke Street), but his suits are made for him by a cut-rate tailor in Toronto's Chinatown at $200 apiece from the discounted ends of bolts he picks up during his Journeys to Britain. He lives in a twenty-three-roorn mansion behind a set of handsome gates at the top of Rosedale's Castle Frank Road, built in 1926 by Salada Tea Company president Gerald Larkin. A prime example of Ontario Georgian-style architecture, the dwelling is run down, its curtains left over from its first owner. The Thomsons (Marilyn's parents live with them in a coach-house) usually eat in the kitchen to save electricity, and the family is unable to retain housekeepers because of the low pay. Even the help's food is rationed. Most cookies are kept in a box with the Thomson name lettered on it. A strict allocation of two of Mr Christie's best is placed on a separate plate to feed the rotating parade of disillusioned cleaning women.* Thomson owns a Mercedes 300-E but usually drives his ancient Oldsmobile ("it clunks around but it's the car that Gonzo prefers") and once purchased a red Porsche *Besides the London flat, the only other Thomson residence is in Barbados, where he ou ns the Southern Palms Hotel. To maximize profits, Ken and Marilyn stay in a third-floor walk-up apartment whenever thev visit instead of occupying one of the more luxurious main-floor suites. Toronto travel impresario Sam Blyth has occasionally booked them aboard West Indies cruises on a travel agents discount. YOUNG KEN 505 turbo. ("Honestly, not one of my more practical expenditures. I was thrilled at first but I hardly use it-I've probably driven not more than twenty-five miles in it this summer." The car is for sale.) The Thomsons never entertain and seldom go out. When they do, preparations include discreet calls to find out precisely what other guests have been invited, whether anyone will be smoking or drinking, how soon they might comfortably leave, and so on. The world's eighth-richest man is one of the country's most reluctant philanthropists. When TorontoDominion Bank chairman Dick Thomson (no relation) and Fred Eaton, head of his family's department store chain, called on Thomson to solicit funds for the Toronto General Hospital, a favourite Establishment charity, they were warned by a mutual friend that the only way they would get any money was to pledge construction of a veterinary wing to treat Gonzo. They thought it was a joke, and came back almost empty-handed. There has been much argument among his headquarters staff over how much cash Ken Thomson actually spends per week. Some insiders claim it's twenty dollars; others insist it's at least forty. No one bids any higher. He has credit cards but seldom if ever uses them. "It's an idiosyncrasy," saysjohn'rory, his chief confidant. "It's just very difficult for Ken to put his hand in his pocket and spend money. Yet he's extremely kind and generous. When we're rushing to a meeting and we're late, if he sees a blind man, he'll stop, miss a couple of lights, and help him cross the street." Tory didn't need to add that the blind man gets no money. Thomson himself won't discuss his spending habits. "I agree with my father that you should use only a small portion of your money on yourself and that you have some kind of obligation to do something useful with the balance. 506 FAREWELL TO GLORY He thought the most beneficial thing you could do with money was to invest and reinvest it, to keep it growingand so do L" Ken's only excursion into philanthropy was his successful 1982 effort to have Toronto's premier concert hall, the magnificent structure designed by Arthur Erickson, named after his father. He gave $4.5 million to the project, the largest donation ever granted the performing arts in Canadian history. "Dad would have been thrilled," he says. "I'm so proud to hear it on the radio sometimes-Roy Thomson Hall, my dad's name being mentioned-or see it in the Globe and Star. He was born on Monteith Street and loved Toronto. lie even tried to use Lord Thomson of Toronto as his title, but the government wouldn't let him." Still, a cultural- especially musical-edifice hardly seemed an appropriate monument. "I could do without culture," Roy Thomson once confided. "I haven't got any, particularly. And I could do without art. I can do without the theatre. I can do without all these things.... Some people love culture. They live on it. They appreciate it and I rather envy them in a way. But, not for me. My favorite music is about the level of Gigi. I like tunes like the 'Blue Danube' waltz, 'Sailing Down the River,' and South Pacific." The naming of Roy Thomson Hall caused a furore. Of the $39 million required to finance the building's construction, $26.5 million had been allocated by the federal, provincial and municipal governments; a further $12.5 million had been raised from corporate donors and individuals. The Thomson contribution was a welcome but hardly essential windfall to be used for future improvements, which to many minds did not warrant naming of the hall after Roy. Accountants quickly calculated that the magnificent gift would not cost Ken very much. The $4.5-million donation was divided into five annual instalments of $900,000, paid through a YOUNG KEN 507 Thomson subsidiary. As well as saving Thomson $450,000 a year in deductible taxes, the delayed instalments earned annual interest of more than half a million dollars at the high rates prevailing at that time, leaving the benefactor to scrape up only $2 million.* THE SAGA OF ROY HERBERT THOMSON, the Toronto barber's son who quit school at fourteen to become a five-dollar-a-week clerk and in 1931 ]eased a fifty-watt radio station in North Bay, Ontario, and another later at Timmins-so he could sell the radios he was lugging along country roads-is one of the sustaining legends of Canadian capitalism. Less well known is the way the hardships of the Great Depression permanently imprinted themselves on generations of the Thomson clan. "I'm still horrified by people who don't make soup stock out of meat scraps," says Ken's niece Sherry, who spent her youth in the communal Thomson home at Port Credit, just west of Toronto. "And if you were making a custard with three egg yolks, you could have knocked me over with a feather the first time I saw a woman throw the egg whites down the drain. That just wouldn't occur to me; the whites are tomorrow's dessert. You used everything and got into the rhythm of making your own jam and freezing your vegetables." The Port Credit household, which for a time included not only Ken but also his sisters, Irma (Sherry's mother) and Phyllis Audrey, and most of their children, was run according to stern, puritanical precepts. "Granddad loved us very much," Sherry recalls, "but the affection was always very gruff. It was a staunch, *That's not all. Wien they attend Roy Thomson Hall concerts, Ken and Marilyn regularly phone down for free house seats- and get them. 508 FAREWELL TO GLORY didn't-come-from-much kind of family, so that signs of affection came out almost by accident, as asides." It was a stern upbringing. She remembers her mother being locked out by Roy, the family patriarch, if she ventured home after midnight. This was not when Irma was a teenager but well into her thirties, divorced, with a nineyear-old daughter, and dating again. Luckily the family had German shepherds and a dog porthole had been cut into the sunroom door. Irma's dating partners still recall having to push her, 1940s dirndl and all, through the dog door after their goodnights. "They could only do that in the summer," according to Sherry, "because in other seasons, the ground got too wet. When I became a teenager I was locked out by my mother in turn, and had to climb up the trellis." Young Ken had attended elementary school in North Bay, where he worked summers as a disc jockey in his father's radio station, CFCH. His main job was to play background noises meant to evoke the crowd sounds and clinking glasses of a ballroom, while big-band dance numbers were on the air, but he also fell in love with the music of Hank Snow and dreamed someday of actually meeting him. When the family moved to Toronto, young Ken was enrolled in Upper Canada College. After an unsuccessful year at the University of Toronto, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force but was never promoted beyond Leading Aircraftman, the equivalent of an army lance-corporal, spending most of his time as an editorial assistant on Wings Abroad, a propaganda weekly. He took his discharge in London and spent two years at Cambridge, though the university had no discernible effect on him. After spending a year on the editorial staff of his fathers Timmins Dai~y Press, he moved back to Southern Ontario where Roy Thomson had acquired the Galt Evening Reporter as one of four dailies he picked up in 1944. His five-year apprenticeship there YOUNG KEN 509 was an important formative influence, as were the weekends he spent at the Port Credit house. Roy Thomson had moved to Scotland in 1954 but returned to the family homestead in summer and at Christmas. The elder Thomson held court while watching the TV set in front of him, listening to the radio beside him, petting the Scottie dog at his feet, eating fruit with a little paring knife, all the while reading a murder mystery. Ken loved frightening his nieces and nephews, especially when they slept in garden tents during the summer. "He'd put a sheet over his head and ghost us," Sherry recalled. "Or he'd hide behind a bush and make fake owl noises. But we always knew it was him and we'd yell, 'Oh Kenny, stop it!' He was very much the tease." By the late 1950s, Roy Thomson had not only acquired the prestigious Scotsman but had also won control, in what was the world's first reverse takeover bid, of the huge Kemsley chain that included London's influen- tial Sunda Times.* Roy's lucky streak broke in 1967, when he acquired The Times, Britain's great journal of record.t The Times may not have lost its lustre under Thomson, but it lost him bags of money. Thomson had by this time become a fixture among British press lords. He could always be depended upon to say something mildly outrageous and to pose for yet one more photograph showing off his skinflint habits. "They say business is the law of the jungle," was a *At about that time his daughter Irma had to canvass funds from neighbours to get the roof of the Thomson house fixed because Roy refused to spend the money. tThe extent of The Times' authority was best summed up in a Punch cartoon, depicting a secretary waWng into a British company president's office to announce: "Sir, the gentleman from The Tmes and the press are here." 510 FAREWELL TO GLORY typical sally. I think it's the law of life. If you want to prosper, you've gotto be ambitious.... You've got to be ready to sacrifice leisure and pleasure, and you've got to plan ahead. I was forty years old before I had any money at all. But these things don't happen overnight. Now how many people are there that will wait that long to be successful, and work all the time? Not very many. Maybe they're right. Maybe I'm a bloody fool. But I don't think I am." American tycoons J. Paul Getty and Armand Hammer approached Thomson in 1973, offering a 2 0-percent share in the] r Occidental consortium prepar- ing to drill in the North Sea where Phillips Petroleum had already found valuable indications. Roy bet his family's (as opposed to his company's) fortune on the play, though oil was then worth only $3.60 a barrel. When Occidental struck the giant Piper field and later the Claymore-and prices climbed to $14 a barrelThomson almost overnight earned $500 million. By 1976, Roy Thomson was in his eighty-second year and not at all well. Ken, who by then had married a graceful model named Nora Marilyn Lavis, had been brought across the Atlantic to assist the old man.* "Most people would say, 'I wouldn't want to do what you've done, even for your success,"' Roy reminisced in one of his last interviews. "They'd say, 'You've missed a lot out of life and success hasn't made it all worthwhile.' But it *Theirs is a wonderful marriage. But Ken seems to be deferential at home as well as the office. In an impromptu 1988 telephone exchange with a reporter from the Financial Post, Thomson admitted that he saved barbers' bills by having his wife cut his hair, but made the transaction sound curiously self-demeaning. "My wife made me have it cut commercially lately," he admit- ted, "but if I behave myself, she'll do it for me. I'd just as soon have her cut my hair. Nobodv does it as nicely as Marilyn. The cost is for me to be nice to her for a few days." YOUNG KEN 511 has to me. It's just a matter of ambition and determination, you keep plugging away. I learn more front my failtires than I learn from my successes, because I learn bloody well not to do them again. Nothing has ever happened to me in my I ife that hasn't been for the best, now I accept death. I lost my wife. I lost a daughter, but those things, I mean, you can't measure them in terms of happiness or success or failure. I'm a very imperfect individtial, and I've done a lot of things I shouldn't have done, but I honestly am not a person who caused anybody any suffering if I could help it." Henry Grunfeld, former chairman of S.G. Warburg, the London merchant bankers who had helped finance Thomson, remembered his last conversation with Roy in the bank's Terrace Room at its Gresham Street headquarters. "It was about three weeks before his death and we both knew it was the last time we would meet. He told me he was worth about $750 million, or whatever it was, and complained bitterly how much he wished he could have made a billion. 'Why, haven't you got enough, Roy?'I remember asking, especially since he was so obviously very ill. He looked surprised, as if he had never considered the question, and shrugged, 'Henry, it's just for the flin of it . . .' It was pathetic." Thomson died on August 7, 1976, and Ken was suddenly in charge. Ills father had passed away both too soon, because the younger Thomson was not ready to take over, and too late-because Ken was by this time fifty-three years old and had spent most of his adult life following his father, a tactful step behind like a commercial version of Prince Philip. Inheriting a father's business is difficult; succeeding an individual as powerful and articulate as Roy Thomson-recognized as a folk hero of capitalism--was impossible. Ken tried valiantly to turn himself into an extrovert but soon conceded that it was a mission impossible. "The nice thing about my 512 FAREWELL TO GLORY dad was that he was so unusual. No one in his right mind could expect me to be the same. I'd be happy to go unnoticed. I've tried to be a good, sound businessman in my quiet way, but I can't say I've been a slave to business. I've tried to strike more of a balance between my personal and business lives." His father's friend and adviser, Sidney E Chapman, summed up the situation more succinctly: "When you live in the shadow of a legend, you don't go flashing mirrors." Ken's first major decision was to cut family ties with The Sunday Times and The Times, where union problems had forced suspension of publication for eleven months. During their stewardship the Thomsons, father and son, had poured.V, 100 million into the properties without any significant return. Their loyalty to those great institutions without any apparent fiscal controls was totally out of character. Thomson sold the two papers for the value of the land and buildings to Rupert Murdoch, and gradually moved his businesses back to Canada. The company owned forty-three daily and eleven weekly Canadian newspapers at the time. They ranged geographically from the Nanaimo Daily Free Press on Vancouver Island to the Evening Telegram in St John's, Newfoundland. What they had in common, apart from ownership, was a blandness so pervasive that no selfrespecting fish could bear being wrapped in one of their pages. "Disliking Ken Thomson, let alone detesting him, is wholly impossible," confessed Richard Gwyn, a leading Canadian commentator who once worked for him. "He radiates niceness from every pore, down to the holes in the soles of his shoes. He's self-effacing, shy, unpretentious, soft-spoken. He peppers his conversations with engaging archaisms, like 'golly' and 'gee whiz.' But then you stop feeling sympathetic, because you realize that his innocence is just a synonym for timidity. And you realize at the same instant that the YOUNG KEN 5 13 reason Thomson newspapers are bland is that they are led by the bland." The Thomson operational code had been set down bV Roy but it didn't initially change much under Ken. B oth Thomsons regarded editors as expendable eccentrics, and Clifford Pilkey, then president of the Ontario Federation of Labour, once called their company "a vicious organization, certainly not compatible with what I describe as decent, honourable labour relations." Reporters did not receive free copies of their own newspapers, and earnest bargaining went on to deprive delivery kids of half a cent in their meagre take-home pay. Most positions had fixed salary limits, so that anyone performing really well would inevitably work himself or herself out of a job. In pre-computer days, Thomson papers sold their used page mats to farmers as chicken-coop insulation and Canadian Press printers were adjusted from triple to double spacing to save paper. Each newsroom telephone had a pencil tied to it, so there would be no wasteful stubs floating around. "God help us if they ever realize there are two sides to a piece of toilet paper," one publisher was heard to whisper at a management cost-cutting meeting. In a thesis he wrote for the Carleton School of Journalism, Klaus Pohle, the former managing editor of the Lethbridge Herald, documented the Thomsonization of his former paper and coined the name for a sadly relevant and increasingly frequent process. In January 1980, Thomson had used some of his North Sea oil proceeds to purchase, for $130 million, a major Canadian newspaper chain, FP Publications Limited, but that projected him into new and unfamiliar ter- ritory. FP had fielded an impressive Ottawa news bureau under the inspired direction of Kevin Doyle (later the editor of Maclean'V) that included such stars of Canadian 514 FAREWELL TO GLORY journalism as Allan Fotheringham, Walter Stewart and Doug Small. The bureau regularly beat the Parliamentary Press Gallery to the news, but it didn't fit in with Thomson's usual barebones operation. When FPs Edmonton bureau chief, Keith Woolhouse, who was working out of his one-bedroom apartment, asked for a wastebasket, that was enough to trigger the costefficiency instincts of Thomson's executive vice-president, Brian Slaight. Doyle tried to defuse the situation by offering to send out an extra wastebasket from the Ottawa office. "Is it excess to the Ottawa bureau?" Slaight, ever the champion of independent editorial control, sternly demanded. Doyle, about to break the news of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's resignation, calmly replied, "Well, if you mean, do we need it, no, we don't." At last, a triumph for head office. Slaight could barely contain himself "We have a truck that goes from Ottawa to Toronto to Winnipeg, then on to Edmonton. If we put the wastebasket on the truck, it will hardly take up any room, and won't cost us a cent!" So the wastebasket journeyed jauntily across the country, and it took only a week and a half to reach its destination. But the Edmonton Bureau's troubles were far from over. Woolhouse wanted to rent an office and needed furniture. Slaight vetoed the initial $1,600 estimate but later approved a bid of $1,100 from a local repossession centre. That didn't save Woolhouse. He permanently blotted his copy book by purchasing his pens and paper clips on the open market instead of from the repossession house. The Edmonton bureau was soon closed, as was the entire FP news operation. The FP purchase had also thrown the Thomson organization into the unusual position of having to operate newspapers against local competition, especially in YOUNG KEN 515 Ottawa, where its Journal was up against the Southamowned Citizen; in Winnipeg, where its Free Press was head to head with Southams Tribune; and in Vancouver, where its Sun had to compete with Southam's Province. That ran strictly against Thomson's publishing philosophy, which perpetuated his father's dictum that what's important "isn't the circulation of one's own newspaper, it's the circulation of the opposition's. Even second-largest is no good. Only the largest is worth buying." The dilemma was neatlv resolved on August 2 7, 1980, when Southam's closed tl~e Winnipeg Tribune while Thomson shut the Ottawa Yournal-th rowing eight hundred employees on the street-and Southam's bought out Thomson's inter- est in the Hancouver Sun. The Ottawa move was particularly puzzling because the journal's circulation had climbed 25 percent in the previous six months and its advertising linage was the highest in eight years. But looking back on that Black Wednesday, Thomson wouldn't change a thing. "Nobody likes to see people lose their jobs," he says. "We didn't take any satisfaction in that. But the situation at the journal was hopeless and it was never going to get any better. We couldn't give the paper away for a dollar. We tried nine different buyers. Nobody else wanted it. Somebody had to draw the curtain. So when Gordon Fisher of Southam's told us he was going to close his paper in Winnipeg, he suggested we close thein both on the same day. I thought it was a good idea because I knew if he closed his paper first, people would come to me and ask, are you going to close yours, and I didn't want to lie to them. So when he said, 'Why don't we do it the same day?' I said, 'Oh boy, we'll be in real trouble-but let's do it."' Trouble came in the form of a Royal Commission, headed by Tom Kent, a former Economist and Winnipeg Free Press editor, who labelled the'rhomson publications as "small-town monopoly papers [that] are almost 5 16 FAREWELL TO GLORY without exception, a lacklustre aggregation of cashboxes" and suggested the organization be forced to sell its flagship publication in Toronto, the Globe and Mail, purchased in 1980. The recommendation was not followed up, but the hearings brought into the public consciousness Thomson's utilitarian code of editorial independence. "We run our newspapers in a highly decentralized manner, delegating operating authority to publishers," Ken Thomson told the Commission's opening session. "We have vested in our publishers the responsibility and the autonomy to decide what news, information and comment should be published daily in their newspapers." That was true enough, and there was no more eloquent witness to that philosophy than Harold Evans, the former editor of both The Times and The Sunday Times, who wrote in his memoirs that the difference in ownership between the Thomsons and Rupert Murdoch was "a transition from light to dark." Neither of the Thomsons have, in fact, cast much of an editorial shadow over their publications. The problem is that editorial budgets ultimately decide any publication's content, and that was-and is-how the Thomsons exercise control. Since the Kent hearings, John Tory has impressively improved both the quality of Thomson papers and the working conditions under which they're produced. The severest test of Thomson's hands-off attitude was the Globe story about the newspaper closings written by Arthur Johnson, quoting the press lord's heartless comment on the plight of those who had lost their jobs: "Each one has to find his own way in this world. "Johnson firmly stuck to his version, but Thomson categorically denies having made the comment. "I explained for twenty minutes how we had gone way beyond our statutory obligations in severance arrangements, but that we were not prepared to see the company's assets dissipated because YOUNG KEN 517 Southams Gordon Fisher consoles Ken Thomson during the 1981 Royal Commission on Neuspapers. we didn't have the guts to face up to the flak. I never said anything about everyone having to make his own way in the world, even though that quote will go down in history with me. I would never say that. I know I'm not brilliant, but even I can figure that one out," He didn't phone the Globe to complain, but six weeks later he met publisher Roy Megarry at a Royal York Hotel reception and let him have it. "Jesus, Roy, the Globe misquoted me terribly," he complained. "They put the worst words in my mouth. I never phoned you about it, but I wish I had." 518 FAREWELL TO GLORY "Geez, Ken," Megarry replied, "I wondered at the time why you'd make such a statement and I talked it over with the editor involved, but he insisted that you had said it." "You'll have to take my word for it. I didn't. I'm not that stupid." Megarry, who persuaded Thomson to invest $65 million in turning the Globe into a national newspaper, insists there has been no editorial interference from the Thomson head office, a few blocks away. "It's one thing to own the Barrie Examiner and not interfere editorially," he says. "It's another to own the Globe in the city where you reside and resist the temptation to put on pressure. But they haven't." On Thomson's sixtieth birthday, Megarry edited a special one-copy issue of the Globe, substituted on his doorstep for the real thing, that had a front page with Ken's picture on it and several feature stories about Gonzo. "That morning, Ken did phone me," Megarry recalls, and said, "'What are you doing, you rascal?'-he frequently refers to me as a rascal-and admitted he had been stunned, because for a split second he thought it really was that day's Globe. 'It was a cute thing to do,' he told me, 'but I hope it didn't cost the company too much money."' DURING THE LATE 1970s, Ken Thomson enjoyed a unique problem. With oil prices up to as much as $34 a barrel, his share in the North Sea fields purchased by his father was throwing off annual revenues of $200 million. That's not the kind of sum you keep in a savings account. Tax reasons plus the wish to get into hard assets dictated new acquisitions, but the chain had run out of cities, towns and even villages where they could maintain monopolies. Thomson went shopping for a safe, timeless investment for his family. YOUNG KEN 519 While on a flight to London, John Tory passed over to Ken an annual report of the Hudson's Bay Company, with the comment, "This is one you should think about." That struck Thomson as a weird coincidence because he had been thinking about The Bay, ever since Fred Eaton at a party had mentioned that the HBC was lucky because so much of its profit flowed from non-merchandising sources. "It was like mental telepathy," Thomson recalled of the airplane conversation.* At first glance, the Hudson's Bay Company seemed a perfect takeover target. It certainly carried the kind of historic pedigree that would please a British-Canadian lord, it was widely held with no control blocks that would have demanded premium prices, and it was a well and conservatively managed enterprise, ideal for the Thomson habit of acquiring companies that turned decent profits without requiring day-to-day involvement. "It looked to me like a business that in the inflationary environment of that time would do quite well, because the top line was pushed up by price increases while many of the costs, including store leases, were fixed," John Tory recalled. "Also I knew that Simpsons, which they had just taken over, was not well managed, so that a turnaround would have impressive bottom-line results." On March 1, 1979, Ken Thomson and John Tory called on Don McGiverin to announce they were bidding $31 a share--36 percent over market value-for 51 percent of the Hudson's Bay Company. At The Bay's board meeting two weeks later, Governor George Richardson reported that in a meeting with Thomson *There is another theory why Thomson settled on The Bay. He walked Gonzo most often through Craigleigh Gardens, near his Rosedale home, and at night the most visible object from the shrubbery is the ochre neon sign at Bloor and Yonge, announcing-rhe Bay! The Bay!" 520 FAREWELL TO GLORY the previous Sunday evening he had failed to persuade him to buy less than 51 percent. The board decided that the premium offered for control was not high enough and that $37 to $40 would have been a more appropriate amount. That consideration was aborted by the sudden entry into the bidding of grocery magnate Galen Weston, offering $40 for the same percentage, though part of it would ha-,e been payable in stock. Unlike Thomson, Weston hinted that he intended to fire most of the FIBC executives, replacing them with his own. In typical Establishment fashion, the first telephone call Thomson received after word of his intended takeover leaked out was from Fred Eaton. "I wish you luck. Welcome to the world of merchandising." The second was from Galen Weston, advising him of the competing bid.* By April 2, Thomson and Tory had raised their bid to $35 for 60 percent of the HBC stock. Weston countered with an improved offer ($40 for 60 percent), but once Thomson came in with an unconditional cash offer of $3 7, for 75 percent of the shares$276 million more than he had originally been willing to pay (although for 75 percent of the shares rather than the original 51 percent)-the bidding was over. The Bay board met on April 4 to approve the takeover formally. The Thomson group made only three demands: a pledge that its equity position wouldn't be diluted by the issue of extra treasury shares; two seats on The Bay board for Thomson and Tory; and alteration of the *It was a project the fathers of both men had desired. Galen's father, Garfield, had purchased 200,000 f IBC shares in preparation for making his own bid, just before he died; Rov Thomson had told his sidekick Sid Chapman and his granddaughter Sherry that he someday wanted to own the Hudson's Bay Company. YOUNG KEN 521 Company's banking arrangements so that the two banks on which they sat as directors-the Toronto-Dominion and the Royal, which had financed the deal-could get some of the business. There was so little board discussion on these issues that when Richardson pointed out it was Don McGiverin's fifty-fifth, the directors burst into "Happy Birthday." Ironically, this all happened just five weeks short of the ten-year limit that Canadian Committee Chairman David Kilgour had wanted to include in the Company's patriation arrangements. "I don't like all this bloody publicity," was Ken Thomson's only public comment.* KEN THOMSON DID LITTLE TO EMOY his position as the FIBC's proprietor, neither becoming its Governor nor taking part in any of its rituals. One exception was a summer journey he took to Baffin Island and Hudson Bay with his wife, Marilyn, two of their children, Lynne and Peter, and George Whitman, the Company's VicePresident of Public Affairs, a Second World War pilot who had fought in the Battle of Britain and had since earned a cross-Canada reputation as a social animator. They had just finished lunch at Ross Peyton's tiny hotel *There was one strange incident in the takeover. George Richardson made a personal profit of more than $15 million by buying-through his own firm, Richardson Securities1,059,800 shares of HBC stock in twenty-one separate deals between February 6 and 2 3, 1979, at an average price of $2 2.5 0, nearly $15 below the amount for which he traded them in six weeks later to Thomson. "Lucky George," as he quickly became known, defended his amazing good fortune and the Ontario Securities Commission cleared him of any wrongdoing. But he was worried enough about accusations of insider trading that he devoted half his speech as Governor before the 1979 annual meeting to defending his actions. 522 FAREWELL TO GLORY at Pangnirtung, on Baffin Island, and Whitman was relaxing on a small rise overlooking the town when up puffed Marilyn and said, "George, I want to do some shopping at that co-op you told me about. You got any money? Here I am, married to the richest man in the country, and he won't allow me to have any credit cards or anything like that. Can I borrow a hundred dollars, But don't tell Ken about it." Whitman peeled off the bills and she skipped off down to the co-op. Just as she disappeared from view, as if on cue, the world's eighth-richest man came up the hill with the same request. "George, I want to go up to the Bay store and buy some fishing tackle. Can you lend me a hundred dollars?" Later that day, as they were fishing, Ken began to eye Whitman's down-filled vest so wistfully that the Bay man finally told him to take off his Eddie Bauer finery and slip it on. "If you like it, it's yours," Whitman offered, happily expecting to agree with Thomsons refusal. Instead, tfie press lord held out his hand and said: "Let's shake on it." And that was the last Whitman ever saw of the vest that had been his Linus blanket on many a northern expedition. Later that day something significant happened, best recorded in Whitman's diary: "We were fishing on the Kulik River and I had gone back to the boat with a double handful of char, when I heard Paul McIlwain, one of our pilots, shouting: 'George! George! Marilyn's hurt bad!' She was down between two river rocks and had a deep cut between her eyes and down her nose. I pulled my shirt and T-shirt off and bound up her head in them. I carried her to the boat where we met Ken and our Inuit guide. We started across the mile and three-quarters of iceberg-studded water to the first-aid station at Pang, Marilyn in the bow, weeping and still in a state of shock. Me on the motor, Ken amidships and the old Inuk, in front with Marilyn, telling her a story. YOUNG KEN 523 "'In the Kulik River, there's a big mother fish,' he was saying, 'but this year the fish was going to die and there would be no more char in the Kulik. But today you put some of your blood in that river and the mother fish is going to live and we'll always have char.' Having used a little applied psychology, the Inuk moved back and stood between Ken and me. He gave me a nudge with his elbow and, pointing at Ken, asked: 'He good man,' "I didn't reply for about fifteen seconds because to have given a token response to a deeply personal question like that would have been perceived as flippant. So I waited, and then said, 'Yes, he's a very good man.' "The Inuk, who was one of Pang's elders, turned to Ken, and carefully crafting his thoughts, said: 'You don't go home. You stay. We take boat, we go down Kingnait Fiord. You come. You catch big char, see polar bear, cari- bou. We live on the land. You stay with us, my wife, my family, George too.' "Ken was absolutely mesmerized. He tried to mumble something, but nothing came out. He leaned over and whispered to me, 'Does he really mean it?' "'Of course he means it.' "'Well, I can go anywhere. I can go anywhere in the world for a holiday.' "'Yes, but Ken, there are things that money can't buy. You've just been paid the most tremendous compliment that one man can give another. He's offering to share his life with you.' "Poor Ken," Whitman noted in his journal, "that kind of generous gesture was completely outside his conceptual frame of reference-that some person from another culture would comfort his wife with a beautiful little made-up fairy tale and pay him the highest tribute that a person in a tribal society can extend to someone who comes from away...." 524 FAREWELL TO GLORY IF THERE IS ONE SANCTUARY where Ken Thomson can find peace it's in the private world of his art objects. Within these hushed precincts he can build his own aesthetic universe, indulging his whims without the budgetary problems that inhibit most collectors. He richly deserves his reputation as the premier collector of habitant scenes by Krieghoff (some selling for as high as $275,000), all of them magically revivified by one of England's best restorers. "He knows every picture the artist painted or attempted to paint and is constantly improving his collection," according to the Earl of West- morland, a director of Sotheby's in London. "He's got a great eye and a passionate love of art," echoes Christina Orobetz, the president of Sothebv's C anadian company. The best of his Canadiana coflection (conservatively estimated as worth $20 million) is now displayed in a 5,000-square-foot gallery on the top floor of Toronto's main Bay store. "I've reached a plateau," he says. "I've got my collection basically together and have reached the point where I can be very selective with gathering my objets d'art." They include the only wood carving Michelangelo ever did, stunning boxwood and ivory carvings and some incredible miniatures by Octavio Jenilla. Death is a recurring theme of his collection, which includes any number of realistically rendered skulls-the carving of a sleeping child using a skull as a pillow, the tableau of a starving wolf being strangled by a skeleton, and a pearwood skull hinged to reveal a miniature Adam and Eve on one side and the Crucifixion on the other. The most unusual-and most treasuredobjects in his collection are the ship models carved by French prisoners in British jails during the Napoleonic era. Thev carved to keep from going insane in their dungeons but had few tools or materials, so most of the hulls are fashioned out of the bones of the] r dead, the rigging braided out of their hair. YOUNG KEN 525 As with most enterprises, Ken Thomson's art collection is not exactly what it seems. It's controlled by Thomson Works of Art Limited, a company owned by his three children so the increase in value of the collection will be exempted from taxes on his death. The Krieghoff paintings offer their owner an extra incentive: every Christmas, Ken lends one or two canvases to Hallmark, which sends him free Christmas cards bearing the imprint of his painting in return. "They give me a thousand cards free and another four hundred wholesale," he admits.* IN RUNNING HIS COMPLEX OPERATION, Thomson of course enjoys the advantages of proprietorship, so that he can be wrong without triggering any adverse consequences. He also has the supreme luxury of belonging to a dynasty, so that financial results-good and bad-can be spread over generations instead of having to meet quarterly projections. The HBCs stock values didn't climb back to their original purchase price for more than a decade, but there was never a thought of liquidating or seeking other drastic remedies. "We never have to keep looking over our shoulders at people taking over any of our companies," John Tory points out. "Even when we make major acquisitions that have an initially negative impact on our profitability, in the longer term we'll have a broader base on which we're able to grow. It's really that simple." Not quite. Tory's real function in the Thomson hierarchy is a source of constant conjecture within and without the organization. "I'm a professional and I never worry about my image," Tory says. "As a business person *The Thomson Christmas card list has carefully noted beside each name the year when it will be removed from his mailings. 526 FAREWELL TO GLORY Von can have too high a profile and there's no upside to that whatsoever. When we bought the Hudson's Bay Company there was a big fuss, but we didn't say much; when it was down for the count we said even less; and when it recovered we said nothing."Ibry refuses to play the Bay Street game. "I don't need the kind of glory others seek," he says. It's too easy to speculate that John Tory is the brains behind Ken Thomson, because that wouldn't be fair to either of them. Thomson is smarter than that and Tory is not that self-effacing. As president of most of the family holding companies, Tory exercises enormous influence. He acts as a kind of secretary-general of the $11 -billion corporate confederacy, prodding, solving, appointing, acquiring, divesting, trouble-shooting-running the damn thing-but nevej quite making the ultimate decision by himself. He is not exactly a surrogate because when he speaks no one knows whether it's really with his voice or Ken's. Veterans of the Thomson organization know that it's usually both, and leave it at that. Tory reads at least two books a year that have nothing to do with business, loves to parse balance sheets, is happy to work sixteen-hour days, plays some golf and tennis, and skis, but when a friend asked him to go sailing discovered he didn't own a suitable short-sleeved shirt. The centre of his life is his family-four super-bright children (John, Jennifer, Jeffrey, Michael) and ten grandchildren. He plays a mean "After You've Gone" on a barrel-house piano and dabbles in bridge, but his most serious hobby is keeping up with his wife, Liz, Toronto's shrewdest and busiest social animator. As well as his Thomson responsibilities he is a director of Sun Life, Rogers Communications, Abitibi-Price and, for the past twenty years, the Royal Bank of Canada. "If you asked almost anyone on the Royal board who was the most brilliant guy there," says former deputy chairman John Coleman, "they'd say YOUNG KEN 527 John Tory. He asks the most pertinent questions and can see through a deal most quickly." Thomson himself doesn't just admire Torv; he worships the man. "If you take the best qualities of the best people in all the different fields of business and roll them into one-that's John Tory," he says. "It's the same pleasure for hi in to work, the way I collect paintings and walk my dog. Above all, hes got a great wife, family and good friends. They have fun together." That emphasis on family governs Thomson's own life. "He has so much love and affection with the family and Gonzo," says his son David, "we get so much pleasure just seeing him and trying to make him happier." David likes to quote the maxim of Meyer Guggenheim, the Swiss-born American industrialist who maintained a family dynasty by handing each of his sons a stick and asking him to break it. Each did. He then gave each a bundle of sticks, which none of them could break. "Stand alone, and you will be broken," he told them. "Stand together and no one will break you." The Thomson family very much sticks together; they are proud and protective of one another, especially ]i n tragic circumstances. just two weeks before Christmas 1990, Gonzo died. "I've had the loss of dear ones, human beings," Ken lamented, "but I've never experienced anything that shook me more than his death. Gonzo slept with me the last night. I held the little guy in my arms and I thought, I can't really stand this. I left the room and then I thought, no, he really needs me. I've got to be there. I felt him expire. I don't want ever, ever to go through such a thing again . . ." CHAPTER 18 DISASTER AND DELIVERANCE "There are no mei-chants here. You're all a lot of'bookkeepers. " -Harvard Professor Walter Salmon, spealing to an HBC executive think-tank FOR MOST OF THE FIRST TWO YEARS after they had attained control of the Hudsons Bay Company, Ken Thomson and John Tory were ecstatic about their new purchase. Contrary to everyones expectations, they seldom intervened in board decisions, and Thomson evidenced no desire to become the Company's Governor. "I'm not on any ego trip," he said after George Richardson left the post and was succeeded by Don McGiverin. "I've got so much in my life that I'm grateful for and so much to be occupied with, that I don't need or want to be Governor. The future of the Company is largely in Don McGiverins hands. Ile's an awful1v nice guy Nobody could represent the Company better. I'm much happier to have him do it than myself " Thomson and Tory joined the board but, with one exception, seemed happy merely to be consulted, their input limited mainly to deciding the extent of dividend payouts and monitoring major capital expenditures. The exception was Tory's concern about Sinipsons. The first item on his agenda was to advise McGiverin to merge the twenty-three-unit department-store chain 529 530 FAREWELL TO GLORY with The Bay.* "We're absolutely delighted with our long-term investment . . happy with management and very hopeful the year's results will be quite satisfactory," To r , v told the Financial Post in 1979, when the Company's operations showed a net of $104 million on sales of $3.4 billion. By the early 1980s, inventorV was turning over more slowly and interest rates had started to climb. That was a serious matter. The interest payments necessary to cover the $2.3-billion debtMcGiverin and his board had incurred expanding the retailing empire quickly overwhelmed everv other balance-sheet item. By 1982, The Bay had move~ into a serious negative earnings position (a net loss of $128 million), and at a directors' meeting onjune 22, Tory finallystepped in. "We can'tkeep growing by incurring more and more debt," he warned the board, threatening drastic measures if there was no hottom-line improvement by the end of the year. What Tory came to realize was that the Company's management had become obsessed with expanding its share of market at the expense of profit. The quest for greater sales became a ' iihad. The Company, which had once confined its special pricing to semi-annual Bay Days, launched Super Dollar Days, In-Store Warehouse Sales, Big Deals, Scratch and Save Days, Price Blow-Outs and quarterly Bay Days each of which lasted two weeks. Customers reacted by cherry-pick-ing the merchandise that was deeply discounted (up to 50 percent) and passing over the items with big mark-ups. To heighten the impression of a stock of bargain goods that had to be moved quickly, stores were over-inventoried; the typical sales floor looked like an untidy warehouse, with *Had T)ry's advice been followed, $iOO million in operating losses and $000 million in interest carrying costs over the next decade might have been avoided. DISASTER AND DELIVERANCE 531 merchandise left in cartons to block the aisles. As they were picked over, the items usually spilled onto the floor, where they were trampled on-or stolen.* The pressure to produce advertising flyers promoting the many sales grew so intense that their pages were crammed with mistakes. A four-page HBC flyer published on August 20, 1989, for example, contained thirty-seven errors that had to be corrected in subsequent newspaper ads. Such tactics proved costly in terms of both immedi ate profit and the YIBCs long-term reputation. Richard Sharpe, who then ran the competing Simpsons-Sears (later Sears Canada) chain, reacted by issuing orders that his company would not even try to match the HBC price cuts. "We ignored them," he says. "They were giving the goods away and losing pailfuls of money. We lost some market share, but we were making money." Still, no expense was spared in trying to pump up the HBC , s sales totals, which in 1984 had climbed by $1.4 billion since the'rhonison purchase-while earnings of $104 million for 1979 had turned into a loss of $107 million in 1984. When one high-ranking Company executive defended that strategy of continual growth and praised the merits of spreading overhead costs through continual expan sion, Torv shot back, "You can't eat market share-and you can't eat overhead, either." Not being a retail mer chant, Torv didn't really know what was possible in the departmen t-store trade, but he did know that as desir able as a growing market share might be, profit was much better-particularly since current cash flows were not enough to service existing debts. *There was a story going the rounds ot"Ibronto's fashion district about the sales manager of a dress supply house, who told his staff, "There's a Bav buyer coining in this afternoon to see our line; lay it out on the floor, so she'll know what it will look like when it gets into the store." 532 FAREWELL TO GLORY FOR A TIMF, THE COMPANY was barely under control, lacking direction or sensible forward momentum. Its executives had been taught how to expand the business, not how to change it. The Company's troubles were so serious that everyone was looking inward to prevent collapse, instead of outward to trigger resurrection. Most of the organization men who were moved in to run various departments had the necessary know-how, but they lacked soul. Walter Salmon, who taught retailing at the Harvard Business School, said as much, addressing the HBC , s executives at a 1982 think-tank. "The problem with this company," he declared, gazing at the gathered suits, "is that there ate no merchants here. You're all a lot of bookkeepers. " Sir William Keswick, the retired British Governor, observing the tribulations of his beloved Hudson's Bay Company from his retirement at Theydon Bois, shook his head in disbelief. "We handed over the Company in apple-pie order, and they went wild with it. If you borrow money at a certain percentage and invest at half that percentage, sooner or later it doesn't work. That's sort of elementary. But that was what they (lid." "They imbued the staff with the notion that fiscal accountability was the highest virtue, and forgot that retailing is really showbiz," complained Shirley Dawe, a brilliant marketer who had joined the HBC as a trainee and rose to be a vice-president. "Don McGiverin had a wonderful rapport with everybody," she fondly remembered, "but lie kept getting further and further away from the action." One problem wasThe Bay's inability to keep up with the changing tastes of Canadian consumers. The Company still behaved as if its main competitors were other department stores when retailing was being fragmented in new directions, with specialty marketers such as Dylex, the Grafton Group, Leon's, The Brick and thousands of DISASTER AND DELIVERANCE 533 imaginative indepen dents winning sales. Despite the Herculeariefforts to raise it, between 1978 and 1984 The Bay's, market share of Canadian retail sales actually declined to 5.3 percentfrom 5.7 percent-while profits plummeted at the same time.The Company dida lot of silly things, such as abandoning its pharmacy counters, which mav not have produced an especially high gross (9 percent) but had been great traffic builders. Some areas-like the cosmetics department at the Winnipeg store with its $12-million face-lift-were overbuilt; others, such as the untidy, often filthy main floor in the Victoria store, were ignored. "If there is an example of abrogated opportunity in the history of corporate Canada," concluded a 1983 study of the HBC bV Torontos Yorkton Securities, "surely it is the Hudson's Bay Company." The I IBC becarne so obsessed with cutting costs that the basic rationale for its department stores-friendly service and a wide selection of merchandise-was lost. The Bay stores switched almost entirely into soft goods, emphasizing fashion at a time when more and more families were nesting in their homes, stocking many of the hard goods the HB(was abandoning, Even the fashiondriven clothing business faced an uncertain future. "Nobody knows what women want to wear any more," commented MarlIN n Brooks, a leading Toronto fashion designer. Service at most Bay stores became virtually non-existent as thousands of knowledgeable and loyal employees were laid off and part-tiniers took their places. The temporary substitutes may have been untrained and disinterested, but unlike permanent emplovees they cost the company no pensions, paid statutory 1~olidavs, vacation times or other fringe benefits. Barry Wilson, manager of The Bay at Bloor and Yonge in Toronto, reported a 43 -percent staff turnover at his store in 1987. It was not alwa~ s easy for Bay management to dismiss longtime employees. One of the mainstays of the 534 FAREWELL TO GLORY downtown Vancouver store, for instance, was Helen Carson, who had managed the wool department for twerity-eight years and had a large following of local knitters. The Bay wanted to fire her because her salary had reached the maximum, but that would have cost a considerable severance allowance. Since she reftised to quit, she was transferred to the children's wear department, where she had to move heavy boxes. Carson eventually injured her lower back and had to resign for medical reasons, leaving behind an untended-and unfrequented-wool department. Lynn Scully, who successfully built up the same store's book department, had taken great pride in her work. "My grandfather was a fur trapper and the whole faintly was excited when I got the job. We loved The Bay and I remember when it was a prestige store and people would actually come in just to buy our shopping bags." But Scully left, as so many other department managers did, because not Only had unrelenting cost-cutting made effective merchandising impossible but the Company had also turned into an impassive and uncaring bureaucracy. In her last year at The Bay, Scully was reporting to nineteen different managers.* Many people left the Company with understandable bitterness, none more so than Mark Bluines, who later started the successful Mark's Work Wearhouse chain. Blunies had been forced out of his job as a junior manager at the Calgary store because his many ideas and ambitions didn't fit the fIBC mould. This diverted him from his objective ofbecoming the youngest-and only Jewish-senior executive of The Bay. Ile was not pleased. "For many years afterwards," he recalls, "ifl felt a little lazy, and was thinking,'Geez, I'm not going to bother openingup in Quebec,' or something like that, I'd drive down to the Bay store and just ride the escalators. The hate would w:ish over me and would fuel Lip my emotions, reineiribering all the times I had answered the page 'Blumes, call 555,' onIv to have tuy nose rubbed in it. So I'd come back and tell my staff, Tet's go for it!' DISASTER AND DELIVERANCE 535 All through this time, the head-office bureaucracy continued to balloon. D.G. (Pete) Buckley, a Bay vicepresident, once burst into McGiverin's office to dramatize the point. "Look, Don," he told the Governor, ,,when I first arrived at your head office, we had an internal phone directory five pages long. This one, published today, has two hundred pages and that doesn't include the whole data-processing group. We've got a problem." "I was absolutely appalled by many of the attitudes and directions within the I 1BC," recalls David Thomson, Ken's elder son, A ho was training on the job in the HBC organization at the time. "There seemed to be a distinct separation between the people who felt themselves visionaries and the line operators facing the customer. The latter were less involved in the decision-making process, which in fact they were Funding. The world was turned on its head. The system had come to a great human impasse." Pierre Mignault, a brilliant merchandiser and later president of the Price Club of Canada but then head of the HB(:,s Quebec region, felt a similar frustration with "the grids of people coining at me from all angles out of that huniongous lbronto head office. It was unreal. You didn't even know who to call about anything important. The Company became too big and too fat and didn't have the human- resource structure to handle its rapid expansion." Mignault experienced a good example of Bay bureaucracy in 1983 when the roof of the Place Vertu store started leaking. Ile had to put twenty buckets on the shop floor to catch the water whenever it rained, but couldn't find the appropriate vice-president in charge of fixing leaky roofs. Even though the local fire department temporarily closed the store because of the danger of the ceilings collapsing, Mignault never did get head office to sanction repairs to tile building. He gave up the attempt after a year and ordered it done on his 536 FAREWELL TO GLORY own. "Of course it cost much more than it would have originally," he recalls, "because after a year of dripping water, the carpets had to be replaced and I had to buy huge fans to get rid of i he musty smell. It was awful. It was embarrassing." To offset the neglect and losses, the Company launched an internal money-raising prograin that took the form of disposing of the balance of its SimpsonsSears stockfor $211 million to Sears, Roebuck, realizing a $48-million profit, and cashing in-for $455 millionthe 7.7 million preferred shares in Dome Resources it had received in 1981 on the sale to the Calgary company's parent of its remaining interest in Hudson's Bay Oil & Gas. That Dome transaction was a milestone in Canadian business history, because it was ultimately responsible for the toppling of the high-flying Calgary energy company and its even higher-flying chairman, Jack Gallagher. Dome had groA n from a one-man operation in the early 1950s to a major energy plaver, but its corporate behaviour remained dominated ~y that same man, Jack Gallagher, whose dreams of grandeur knew no limits. At the heart of his fantasies was the desire to make Dome larger in Canada than Imperial Oil. To achieve that goal, in 1981 Gallagher went after Hudson's Bay Oil & Gas, a subsidiary of Conoco, the former Continental 011, based in Stamford, C onnecticut. f fe easily won control (5 3 percent) of HBO(; but only by doubling Dome's debt load to $5.3 billion, a level that required interest payments of an agonizing $3 million a day. To lighten that load he desperately needed access to HBOG's $300million annual cash flow, and that meant buying out all the minority shareholders, including the largest single block-the 10. 1 percent still owned by the HBC. Just before Gallagher had made his move on Conoco, he had offered -rory, through a Bay Street intermediary, DISASTER AND DELIVERANCE 537 S27 a share for the Company's 11130G stock. Tory, who had done his own calculations, considered it to be worth at least $50, though he had at one time been willing to sell HB(:,,, position at $40 to $45. Now he dug in. Tory seldom loses his temper, but he still turns red thinking about that $27 bid, particularly since it was made just three days before Gallagher offered Conoco the equivalent of $52 for its 11130G stock. "That really stiffened our backbone," he recalls, "and when I met Gallagher I told him in no uncertain terms that I thought this was not the way ethical businessmen operated." He refused a trade of Dome shares for 1113Cs stake and would accept only a complicated retractable prefer red-stock formula that made the HBCs 7.7 million Dome shares worth $57.50 each on or beforc December 31, 1984, with the money paid out of an escrow account that Dome management couldn't touch in the interval. Gallagher later claimed the deal was largely responsible for Dome's downfall, but for HBC the 1983 Dome redemption provided a badly needed infusion of $45 5 million in cash.* By 1984, the I IB(:',s pre-tax losses over the preceding four years amounted to more than $320 million. Thomson and Tory had grown exasperated with management's intransigence. One ofthe big problems was that the cost of the money involved in the I 113Cs expansions was never included in profit projections. Regional and departmental managers would make presentations to the board forecasting glowing revenues and operating profits for new store expansions without even mentioning returns *The 1113Cs onl~ remaining oil investment was the small Calgary-based Canadian Roxy Petroleum (named after the Roxv Arcade, a New York roller-skating rink where its promoter, Robert Peters, had spent an enjoyable evening), bought in 1980 and sold seven Nvars later to Westcoast Transmission for $82 million at a smail profit. 538 FAREWELL TO GLORY on capital invested, interest costs, cash flows or tax considerations. At 5 P.M. on November 29, 1984, Tory, who had brought up the issue so many times he was fed up with bleating about it, arrived late at a Bay committee meeting attended by Governor Don McGiverin and HBC vice-presi dents Wally Evans, Rolph Huband, Marvin Tiller, Don Wood, Al Guglielmin and Lorne Klapp.The outside directors present included Ian Barclay of Vancouver, Marcel B61anger of Montreal and Dawn McKeag of Winnipeg. They had met to hear the presentation of C.W. "Chuck" Gerhart, then general manager of the Ottawa region, who reviewed his area's retail growth, projected sales and operating profits five years into the future, cheerfully predicting a net increase from $3.5 million to $12.1 million by 1989-this for a district that had a profit peak of $5 million in the past and had not recently been reaching its own sales targets. For Tory, that was it. Keeping himself under tight control, he politely inquired whether Gerhart cared to acknowledge the fact that current profits had been realized only after investment of about $30 million to improve the main Ottawa store, linking it to the Rideau Centre, and pointed out that this expenditure had involved considerable financing costs. When the Ottawa manager replied with the equivalent of a shrug, , ro ry gave him a stern lecture about the impact of financing charges on cash flows and bottom-line profits. "It really wasn't Gerhart's fault," he later admitted. "He was just part of the HBCs corporate culture. They were living in a drearn world-only looking at operating profits and pretending everything else would take care of itself." The next day, just after a revised quarterly profit outlook was tabled showing a further $50-million dip in a rapidly accelerating financial slide (the loss for the nine months ended October 3 1, 1984, was $7.67 a share, compared with $4.20 the year before), Tory addressed the DISASTER AND DELIVERANCE 539 Company's full board. It was the toughest speech he'd ever given, and would in retrospect become recognized as a watershed in the Hudson's Bay Company's long history. "IAhen we ~icquired HBC," one of the directors recalls his saying, "it had just taken over Simpsons. I thought HBC was well managed and could help Simpsons, which had inferior management. Instead, the Bay's management screwed up Simpsons, and I've lost confidence in the LIBC management. The major shareholder,A ould not consider investing another cent in HBC at this tii-ne. I will review the situation with Ken and our people and will have recommendations for the Board at our next meeting In January." He stressed that the continned existence of the FIBC was at risk because nobody seemed to be focusing on the real problem-that the Company simply wasn't generating enough cash to cover its dailv requirements. An irriniediate freeze was placed on capital spending; drastic cuts in corporate overhead were ordered; nem guidelines were established to focus objectives on cash flows and net earnings rather than sales totals and operating profits. "When you look back," Thomson later rurninated, 41 it's a legitimate question to ask why we let it go so long. When we made the investment, we believed the HBC was a well-managed company, and there was very little rea- son for us to think otherwise, as profits grew in the first few years. Then, ill of a sudden, with the downturn in business and upturn in interest rates, the sins of the past came home to roost. Now that doesn't make for a passive investment. Professional management was failing to meet budget objectives by increasingly wide margins. When I said the management of the HBC is great, I was right-I just got the tense wrong. Don McGiverin and his people had done a superb job, but the Company had turned into a sort of ivory-tower bureaucracy. We could have tried to get -,i hot-shot retailer from the States to 540 FAREWELL TO GLORY take his place, but that wouldn't have been right. We could have sold off The Bay's real estate and broken up the Company, but I didn't want to do that. We could have merged the 11BC with Yhomson Newspapers, but that wouldn't have been fair to the shareholders who had invested in our publishing abilities. No, the best thing was to stick with it, and build it up again." Right after that November 30 meeting, Tory had an encounter with McGiverin over costs of the Company's computer operation, which were climbing at an alarming 20 percent annually. -lbry wanted independent costcontrol experts to review the computer systems, but McGiverin refused to allow them access. Tory and Thomson quickly realized that the Governor's head would have to be included in any effective reform package. "I don't really think management realized how desperate the financial situation had become," Ken Thomson recalls. "They thought, 'Heres a 300-year-old company, and nothing will happen'-so they just kept doing things as before. We had waited and waited and waited, but finally we had to take action. Lookit, out of respect for the kind of person he is and what he had done in the past, we didn't want to hurt Don McGiverin. But he had to go, and he was gentlemanly enough, big enough to realize changes had to be made. We were able to maintain our mutual respect and friendship." And so the merchant prince was stripped of his crown, if not his title. Feeling prouder of his run than bloodied because of the way it had ended, McGiverin lost not an ounce of dignity in the process of giving up his authority. "I hung in too long, I really did," he told a friend on the morning after his demotion. "But then, not every persons built for all seasons. If I had thought there was a better way of doing things, I'd have done it. God, I've been forty-five years in this thing, and I've been at it twenty hours a day. Still, the Chief Executive Officer DISASTER AND DELIVERANCE 541 can never have a bullet-proof vest. I've had a good run, and when they asked me to stay on as Governor, I told them I'd be delighted." At a crucial board meeting on January 2 5, 1985,Tory, speaking on Thoinson's behalf, announced that McGiverin had relinquished his post as Chief Executive Officer but would continue as Governor in a non-executive capacity. In his place, two executive vice-presidents-lain Ronald and George Kosich-were being appointed to run the Company, with the former to be in charge of Zellers, wholesale, furs, real estate, the northern stores and the disposal of non-strategic assets, while the latter would take over control of the HBC's department stores Including SiMPSODs as well as credit and information services. The directors (except Ronald and Kosich) thought this was a silly idea because the Company would not have a single responsible executive. They only approved the new structure subject to Tory's taking on the chairmanship of the management committee of the board, thus effectively turning himself into the Company's CEO, since neither Ronald nor Kosich could implement major policy shifts without first checking with him. For the next half-decade, John Tory, in effect, ran the I] 13c. It was a stormy five years, but in the end he saved the Company. THE TORY-DOMINKrED RONALD-KOSICH partnership represented a dramatic shift in direction, since Don McGiverin had by then been running the Company for fifteen years. While few had ever questioned his skills as a retailer, McGiverin had, since 1978, opted out of his chosen profession, spending nearly all his time and energy on takeovers. As a result of that neglect-plus the effects of the recession and the Company's astronomical debt load-the HBCs credit ratings were downgraded 542 FAREWELL TO GLORY from AAA to a humiliating B. Between 1980 and 1982, operating profits declined 97 percent.* Apart from cutting costs of its existing retail operations, The Bay under both McGiverin and Tory had also drastically trimmed the number of its operations. The Shop-Rite catalogue stores were closed in 1982 and its Marshall Wells hardware subsidiary was sold in 1985. Its travel business and its share of Eaton Bay Financial Services, Computer Innovations, Hudson's Bay Distillers and Toronto Credits were disposed of the same vear.t In the suminer of 1987, The Bav sold off its wholesale division, established in 1907 to handle liquor as well as grocery distribution, later adding candies and tobacco. With annual sales of $800 million, it was a big operation, but it never made much profit. After a partnership between Norman Paul, brother of a former president of Zellers, and Jimmy Kay (then chairman of Dylex) bought it for $133 million (about half of it down), the pair took not quite a year to run it into the ground, forcing its 1,200 employees on to the street and causing a $45-million writedown on the 11BCs books, though much of it was later recovered. Late on a Friday e-, ening in January 1987, Marvin Tiller, head of the Northern Stores Division in *At one point in 1986, things got so tight that the Company applied to take a $35-million surplus out of its employee pension fund. The application was withdrawn only when the Pension Commission of Ontario warned that it would be refused. tThe Bay's real-estate holdings, except those buildings occupied by its stores, were folded into its subsidiary Markborough Properties in 1984 and six years later Markborough was turned into a separate public company through the spinning off of its shares to the HBCs stockholders. With 78.4 percent of the parent company's stock, Ken Thomson could claim the same percentage of Markborough, which allowed him to realize a tax-free $315-million capital gain. DISASTER AND DELIVERANCE 543 hiin Ronahl, Exet-litive Kice-President, HBC Winnipeg, got a call from lain Ronald, the HBC's exec utive vice-president, advising him to be in his office at 8:30 A.M. the following Monday. "When I got there, Ronald abruptly advised me that the Northern Stores Division had been sold and that the new owners would be arriving in half an hour," Tiller recalls. "I told him that we'd like to have done an employee buyout, but sure enough, thirt ' v minutes later Ian Sutherland and Raymond Dor6, representing Mutual Trust of Waterloo, Ontario, rolled in, ready to take over." Sale of the Company's historic Northern Stores Division had first been discussed at a management committee meeting on September 12, 1986. Ronald reported that he had been approached by a group of investors organized by Mutual Trust and that while profits for the operation might reach $35 million, it didn't have much 544 FAREWELL TO GLORY opportunity for expansion. The item came up again at a January 23 meeting, where the selling price was set at $8 million over book ' value, with an 80-percent cash advance. Approval to Jettison this most historic of the HBC's departments--the territory for which it had received its Charter 317 years eailier-was granted at the directors' meeting on January 2 8, 1987. The official minute hardly does that momentous decision justice: "The Board discussed the pros and cons of such a sale. On the one hand N.S.D. is profitable and represents to Canadians the heritage and pioneering spirit of the company. On the other hand, it operates in a total welfare environment with considerable risks of government intervention, it requires capital for modernization and has little growth potential. On balance, given the overriding need to substantially reduce debt, the Board decided to approve the sale." Strangely, no outside directors attended that meeting, though they were polled by telephone. Only four executives, who also served on the board, were there to vote on the fateful motion to cut the ties with the I IBCs own history.* "My recollection," recalledj.W. "Bud" Bird, one of the directors who was telephoned on the issue, "was of feeling a sense of loss, that we were really changing the character of the Company, but that It was sort of a sidebattle in the mission to establish three main retailing giants and to concentrate where the volumes were and the super-store kinds of activity. The preservation of the origins of the Company was no longer commercially attractive to the main mission of the Company." That seemed more of a retroactive rationalization than a reason. Northern Stores had been a dependable money-maker, clearing$28 million in operating profit on *They were: Don McGiverin, George Kosich, fain Ronald, and Gary Lukassen. All the directors polled by telephone agreed to the sale. DISASTER AND DELIVERANCE 545 ~1 $400-million sales volume the year the division was sold. Spinning the 178 stores off for $189 million reduced the parent company's debt by a net $150 million, about 6 percent of the totai it then owed, which didn't make any material difference. 'Filler was as puzzled by the decision as anyone. "I couldn't fathoin how they could possibly come to that decision," he said, "particularly since we ha~ a five-year profit trend that was right on target and was marching on and on.The most difficult experience for me was having to face iny people, who all have an 11BC stamped on their backsides, and tell them about it." Rolph Huband, the U113CS vice-president and secretary, was the only Company executive who took note of the sale's historic dimensions. "The heritage and adventuring spirit of the Company is gone," he lamented. Dick Murray, the former managing director, came out of retirement to thunder: "Only unpardonable cowardice and incompetence could lead the Canadian owners of this great historic company to throw away these jewels in their crown. The Company now abandons the Canadian North; it severs generations of a trusting and respectful relationship between native peoples and traders--it deletes the words and discards the heart of its historic name: Coinpanv of Adventurers. One might Just as well take the RCMP and sell it to Pinkertons." These sentiments were shared by former Deputy Governor Sir Eric Faulkner, who mourned: "If the HBC is alive three hundred years froin now, it will be neither the fault of the Thonisons or of the Bay directors from 1970 on. If we had foreseen what would follow ... would we all have been persuaded to transfer to Canada?" *The last of the great British directors, Sir Martin jacorub, expressed his vieiA s of the sale by quietly investing in the successoi company lo the Northern Stores Division, which at George Whitmans suggestion became known as the North West Company. 546 FAREWELL TO GLORY On May 2, 1987, precisely 31 7 years after the Company of Adventurers had taken up Charles 11's Charter to expiolt the upper half of the North American continent, Derek Riley, the Winnipeg businessman who had been elected chairman of the offshoot company, folded the Governor's flag that had flown over the posts of the HBC's northern division and banded it back to Don McGlverin. Suddenly it was over--3 17 years of history cut adrift as if they had never happened. Ken Thomsons main interest in the transfer was to claim for the HBC the art works collected by the northern division, taking three-quarters of the Inuit sculptures, prints and historical paintings. Ile felt very much more strongly about getting rid of the Company's fur business. "I was just praying the Company would sell it," he confided after the decision had been made. "I think it's an anachronism. We don't need to kill animals to feed our vanity. They may not be a high order of life, but animals have the same right to live as we have. They can say what they like about anitrials being humanely trapped-its not true. You can't kill an animalwithout making it suffer. So why should we kill creatures who are out there trying to survive? That's all they're doing, trying to sumive. Over the coming years, people are just not going to be wearing fur coats. It's a dying business. I know that somebody else is still doing it, but it has nothing to do with my family." That was a revealing statement, because it was the one aspect of current HBC operations that Thomson really felt pas- sionately about (except, of course, for losing all that money), yet he himself did nothing about it, allowing the Company's executives to work their way towards his conclusion on the issue--but only eight years after he became the Company's principal proprietor. His son David confirms his fathers reluctance to applv the force of his authority, even in a cause he feels passionately about. "My father has never wished to DISASTER AND DELIVERANCE 547 dictate his will to the business operators," says he. "Power is always perceived; when it is used, it ceases to be. He had believed that the people within HBC supported the business and that itwas beneficial to the Company. Although he made his personal feelings very clear on numerous occasions, he would never unilaterally end the fur business within the IJBC." The Canadian fur-sale operations near the Toronto airport were sold for $45 million to Len Werner, the prevtous manager. Disposing of the British facilities at London's Beaver House was a much more complicated affair. Hugh Dwan, the president of the HBC's British fur unit, received a phone call from lain Ronald ordering him to be at the London offices of Morgan Stanley a day or two later to hear the details pertaining to the sale of his company. Dwan, who had up to then received no notice of the move, was just as puzzled as Marvin Tiller had been about jettisoning the northern stores, particularly since the auction house had been turning good profits and he had just recently submitted (and had approved) his optiinistic budgets. The sale-to the Finnish Fur Sales Company, for $37.5 million-had been negotiated without his knowledge or consent. "They told me that selling the auction house would enable the Company to concentrate on their core business," he recalls. "In f~ct, the fur business in England was no drain at all on Canadian management because we didn't need them. The debt reduction benefits were a drop in the bucket. To me, their decision seemed like chopping up the kitchen furniture to feed the fire, and then finding out you have no place to sit. . . They sold the company in the face of fastrising fur prices, so if they had waited one more year, they could have got several million dollars more. It was an undignified scramble to get out." Dwan had a devil of a time persuading London's ftir traders that the HBC move was serious. Three centuries 548 FAREWELL TO GLORY is a long time. "They thought it was some kind of reverse takeover for tax reasons and that the HBC would end up owning the Finnish co-operative," Dwan remembers. "There was strong feeling that the Company had let them down. In furs, the HBC was a mark of confidence all over the world." After his day at Morgan Stanley, going over the dreary details of the sale, Dwan walked to Earls Court, then took a taxi home. "I turned on the TV news," he recalls, "and there was young David Thomson, who had just purchased a Constable for Y~2 million, saying that as its new owner he was anxious the United K-ingdom not lose its heritage, and that he therefore might not take it out of the country. I thought to myself, 'They've just sold out the best trading name in the world,' and I cried." On January 31, 1988, the fur men held a wake on the auction floor at Beaver House. It had been on January 24, 1672, that the first London HBC fur auction was held at Garrawav's coffee house, near the Royal Exchange, where tea frorn dried leaves imported by the East India Company had originally been brewed. That first sale was a very special event attended by the Company's founder, Prince Rupert, his cousin, the Lord High Admiral, the Duke of York (who would become the FIBCs second Governor and, as James 11, King of England) and the poet John Dryden. Now it was all over, and from seven in the evening to midnight, a lot of rum was tasted, songs were sung, and stories told. Special arrangements had been made to transmit the Company's farewell telegrams and telephone calls that day, presuming there would be some form of official farewell wishes sent to mark the end of the Company's founding department. Incredibly, no message ever came. "They didn't even know we still existed," said a bitter Arthur Frayling, Dwan's predecessor and a sixty-eight-~ ear veteran of the fur trade. "The greetings from head office in Canada were as they had DISASTER AND DELIVERANCE 549 been for some years previous-zero. They had actually established in their minds that the Company's great background and tradition was, in fact, a drawback. Now that I can't take. I'm sorry, I can't bloody well take it." The British fur trade ended with Frayling, well over six feet tqll and with the hearing of the infantry colonel lie once was, standing on the bidding stage at Beaver House and leading the mourners in song: Dear old pals, jolly old pals all in together in all sorts of weather. Dear old pals, jolly old pals, Give me the solace of dear old pals ... T[ IE RULF OF THI 'roRY-KOSICI I-RONALD triumvirate ended on July 1, 1987, with the appointment of George Kosich as the HBCs president and chief operating officer. A University of British Columbia Commerce grad, he had spent twenty-seven years with The Bay, and even though his cutbacks had earned him the nicknaine George Carnage, he was a capable retailer with Having divested itself of its northern stores and fur trade, the Company went on a kind of scorched-earth rampage, getting rid of the very last historic symbol it possessed. This was the collection ofsilver objects minted in t670, the year of its incor poration, that had been gathered b ' v various Governors and kept at Beaver House. 'rhe thirty hallmarked pieces were shipped without notice to New York for sale bv Christie's, so that some of the foi met British I IBC directors ~ad less chance to buy them, or, as one former Governor intended, to donate them to the city of London. 550 FAREWELL TO GLORY energy to burn, and brought to his position an optimistic outlook and determination to dismantle the deadening sanctions of head office.* Kosich's-and the HBC's-good fortune was to have at his side Gary Lukassen, the Company's chief financial officer, who became a key man in its resurrection. Kosich was tough and as single-minded as a mountain inule, which didn't enhance his popularity. On October 24, 1988, anationymous petition was circulated at the fIB(",s head office, asking executives whether they respected Kosich's style of management. "Do you believe that the removal of George Kosich [as chief operating officer and president] would return the Company to a more stable and productive environrnent?" the questionnaire demanded. At the first rnanagettient committee meeting after its distribution, John Tory began the proceedings by turning to Kosich and, with inock seriousness, explaining, "Before we start the business of the meeting, there is an announcement I have to make. ft concerns the questionnaire that was circulated to the executive staff. We've tabulated the results. There were 17 5 replies that came in. Six percent voted for Ed Broadbent [then NDP leader], about 15 percent were undecided, and the others said they didn't know who George Kosich was." One of Kosich's prob- lems in dealing with staff morale was his vocabulary. He was always talking about ALB.W.A. (which meant Management By Walking About-a reference *lain Ronald resigned the same day Kosich was appointed, later becoming president of administration for the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. "I just couldn't stay at The Bay a moment longer, because I have to took at myself in the mirror every day, and can't shaN e with mN eyes shut," lie told a friend just after he quit. Doug Ntahaffy, t~e I IBCs senior N ice-president, finance, also resigned within a few weeks of the Kosich appointment. DISASTER AND DELIVERANCE 551 George Kosich, President, 11BC to mingling with customers), eliminating T.N.M.J. (the That's Not My Job syndrome, when it came to helping close sales by using a little extra effort) and in a gush of participles, defined his formula for success as "downsizing, rationalizing, fine-tuning and refocusing." With Ken Thomson's and John Tory's active backing, Kosich turricd the Company inside out, closing unprofitable units but supporting success with ambitious retailing plans. The deliverance of the HBC was not nearly as dramatic as its near disintegration. It was largely a matter of rationalization and reorganization- 552 FAREWELL TO GLORY the gradual reintroduction of the Company to its natural retailing audience. Kosich eliminated layers of middle management and centralized buying and sales promotion to cut expenses. lie used computer technology to provide better data for buying decisions and his merchandising flair to pick commodity winners, then spent money backing those premium items with more inventory and upgraded locations in the stores. At the same time he restored flagship downtown units to some semblance of their former glory by installing colourful, contemporary environments for housewares and women's and men's fashions. It was at Zellers, the discount store that Joe Segal saved from bankruptcy and Don McGiverin bought at gunpoint, that Kosich and the FIBC enjoyed their most spectacular success. When he and David Thomson took over Zellers in 1987, it was experimenting with an upscale format to distinguish itself from its discount competitors. Kosich declared that a discount store must look like a discount store and ordered the newly installed partitions and carpeting removed. He also insisted that in discounting, expenses are everything and put into effect the lowest operating costs in the industry. This allowed Zellers to reduce its prices and trumpet that at its stores "the lowest price is the law." Customers responded, driving sales up, expense rates down, and prices still lower. As a result, Zellers' operating profits tripled in the four years of the Kosich presidency and for the first time since the Thomson takeover, the owners opened the pursestrings in November 1990 to purchase the fifty-store Towers chain. By, mid-April 1991, Kosich had their carpets removed, their expense rates reduced, and new Zellers signs installed. In the meantime the Company had completed its transformation from a conglomerate to a retailer. DISASTER AND DELIVERANCE 553 "Disposal of the fur and northern departments was required to correct the daring excesses of the 1970s," maintains Rolph I luband, the Company's vice-president and corporate secretary. "The necessary corrections having been made, the HBc reset the course originally plotted in 1970-to become the most successful of Canadian business enterprises." With the distribution in August 1990 ofNlarkborough Properties shares to its own stockholders, the HBC was for the first time since 1870 mainly in one line of business-retailing. The only unit i hat never stopped bleeding was Simpsons. That upscale, Toronto-centred department store had proved a disaster since Don McGiverin had taken it over in the late 1970s. Simpsons had suffered through the tenures of eight presidents in a decade: 'I~d Burton, Charles AlacRea, Gworge Kosich, Al Brent, Bob Peter, David Thomson, Paul Walters and Bob Peter again. None ofthem could resurrect the sleeping elephant. The store had lost its audience. 1111C management tried going first upscale and then downscale, firing sales personnel over thirty-five years of age, publishing yuppie ads, shutting down the Montreal and Regina units, combining purchasing offices, arnalganiating advertising depart- inents, putting in the country's-probably the continent's-inost expensive food hall (in the basement), but nothing,worked. The upscale shoppers didn't get upscale service-and so they stayed away. At any rate, there weren't enough of them to turn Simpsons into a northern Bloomingdale's. Even internally, Simpsons was treatedas a joke,,~N ith Bay executives referring to its main Toronto store as "the Panty Palace." The Company became fed up with throwing people and money at the troublesome Simpsons division and finally in the summet of 1991 closed it down. But that was all anti-climax. By the spring of 1989, the HBC's balance sheets reflected the dramatic 554 FAREWELL TO GLORY turnaround that Tor~, had masterminded and Kosich had engineered: profits at $144 million were up 389 percent from the previous year's. The Company's salvation had been slow and painful but, against all odds, it had been achieved and its credit ratings had been restored. The Hudsons Bay Company was once more safely in the black. CHAPTER19 LAST LORD OF THE BAY "I become excited at the thought of measuring 7nyself in varied situations, alongside Wellington in India oi being in afighter, attacking afirmation of bombers and being vastly outnumbered. It's an interesting way to testyourself because you setyour own limits. -David Thomson THE RICI I DON'T HAVE CHILDRFIN; they have heirs. For the first-born male, growing up is a brief interval during which he matures into becoming his father's Son, with all the baggage of continuity and shedding of spontaneity that such a rite of passage implies. Youth involves being wafted through Father's private school and enrolled in his clubs at birth, experiencing all the right things (doing drugs means two Aspirins at bedtime), earning a Harvard MBA, and spending languid vacations at large summer homes on the manicured shores of cool green lakes. These precocious progeny learn at their daddies' knees how to exude that air of besieged innocence that marks the Canadian Establishment's young-a mixture of being well bred and mentally inert. As a group, they seldom have an original idea, think it's daring to use an adverb and believe that culture means attending a Pavarotti gala in a tux. They are dull to the point of banalltv. 558 FAREWELL TO GLORY And then there is David Kenneth Roy Thomson. I lis very name evokes the three -generati on dynasty he represents, and he is, by quite a wide margin, the most fascinating of Canada's inheritors, being his own kind of pensive rebel and a recognized art connoisseur to boot. At thirty-five, David Thomson is Deputy Chairman of Woodbridge, the holding company that controls the farnily assets. The trust set up by Roy Thomson, who died in 1976 at eightv-two, having amassed a corporate flush then worth at least $750 million, appointed David, Ken's elder son, to be the nexthead oftheThomson Organization. He will also assume his grandfather's title, which will give him a seat in the House of Lords, never claimed by Ken. "David, my grandson, will have to take his part in the running of the Organization, and David's son, too," the dying Thomson wrote, spelling out the rules. "For the business is now all tied LIP in trusts for those future Thoirisons, so that death duties will not tear it apart.... These Thomson boys that come after Ken are not going to be able, even if they want to, to shrug off these responsibilities. The conditions of the trust ensure that control of the business will remain in Thomson hands for eighty years."* *KenThomson has two other children: Lvnne, eighteen months younger than David, a sti inning brunette m ho graduated from the acting facult-,, at Harvai d and who was in Hollywood in 199 1, ,A orking witl~ a producer, and Peter, eight years David's junior, who participates in Southern Ontario racing circuits and dirtrallV events, practising his driving four or five hours a day. A graduate of the University of Western Ontario, he owns a substantial interest in a4bronto cable-TYcompany and has begun his career inside the Thomson Organization. 'Ib a% oid succession duties, RoyThomson's will stipulated that his personal fortune would be divided among his seven grandchildren. Roy Thomson's trust is administered by his son, Ken, his surviving daughter, Phyllis Audrey, Campbell (the other daughter, Irma, died in 1966), his former chief of staff, Sidney Chapman, and John'Fory. LAST LORD OF THE BAY 559 The scenario is predictable; its leading man is not. The young Thomson marches to his own drum corps. lie is as private as Conrad Black-his only intellectual rival among Canadas young rich-is public. He has climbed to the second-highest position within the Thomson Organization with no profile, has yet to grant his first newspaper, television or any other interview (except for this book), and is so circurnspect that his 1988 marriage to a fashion buyer for Simpsons was missed by Toronto's social columnists and not detected even by the nosy Rosedale mavens who surround his home. His conversation, which is what he must mainly be judged by, since he has yet to exercise much visible power, is an improbable mixture of introspective genius and postindustrial babble. 'Fall and wispy, with curly sandy hair and frigid blue eyes, he is light on both feet, betraying the easy grace born of his training in the martial arts. Intensity characterizes all his thoughts and actions. Ask him the meaning of life or the time of day and the brows furrow into deep scars (the forehead is too youthful to show supporting wrinkles), the eyes grow reflective, and the brain cells almost audibly start churning; there is never any small talk. DAVID THOMSON WAS EDUCNFED at The Hall School in England and Toronto's Upper Canada College. He was (and is) painfully shy, staying away from the sports and military training in which both schools specialize. "I never understood the emphasis on playing games as the only forum for exhibiting manliness," he recalls. "The Upper Canada College Battalion was an unnecessary and wasteful commitment, illustrating the shallow nature of so many contemporaries in early life. As a chore, it was counter to the deep emotional issues which I sought to begin my journey." Not your average prom-date jock. 560 FAREWELL TO GLORY He read history at Cambridge, specializing in studies of the civil service in India from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, particularly under Mountstuart Elphinstone, who rose from aide-de-camp to Colonel Arthur Wellesley (later the Duke of Wellington) to governor of Bombay and was one of the chief founders of state education in India. "My classmates were more interested in military battles," he remembers, "and I must say Wellington fought tactically superb engagements, greater by far than any of his European campaigns, including Waterloo. His tactics were similar to Hannibal's against the Romans after his crossing of the Alps, when he gained the higher ground at the battle of Lake Trasimene. But I was much more fascinated with the mundane aspects of how the British were able to educate and develop an infrastructure of modern government in that huge land mass. Legalities are very important and represent absolute regulation, constrictive and formal. I prefer frameworks to guidelines, because you're able to be creative within them. My mind works with associations and ideas. History taught me this above all else. At an early age, I realized that to not understand these life experiences would lessen my ultimate success and enjoyment in life." To lighten the academic load, Thomson played left wing on the 1976 Cambridge hockey team that beat Oxford for only the fourth time since 1930. "1 like to think I was on the team because of my abilities," he laughs, "but I owned a Volvo, which afforded me a constant place." David believes his most significant formative influence was the weekends he spent with his grandfather at Alderbourne Arches in Buckinghamshire. "He was very lonely and we conversed for hours about business and people," the young Thomson reminisces. "His curious mind was always questioning why things were done in a particular way, seeking to understand the forces LAST LORD OF THE BAY 561 that affect people's judgments. Granddad would relate ]its experiences with various personalities: Chou En-lai, .Mao, Khrushchev, Beaverbrook, competitors, social companions, family. He always admired those people who could laugh at themselves amidst the negative circumstances that surrounded their lives. He was an optinust with an uncanny ability to seize opportunities that others could not sec. This approach was in complete parallel to my own nature." There was another parallel: Roy Thomson unleashed the random thoughts that he credited with helping him resolve the most complex corporate problems by guessing the murderer in the dozen Agatha Christie and other whodunits he devoured every week. Those mystery stories were for him what art woul~ become to his grandson, less an escape than a way to sharpen and exercise the mind for managing the exponential growth of the family fortune. (Every morning of every day David still puts on the copper bracelet Roy Thomson wore to ward off arthritis, as a reminder of the old mans spirit.) It was at this time that his serious interest in painting took root. "Art cam e to mean more and more as I became involved with the lives of the artists and came to better understand the context in which they lived. For me, art has never been a financial or social game." Aware that any cultural hobby pursued by a rich kid was bound to be dismissed as dilettantish, David put in a long and arduous apprenticeship under Hermann Baer, who ran a small shop on London's Davies Street that rented antique props to the film industry and was also an articulate expert in medieval art. The other mentor in art has been his father, whose collection, David claims, "should be celebrated in its completeness; even the frame mouldings are harmonious. He has distilled his vision of a few artists into a handful of works by each. The result is sincere and compelling." 562 FAREWELL TO GLORY "David gets feelings that I never get from pictures," admits his father, Ken. "He never misses the technical aspect ofart. He sees when something is well executed and when its not so well executed. He talks about the soul, the true message of a painting and can sort of read what the artist had in his mind when he did it. I'm not that good. I can't figure those things out. He gets signals that I don't even understand. I just get an instant message that's probably much more shallow than David's." The relationship between the two men is close but not cloying, with the senior Thomson occasionally wondering if his son is tuned in to worldly business realities. "Our private discussions evoke mixed emotions, but once agreed, we tackle issues with a single-minded tenacity," David insists. "I love him deeply, would do anything for him, and I am not alone. Many of my cohorts would defend him to the death." Of his son, Ken Thomson says, "He's a fine young man. The same sensitivity that he relates to his paintings, he relates to people and business. It worries him if somebody isn't being treated right and all that sort of stuff. He relates to quality. When he's involved in something he wants it to be the best, but of course we can't always have the very best. In his position, he could have just taken what's coming and enjoyed it, but that would have been more shallow than his thinking. It wouldn't have been as satisfying." DAVID THOMSON WORKS on the eighteenth floor of the Thomson Building across the street from Toronto City Hall. A visitor entering the private headquarters of his personal holding company, Lavis Incorporated (after his mother's maiden name), is struck by the sight of three incongruous objects: the large-scale model of a 1920s U.S. Post Office monoplane, painted every colour of the rainbow, that looks as if it had just landed out of a LAST LORD OF THE BAY 563 Peanuts cartoon; an exquisite, life-sized thirteenth-century French limestone figure that appears to be bending towards its owner in an attitude of gentle benediction; and the dark green seat from a Second World War Nazi Luftwaffe fighter. The office walls are covered with the striking canvases of Patrick Heron, a controversial contemporary British artist who specializes in jarring colour patterns. David usually works gazing out the window opposite his desk on which are mounted several transparencies. -That one," he explains, "is a Constable, an oil sketch he Painted on his honeymoon in November 1816 of Weymouth in Dorset, along England's south coast. These two are by Cy Twombly, the most compelling of modern artists, who left the States in the 1950s and now lives in Rome. That small transparency is a marvellous limestone figure from about 1260 and represents the beginning of sculpture in the full round. One must travel back-wards to pagan times before one encounters full relief sculpture." In the same mood he produces out of his desk a coin from the Dark Ages, a Merovingian gold Tremissis struck in Lyons about 675 A.D., modelled after the Roman currency of the Emperor Justinian: "Hundreds of nioneyers minted crude coinage in the manner of Imperial Rome, inscribing their names and cities on the reverse legend. The effigies are extraordinary in theirvivid line and spontaneous gesture; they evoke a most wonderful sense of expression and power. For me, thev are the beginnings of the small entrepreneur in the history of coinage-they were created amidst the most barbaric circumstances by a people in constant motion and are amongst the few objects that remain from those distant days." Thomson's most valuable acquisition was J.M.W Turner's magnificent Seascape, Folkestone, which Lord Clark, the former director of the National Gallery (who once owned the painting), described as "the best picture 564 FAREWELL TO GLORY in the world." David bought it at auction in 1984 for $14.6 million, outbidding the National Gallery of Scotland; five years later it was officially valued at $50 million. But his real obsession is with John Constable, the miller's son who with Turner dominated English landscape painting in the nineteenth century. Thomson's first purchase, at nineteen, was a page out of the artist's 1835 Artindel sketchbook, and his current collection of twenty major works and eighty-six of his drawings, as well as oil sketches, watercolours and letters, ranks as the world's finest private representation of Constable's art. In 1991 Thomson published a lavishly printed and illustrated 328-page study, Constable and his Drawings (with text by Ian Fleming-Williams, Britain's leading Constable expert), which has been highly praised by Eng- lish art critics. "In sharp contrast to formal art history monographs," he notes, "one can read this book without having studied fifteen previous works. This is about pure observation, not terribly different to the art itself Constable's sensibility has had a strong influence on my personal philosophy, which I carry forward in all walks of life, including the business. So few people allow themselves to openly see and question scenes and events as he did. All too often subjects are viewed from a narrow perspective, with strong conclusions drawn in advance. Being possessed by imagination, curiosity and such dreamlike qualities doesn't mean one is incapable of pragmatism and tough decision-making. Whenever you lose that sense of idealism, you lose your reason for being. Constable for me has always represented the search for truth." THAT SEARCH HAS TAKEN THOMSON into the soggy pastures of existentialism, at least in the sense that he believes men and women are diminished by not meeting the challenges they set for themselves. Intensely LAST LORD OF THE BAY 565 attracted by war and danger, because those circumstances force people to harness the peak of their physical and emotional energies, he owns a large library documenting first-hand experiences of aerial combat and the uses of camouflage ("creating patterns and colour combinations that transformed each aircraft into a work of art"). He often imagines himself in battle. ("I become excited at the thought of measuring myself in varied situations, alongside IA"ellington in India or being in a fighter, attacking a formation of bombers and being vastly outnumbered. It's an interesting way to test yourself because you set your own limits.") Among his favourite documents is one of the last letters written by Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott, found beside his frozen body in 1912, that Thomson regularly rereads as an example of an undaunted spirit facing death. "The existential idea of lifes journey is very important," he contends. "It's all too easy to become cynical and to forget that we are all children at heart, that when you leave those youthful dreams behind you leave a great part of your being forever, you abandon your sense of wonder and astonishment, the idea that vou can be spiritually moved by something or someone.'; That sense of wonder is best caught in his house, an architect's jewel on a dead-end street in Rosedale where he finds sanctuary. He lives there with his wife, a preRaphaelite beauty named Mary Lou La Prairie, and their daughter, Thyra Nicole. He met Mary Lou in 1988 at Simpsons where she worked as a fashion buyer for young contemporary women's wear. ("Our love for one another was instantaneous. It was a fairy-tale romance. It has changed my life.") David drives a 1984 Audi and owns a pied-~-tei-re in New York and a house in the Highbury district of London. His main interest is the collection at his Toronto house, which is less a home than an art gallery with a 566 FAREWELL TO GLORY kitchen and some bedrooms attached. Every wall is crammed with paintings. The total effect is less than the sum of its parts because individual pictures have so little room to breathe; the eye cannot feast on any one canvas without being distracted by those on either side of it. Edvard Munch, Sir Stanley Spencer, Ilya Chasnik, Piet Mondrian, Eugene Jansson, Picasso, Ivan Kluin, Roger Hilton, Cy Twombly, Joseph Beuys, Ferdinand Hodier, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Mark Rothko, Paul Klee and a dozen other artists of equal international renown are represented. Strangely, except for a small drybrush by David Milne, there are no Canadian paintings. (Not a Krieghoff in sight.) "I look forward to the day," he says, "when I can hang a room of empty frames. What an extraordinary experience that would be. Nothing can be more perfect than a frame and one's perception of balance and space, within and without its running pattern. This is sculpture. Immediately one thinks of the classic argument about what one chooses to leave out as opposed to what one puts back in. As with business, it is what we end up not expending that returns far more in the long run, well beyond any immediate cost savings or profits." And then there are his art objects: a rare book on coloured fifteenth-century woodcuts, among the earliest printed and hand-coloured images in the history of art; facsimiles of the original texts of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and George Orwell's 1984, showing the authors' corrections in ink; a study of fences from the Middle Ages ("one of the finest ways of dating objects and understanding the social order of those times"); an animation cell from Dr Seuss's The Grinch Who Stole Christmas; an Ethiopian book of holy scriptures in hippopotamus-hide binding from the year 1500; an original Schulz cartoon of Charlie Brown; a small woodcut from Lower Swabia, dated 1420; an eighteenth-century African bronze from LAST LORD OF THE BAY 567 Benin; and a magnificent depiction in wood of the Crucifixion, mounted on its original cross, which was the focal point of an unidentified church in South Germany during the last quarter of the twelfth century. David and a visitor gaze at this icon. "The agony of Christ is pronounced with the hips slightly tilted," he explains. "The profile of Jesus' head is quite spectacular. In this piece, one confronts the beginnings of Gothic carving and the tremendous expressionism of the northern world . . ." "Look at those nails," the ovcrwhelmed visitor offers helpfully, "how honest and raw they are . . ." "Well, no, actually I put them there myself; they're what the cross is hanging on." The gallery is constantly being expanded but its paintings will probably never be exhibited. "One does not form an art collection to then have a representative of Architectural Digest come by and write an article that invades one's privacy," Thomson insists. He maintains an intelligence network in New York and London to hunt down the works he seeks. "The art world has taught me harsh lessons on human nature," he confesses. "Money does not open every door. A real collector will rarely sell a work unless he can replace it with something even greater that has more personal meaning. Sometimes the issue can only be resolved by a trade or an exchange. I rely on a few people to update me and avidly peruse books and catalogues. I'll take three or four volumes with me to bed every night. It's no different from my grandfather reading all those spy and detective novels." Almost hidden from view in the basement of the Rosedale house are a few exquisitely fine lead-pencil drawings-of a fish pond, an oak tree, water lilies, wrecked cars. These are some of David Thomson's own. He has been drawing to express his innermost thoughts since childhood. One British critic who saw them while 568 FAREWELL TO GLORY on a visit noted they were "very good indeed, highly detailed, well observed," but they will never be shown. "I sometimes say to Mary Lou, 'I must draw a tree now,' and go away into my world for several hours. I have to. I am absolutely compelled to follow my feelings, or I forfeit the right to live." Thomson makes little effort to separate his passion for art from his devotion to business. In his mind, these twin strands are forever intertwined: "I take art so seriously because it's one of the few pursuits in which I can totally unravel my soul. For me, the act of creation comes through in a better appreciation of business. . . . I measure great achievements in information publishing [the Thomson newspapers] in the same way as I view a compelling work of art." lie dismisses the criticism that Thomson newspapers 1111 the spaces between their ads with the cheapest boiler-plate copy available as being out of date. Instead, he praises employees such as Peter Kapyrka, publisher of the Barrie Examiner, for furthering his company's organic growth by adding a weekly real-estate supplement. There is, according to the youthful inheritor, almost no aspect of art that can't be related to some section of the Thomson Organization's operational code. "If you look at Limoges and Mosan, two of the great French workshops producing art in the twelfth century, you might think, 'What the hell does that have to do with business?"' he says. "Limoges in central France made fantastic reliquaries and chalices for churches and cathedrals with very few variables. But the Mosan craftsmen were different. They worked the market between Li~ge and Cologne. Their representatives sat down directly with the local bishop and asked what he wanted to see in the holy shrine. They were, in effect, forming the first customer focus groups and producing castings that were far superior to the Limoges enamels. You can't do any- LAST LORD OF THE BAY 569 thing well in publishing without a highly developed sense of audience." David's spiritual bible is a remarkable book-length essay entitled Happiness: An Exploration of the Art of Sleeping, Eating, Complaining, Postponing, Sympathising, and, Above All, Being Free, by Theodore Zeldin, an Oxford don who portrays Everyman's journey into paradise, comparing what he encounters with what he expected to find. "The book," Thomson summarizes, "is about having the courage to dream in a highly structured society and the corporate world. It's about having faith in one's intuition, about preserving one's childhood vision and curiosity, about the fact that dissent requires great moral courage, and that failure is as important as success." He is mesmerized by the fact that in his position and state of development he is free to make mistakes and believes that this may be the greatest privilege bestowed on him by wealth. It's the errors in judgment that really accelerate his learning curve; he takes the correct decisions for granted. That learning curve received its most valuable spurt during the decade he spent with the Hudson's Bay Company. DAVID 'rijOMSON'S DEDICATION to the HBC seems incompatible with his artistic temperament and search for mental stimuli. Yet he spent ten years in the service of the Company-between the ages of twenty-four and thirty-four, his most productive business apprenticeship-as a full-time retailer, right down to a term of selling socks at The Bay's downtown Toronto department store. In the summer of 1982, when Ken Thomson took his family on a second northern journey to view the HBCs Arctic kingdom, their guide was once again the 570 FAREWELL TO GLORY Company's George Whitman. The party was encamped on the Belcher Islands in the middle of Hudson Bay when Whitman bluntl~ asked the elder Thomson why he had bought the Hudson's Bay Company. When Ken explained that he had a sense of Canadian history and he did not want to see the Company swapped around, sold off, or allowed to disappear, Whitman turned to David and said, "It would really be nice to hope that someday you might become the Governor. How do you feet about that?" David, who was then looking for a place to light, allowed that he would indeed be interested but that he knew nothing about retailing. Sensing the young mans excitement, Whitman talked for hours about the Company's glorious history and its magical presence in the Canadian wilderness. He suggested to Ken that David not be parachuted into some senior position where he would be usurping the succession of staff climbing through the system but that a comprehensive training program be put together that would expose the young Thomson to the Company's inner workings, and vice versa. "people were very careful about what they'd say to me and were told to be so, anticipating that I would not stay long," David recalls. "But this didn't happen because I becarne enthralled with many areas of the Company's then disjointed business potential. I have always been fascinated by how one motivates people in a negative situation. My business focus was entirely retail, and to learn it well I allowed myself no distractions or meanderings. I committed myself to the cause of making the HBC a great Company again." He began in the main Toronto retail store, then spent a year commuting to Quebec, Saskatchewan, Alberta (where he once forgot his pyjamas in a motel at Medicine Hat) and British Columbia in addition to the fur divisions in New York and Montreal. LAST LORD OF THE BAY 571 Ken Thomson, David Thomson and George Kosich at the 1988 HBC annual meeting Probably his most moving experience was the time he spent at a fur-trading post in Prince Albert. "The juxtaposition was dramatic," he recalls. "Onjuly 4, 1980, 1 bid successfully for a Munch woodblock; the following week I was in Prince Albert, and I remember being taken to the post's backyard where ten bear claws were positioned on the cement floor, with fresh bloodstains and tissue intact. One fellow proceeded to demonstrate the various new traps and took me through the back room, where numerous shiny models were hanging. He hinged several in open positions and tossed a branch into the claw. I shall never forget the powerful crescendo of the folding pincers. For one of the first times I enjoyed a completely unfettered response to life, isolated from big cities and the diversions of money. We drove along dirt roads, watched sunsets, merchandised the store, went fishing and talked of our childhoods. The experience was unforgettable and I developed a deep respect and empathy towards those real people." 572 FAREWELL TO GLORY That warm feeling described his reaction to the Company as a whole. During his travels, he kept a private journal, recording his thoughts-among them: On storefixtures: Chrome is poor choice. For specialty mens store in Toronto, would buy old barns which farmers glad to get rid of and refurbish our departments completely in cedar. On display: Spotlight the ring on a model's finger in a downtown window ... use all senses, including the aroma of good cooking. On old stock: Things never die. One item from an unsuccessful line will become so popular, it becomes one itself. On expansion: To build a new shopping centre or store is an analytical decision with no feelings. Yet selling decisions are all feelings. On selling: Merchandising is the last frontier of the untrained intelligence. On Zellers: Slop it up. Far too clean. On Fred Eaton: Talk to any time. Get in touch. Ball is in my court. In the course of his training, he spent twelve months with one of the HBCs most troubled units, Shop-Rite, which ran five dozen discount catalogue outlets, mostly in Southern Ontario, and was losing about $2 million a year. Pete Buckley, who then ran the division, recalls ihat David was an effective junior manager, particularly as a member of Shop-Rite's ball-hockey team, whiA challenged the company's warehousemen to a match. "I was the referee and it got pretty rowdy," he recalls. "As soon as the warehousemen saw David, I could hear them muttering, 'Get that sucker.' But he was the most competitive guy in there and just beat the hell out of some of them." The admiration was mutual. "I have a lot of LAST LORD OF THE BAY 573 respect for Buckley," Thomson says. "He told me on one occas] on, 'David, do you know how to better understand your consumer? I'll tell you. At one time I lived in an apartment building and at night, using binoculars, I would scan people's apartments, to see what goods they were using.' I said, 'You're a bloody genius! That's so simple!"' David's next and most important step, in July 1983, was his appointinctit as manager of the HBCs suburban Toronto Cloverdale store, which he ran for a year, raising its operating profit to 8.9 percent, among the chain's highest. He established a Grandmother's Boutique ("a fine opportunity to cater to all the empty-nesters in Cloverdale's trading area"), reduced inefficiencies and soon found other managers copying his methods. "For many, it made no sense that David Thomson would need to work, and I think it was a surprise because no one had ever seen me perform alone," he recalls. "That year's journey made me acutely aware of the pressures and discomforts some people felt from the mere thought of my presence." But he persisted, and the time at Cloverdale established his independent reputation among Bay executives. There followed a stint with Simpsons, where he became assistant to George Kosich, who, a year later, would be promoted to run both Simpsons and The Bay. They quickly formed a duo, cruising the HBC retailing empire's inner and outer limits, cutting costs, closing stores, laying off employees, recasting its merchandising philosophy. (What annoyed staffers most was that when Thomson and Kosich would arrive at a store, obviously preparing to wield the axe, they first spent a day walking around each department handing out jujubes.) "The sys- tem was at an impasse," David remembers, "and its dismal financial results mirrored my feelings, as did many conversations and pieces of information that came my way. I had clandestine meetings under stairwells in 574 FAREWELL TO GLORY shopping malls and other places, as employees, torn between what they knew in their hearts was right and the security of their employment, confided to me about basic merchandising issues that were not being addressed. I felt the ground swell beneath me as I realized how passionately these people cared about the Company." Others were critical of his methods, accusing him of grilling underlings about their superiors' performance, then attacking those in charge on the basis of what he'd heard. They claimed that he could operate at only two speeds, full throttle or total indifference, and recalled an HBC management meeting where he grew bored, slumped at his desk, and finally started reading a book. "David used to phone from Liechtenstein on a Sunday night and say, 'Hey boss, can I get Monday off?"' complained Marvin Tiller, then in charge of the HBC"S Northern Stores, where the young Thomson put in some time. Early in 1987, he had to decide whether to continue with retailing or switch to publishing. He flew to London, took a long walk on Hampstead Heath, and opted for the presidency of Zellers. That meant moving to Montreal and taking on his first major executive assignment. "David was only twenty-nine years old, an unknown quantity, his apparent qualifications confined to his shareholdings," recalls J.W "Bud" Bird, an HBC director at the time. "We made the appointment, knowing it was an innovative move that could have a lot of precarious circumstances." With one exception, the investment community was not impressed. "I don't think it's appropriate," an investment analyst charged anonymously in the Financial Times of Canada. "He should not be allowed such a position just because of his father's influence, to take over such a large chain without working his way to the top." The exception was Don Tigert, an analyst with Burns, Fry, who commented, "I was very LAST LORD OF THE BAY 575 impressed with the guy. He said he was going to whack S80 million out of Zellers' expense structure and in just six months he did precisely that." According to David, the franchise had to be brought back down to its pedestrian fundamentals, which had governed its earlier success, because its stores and merchandise were becoming too expensive and head office, in particular, needed some brutal trimming. "In the initial week," he recalls, "I summoned the head-office staff and announced my decision to lay off 250 employees who, in fact, were standing in that room, I remember someone questioning me about having butchered the Simpson organization a couple of years earlier. I always appreciated blunt opinions, and this was no exception." He had a brief but spectacular success at Zellers (he raised operating profit by 45 percent), although some attribute a good deal of the credit to the influence of his mentor, George Kosich, who was now president of the IJBC. It was followed by a frustrating term as president of Simpsons which, unlike Zellers, was no easy turnaround, and after a year he was discreetly promoted to part-time chairman and sixteeti months later resigned to pursue his other business interests. Although his relations with Kosich have cooled noticeably and some question his continuing interest in retailing, he remains a director of the HBC and attends its Executive Committee meetings. "I have asked my father on many occasions," savs he, "where the family might find a great franchise equal to the Hudsons Bay Company." Most if not all Thonison employees who have come into contact with David respect him but eventually become overdosed on his intensity and his lingo. He told one dissatisfied British staff member that perhaps he should consider leaving the firm, that there were certain disadvantages and anxieties involved in working for someone like him. "But at the end of the day," he added, 576 FAREWELL TO GLORY i6you may say: 'You know, it's interesting working for David. Even if he's mad.' If that means I'm not normal, I'm perfectly happy with that. That's the type of dialogue I really enjoy because it not only gives me strength but allows so many wonderful initiatives to occur in the business." DAVID THOMSON IS VOLATILE, as unpredictable as a hailstorm. He could become the leader of the new generation of Canada's Establishment, or he might seek permanent refuge in his art. He is just beginning his run, with each new experience providing the bounce that will determine his ultimate direction. Not at all like the father he loves but very close to the grandfather he respects, he faces a future limited only by his ability to survive his own intensity. Perhaps he had an inkling of the fact that nothing could stop him except himself when he chose the quote to accompany his picture in the Upper Canada College 1975 graduation yearbook: "We are never so much the victims of another as we are the victims of ourselves." Meanwhile, he goes on pontificating, turning dollars and flexing his expanding authority. "I wish," he says, "to prolong those inspired moments in life and see them continually manifested in all areas of endeavour.... My search is always to create new wealth." Once a Thomson, always a Thomson. EPILOGUE The Hudson's Bay Company is permanently woven into the marrow and the dreams of this country. Its geography became Canada, its history the new nation's dowry. TWO DECADES INTO ITS FOURTH CENTURY of existence, the Hudson's Bay Company has seldom been spiritually weaker or economically stronger. When Ken Thomson decided to wash his hands of the fur trade and jettison its northern operations, the Company lost its soul. Yet by abandoning its founding territory and rejecting its past as the basis of its future, he inadvertently set the Company free. For most of three hundred years the HBC`s prevailing ethic could be summed up in one word: survival. Such a benign state of endurance was, of course, squarely within the Canadian experience, since the country prided itself on nothing so much as just being there. The resultant mindset was best caught by Margaret Atwood in her seminal work, Survival, and by HarryJ. Boyle, the Canadian broadcaster who rhapsodized about "the soulsharpening satisfaction that comes from being a survivor." While survivors are the winners in any game, standing by is not enough. The problem with survival is that it too often produces an over-respectftil, timorous mentality. Hypnotized by the extraordinary history of 578 EPILOGUE 579 the institution they represented, the Bay men turned inward and became marginal to the country growing up around them-in it, but not of it. Their obsessive concern with durability governed nearly every stage of the Company's evolution from a one-fort trading operation on Hudson Bay to its modern incarnation as a $5-billion merchandising conglomerate. Reading the Bay men's journals, one is struck by the strong sense of obligation they felt to those who had gone before or would come after; they behaved as if one wrong step might wipe out the HBCs history. They didn't seem to realize that history is not a disposable commodity, that the future cannot erase the past. The Iludson's Bay Company is permanently woven into the marrow and the dreams of this country. Its geography became Canada, its history the new nation's dowry. More important, the Company's frontier presence spawned the country's founding ethic. All those early forts and trading posts were really Company towns, demanding deference to authority from inhabitants inside their ramparts and deference to nature beyond them. That orderly attitude -stressing collective survival instead of individual excellencebecame the country's prevailing ideology, and it still colours what Canadians do and especially don't do. That was very different from the American frontier, where authority was challenged rather than deferred to, and the hunt was on for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" instead of "peace, order and good government." One expression of those dissimilar approaches was the treatment of aboriginals. The Americans conquered their frontier, sharpshooters against tomahawks, with first the mountain men slaughtering Indians for their furs, followed by the U.S. Cavalry, which fought sixty- nine Indian wars, often killing "Injuns" just to "watch lein spin." 580 EPILOGUE In contrast, the 11BC established a long-term commercial relationship with the natives across the territory that would later become Canada. Its traders never shot their customers. It was the Indians (and later the Inuit) who provided the furs swapped for imported goods at the Company stores. The terms of trade were not always fair, but being exploited was not as bad as being shot. In a curious way, it was a form of mutual exploitation because the Indians and Inuit were able to trade near-worthless pelts (they had previously killed animals mainly as food) for axes, guns, blankets, tea kettles and the many other desirable goods that made wilderness life easier. While it is impossible to generalize about any large group of employees-especially when their tenure stretched over three centuries-the Hudson's Bay Company traders were more saints than sinners. Keeping in mind the fact that they ruled a large slice of the earth's territory for a dozen generations-with virtually no accountability-the Governors, officers and servants cannot be charged with any great burden of shame. They were mostly good men, some better than others, who led expedient lives in harsh surroundings, and lived to tell the tale. As well as deference to authority, the most significant strain they injected into the Canadian character was the Presbyterian notion of stressing life's sombre virtues. Mostly Scots, the early Bay men rejected creativity and joy, replacing these qualities with stoicism and the notion that hard work was the Lord's eleventh commandment. In contrast to the exuberant individualism of the American West, the idea was to be plainly dressed and plain spoken, never too free with one's money or emotions. Until its Canadianization in 1970, perpetuating the HBC as a corporate entity often seemed less a means to desirable financial goals (such as shareholder dividends EPILOGUE 581 or capital reinvestment) than an end in itself That very special onus flowed from its genesis as a royally chartered trading company and the prestige of its early governors-Prince Rupert, the Duke of York, the Duke of Marlborough-and the imposing peers and knights who followed. The influence of these personages, plus the never-denied rumour thatthe Royal Family still owned its stock, marked the Company as an untouchable colonial agency. Imperial troops and fleets of the Royal Navy were dispatched to defend its flanks; the Bank of England coddled its treasury, lending it credit and the occasional Governor. Within its North American domain, the HBC became a significant instrument of empire, its explorers probing the West and North, planting across the frontier the necklace of forts that kept the American annexationists at bay, and laying down the commercial matrix for a national economy. "The honoured old initials HBC have been interpreted facetiously as meaning 'Here Before Christ,"' noted W Kaye Lamb, the fur-trade historian; "instead, they might more fittingly be taken as signifying'Here Before Canada.'And if this had not been so, it is unlikely that Canada as we know it today would now exist." The Company acted as a volunteer surrogate of the British Empire, occupying the territories beyond its founding North American colonies until Canada's own aspirations stretched across to the Pacific and up to the .A,rctic oceans. The writ of the HBC's offbeat mercenary army of fur traders ran across the continent. By canoe, York boat, steamship and Red River cart, on snowshoes and aboard the backs of pack-ponies, they eventually established the viability of a transcontinental state. This was all heady stuff and it was no wonder that the Companys employees felt they were a very special breed, developing an almost canine loyalty to the HBC. It was as if signing on 582 EPILOGUE, with the Bay included an unspoken contract that in return for accepting relatively low pay and inadequate working conditions they could enter the faith-become adventurers and merchant princes. An essential element of that belief system required their acceptance of the notion that the Company had to be protected at all costs-human and fiscal-so that it would go on forever. Because the first duty of any faith is to perpetuate itself, that creed paralysed the HBCs policy planners. They took occasional risks, but they never bet the Company. At those moments when an intuitive leap was required to advance the HBC into fresh and potentially lucrative economic jurisdictions, its decision-makers almost always opted for safety and survival. THERE ARE TWO WAYS TO VIEW the history of the Hudson's Bay Company's first three hundred and twenty years: what it did, and what it might have done. What it did, as this three-volume study of the Bay documents, was to endure and endure comfortably-to survive considerably longer than any of history's many chartered trading companies. Its traders moved across the empire of the Bay like assault platoons of an inland regiment, ready to defend the faith wherever it might be threatened. There is nothing wrong with an organization determined to preserve itself; many more daring commercial enterprises have long since vanished from contention. Yet in strictly commercial terms, the Company's marathon was something of a bust. Its dividend record indicates that after an initial fourteen years without paybacks it earned a 50-percent dividend in 1684 and a similar rate four years later. It then took more than two centuries of modest profits averaging well under 10 percent before the 50-percent rate was achieved again, for EPILOGUE 583 one year, in 1913. Despite its glorious history, the HBC was a spectacular financial underachiever, yet few of the Company's guiding spirits were willing to admit just how mediocre their performance had really been. One exception was Sir Henry Benson (later Lord Benson), who resigned in a huff as the HBc's Deputy Governor in 1962 to become senior adviser to the Governor of the Bank of England. "I remember giving enormous offence to the Canadians when I said it was extraordinary how little the Company had achieved, bearing in mind that it had bv then been in existence for nearly three hundred years,;' he vividly recalled. "This was taken to be, quite wrongly, a reflection on the then management. I didn't mean that at all. I meant it was surprising that a company in existence for three centuries still only had assets of whatever they were at the time. This caused enormous offence, but it was true. I don't think that it used its position and its advantages very well for long periods in its history. Looking back, it still surprises me that it wasn't a much greater trading corporation, operating all over Canada. It was asleep." John Ernest Harley Collins, a former naval captain (DSC and bar) who rose to head Morgan, Grenfell, one of England's leading merchant banks, and spent seventeen years as an HBC director, put the case more succinctly: "We fell into a folie de grandeur, became too conservative, allowed things to humble on, just because it was the HBC. " Although it owned the world's most valuable land monopoly-a third of the still-to-be-explored northern part of the American continent-the Company spent most of the eighteenth century huddled in a handful of insignificant posts around Hudson Bay, trading a few pelts but doing almost nothing to claim the economic benefits of the great land mass at its back door. Between 1693 and 1714 it maintained only twenty-seven men on the Bay at a time when free traders from Quebec were 584 EPILOGUE ranging far inland in their quest for furs. (By 1688 the coureurs de bois had penetrated past Lake Superior nearly to the present site of Winnipeg.) Joseph Robson, an early HBC surveyor stationed on Hudson Bay, was dead right when he charged that "the Company have for eighty years slept at the edge of a frozen sea." This isolation was no accident. It was such strict corporate policy that when an I IBC trader named John Butler wanted to send his son inland to learn the Indian language, he was ordered to have the boy stay put. The Company didn't establish its first inland trading post until 1774 and in the next four decades was almost wiped out by the rampaging traders of Montreal's North West Company. The Nor'Westers sarcastically praised the Company of Adventurers for providing such a useful "cloak to protect the trade from more active opponents." Except for the occasional jolt of imagination, the Company operated at its maximum effectiveness mainly during the four-decadc span when Sir George Simpson ran it, from 1821 to 1860. Unlike his predecessors, Simpson expanded its geographical limits and pushed it well beyond furs into trading lumber, cranberries, frozen salmon and even North Pacific icebergs and glaciers. (His crews sawed off chunks of the appropriate size and loaded them aboard a fleet of ]eased ships for a quick journey to San Francisco, where the ice was sold for refrigerating meat.) Acting with the hauteur of a man in charge of his private universe, Simpson did any danin thing he pleased and in the process temporarily transformed the HBC into a dynamic and imaginative enterprise. APART FROM ITS PRE0CCUPXrION with survival, the Hudson's Bay Company suffered from three centuries of being run on a part-time basis by well-connected (and well-intentioned) London financiers who didn't know EPILOGUE 585 the going rate for stamina in the Canadian bush. They were the ultimate absentee landlords. Nothing was more symbolic of their stewardship than the fact that it took 264 years before any Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company-Sir Patrick Ashley Cooper, the twenty-ninth man to hold the office-actually visited Hudson Bay. At nearly every major turning point, the Company's London godfathers, not quite trusting their colonial appointees in Canada to do the right thing, chose to do as little and as late as possible. With a few enlightened exceptions, the British overlords seemed mainly concerned with not becoming agents of the HBCs demise. They neither granted their Canadian administrators full authority nor exercised it themselves-except at the beginning, when the stakes were too small to matter. The Hudson's Bay Company was confronted by so many dazzling business opportunities it refused to exploit that it's a miracle it didn't founder out of a sense of corporate shame. Here was a company that dominated the world's fur trade for most of three hundred years yet never made a single fur coat. Here was a company that pioneered Canada's transportation arteries (even the TransCanada Highway runs along the old canoe routes) and for two centuries exercised a transportation monopoly in the West and later in the North, yet when it came time to build a transcontinental railway, opted out of the process. Here was a company that had the only functioning infrastructure in the Prairies and owned seven million acres of prime real estate, much of it along the new railway route, yet did little to capitalize on these invaluable assets except to sell off the land. Here was a company that established a world-wide market for its "Best Procurable" Scotch, for its high-quality gin and rye, but instead of continuing to distil its popular house brands turned the business over to Seagrams, harvesting no advantage from its good reputation in this high mark-up industry. "The Company could 586 EPILOGUE surely have developed more of the country in so many imaginative ways," complained IAalter Rose, a former head of both the Fur Sales and Wholesale departments at the HBC. "They had all that land, had been there for two centuries before the European immigrants arrived, and all they ever did was sell the raw acreage and take out dividends." Even in its modern retailing phase, the Company, having had the money and opportunity to snare most of the desirable shopping-centre sites across western Canada, concentrated instead on the miniature versions of Harrods it had built in provincial capitals, nurturing these masonrv mausoleums even when they seemed as obsolete as trans-Atlantic ocean liners. While other department-store chains were busy constructing the suburban shopping malls that would capture the bulk of the retail business, the I IBC was throwing up grand concrete parking garages next to its downtown retail palaces. The HBCs most obvious dereliction of opportunity was the failure to capitalize on its potential oil and gas reserves. In the mid-1920s the Company still held mineral rights on 4.5 million acres checkered across the Prairies. Rather than exploit that invaluable asset, described by Fortune as "an oilman's dream," the HBC leased the entire package to Marland Oil of Ponca City, Oklahoma (and its successor, Continental), retaining only a 21 percent interest. By the late 1960s, the joint venture ranked as Canada's third-largest oil and gas producer, with 1,606 wells in production and 11.2 million acres under licence. Its earnings were twice as high as those of the HBC and its equity worth four times as much-even though the Company received less than a quarter of the royalties. "Instead of leasing out all those oil and gas lands," Alexander Maclntosh, Deputy Governor of the HBC, lamented, "we should have held on to them like the CPR." EPILOGUE 587 L.F. McCollum, former chairman of Continental Oil and a director of Hudson's Bay Oil & Gas, was more blunt: "They were years of lost opportunity. I felt sorry for the UBC. They had great assets and did nothing about them. They should have created their own oil company and, if they didn't want to keep it going, spun it off to the stockholders rather than allowing the benefits to flow to somebody else. The Hudson's Bay people used to tell me how proud they ~A ere to be the oldest company in the western hemisphere and I'd tell them, 'So what? What have you (lone? Continental Oil is only twenty-five years old and our assets are worth ten times as much as yours, so please don't brag to me."' FOR MORE THAN THREE HLYNDRF.D YEARS, the IIBC men were content to bask in the comforting faith that the Company of Adventurers was too old, too big and too important ever to disappear. They were right. The Company still exists, even if it has changed more dramatically in the past two decades than in the two previous centuries. Although it was the 1979 purchase of the Hudson's Bay Company by Ken Thomson that eventually shuffled its components beyond recognition, the fundamental shift in the Company's character occurred with its transfer to Canada nine years earlier. Before 1970, the HBC had been a very British company, its managing directors in Canada being English (like Philip Chester) or Anglophiles (like Dick Murray) who expended most of their energies defending their decisions, large and small, to the London board, which was composed of distinguished City men whose common strain was that they refused to think like North Americans. The appointment of Don McGiverin as president and later as governor changed all that. As North American as they 588 EPILOGUE come, he launched a dramatic sequence of risky takeovers that created one of the world's great retailing empires whose potential impressed Ken Thomson enough to buy in. By mid-1991, the H13C had become a business like any other, except for the tug of its memories. Having buried its past and shed its glory, it had become an aggressive and successful retailing colossus, ready to jump into the United States if that seemed an appropriate tactic. Like Canada, the Hudson's Bay Company has always shuttled between unstoppable momentum and impending collapse-a great might-have-been Company in a great might-have-been country, both facing an unpredictable future.  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS THE ORIGINAL IMPULSE to establish the Hudson's Bay Company in the mid-seventeenth century had come from London, and it was there that the mysterious sources of its astonishing longevity had to be traced. That involved several journeys to England, where many interviews-some lasting most of a day~altered my preconceived notions of the British business mentality. I understood at last how the Company's huge domain could have been run with such enduring results for three centuries by men who seldom set foot in it. Wry thoughts came to mind as I made my appointed rounds through the City, London's bustling financial district, meeting the dozen remarkable men who had been the Company's last British overlords. In few former seats of empire is there so much to occupy the eye, the imagination and the memory. The men who built London's magnificent office structures, and whose descendants still occupy them, brought a touch of civility to the rough-and-tumble world of commerce. Former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who knew his history, once remarked that he could think of no more delightful period or place in which to have lived than mid-nine- teenth-century England, when the country was run by a small group of highly intelligent and largely disinterested individuals. I know precisely what he meant, even if the merchant adventurers I met were anything but dis- interested. Their involvement with the Hudson's Bay Company had been a magic moment in their successful professional lives. Interviewing them was no simple task. Steeped in discretion, they pleaded everything except ignorance to 589 590 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS avoid my questions, and it took several visits before they felt at ease with me and my tape recorder. (One former Governor kept eyeing the machine with suspicion, certain that whatever kind of contraption it was, the thing might explode in his face at any moment.) Though they eventually proved to be far more helpftil and forthcoming than their Canadian counterparts, their initial demeanour was reminiscent of John le Carr6s astute comment that "your extrovert Englishman or woman of the supposedly privileged classes ... can have a Force Fwelve nervous breakdown while he stands next to you in the bus queue, and you may be his best friend, but you'll never be the wiser." That impression of reticence stayed with me as I visited a Royal Bank of Canada safehouse near Buckingham Palace. The site was so historic that I vaguely wondered what century I had blundered into; then, catching a glimpse of a 747 in a holding pattern above Hyde Park, I stepped inside. The tight-lipped guests included Lord Adeane, financial adviser to the Queen; Jocelyn Hambro, a leading merchant banker and chairman of the Phoenix Assurance Company; Hugh Dwan, Managing Director in London for the HBC; Geoff Styles, in charge of the Royal Bank's British operations; and Lord Tweedsmuir. I had heard rumours that the Royal Family still owned the IIBC stock their ancestors had acquired three hundred years before, so I asked Lord Adeane whether they had a special interest in the Company. "Yes," was the discreet reply-that, and not another word.* *When I returned to Canada, I asked Donald McGiverin, the HBC's current Governor, the same question. His reply was slightly more illuminating. "I don't really know," he said, "because no record of royal stockholdings is published. But the last time I saw the Duke of Edinburgh during the Canadian royal tour in 1977, he took me aside and whispered, 'Tell me, how are we doing?"' ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 591 Lord 'Rveedsmuir, son of John Buchan, first Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield and Canada's fifteenth Governor G eneral, turned out to be the most interesting guest of all. He had spent fourteen months as a trader for the Hudson's Bay Company at Cape Dorset on the southwestern tip of Baffin Island. That had been forty-one years earlier, but when he spoke about "our flag" he meant not the Union Jack but the HBCs house pennant. "I am a Scottish adventurer, and we do not change much with the centuries," he told me, recalling that the year at Dorset had been the happiest of his life, that the Company was a great link of empire, and that the Scots were its perfect servants. THE HOUSE OF LORDS-repository for many former HBC characters-is a geriatric paradise, a venue out of time and place, with elderly dukes, earls, countesses, barons and bishops sitting about looking at one another, whispering in mildewed tones of past triumphs, terrified of dying with empty appointment books. Their inflexible graces are still in place but they look as if they would get winded playing chess. In a nearby lounge, I spotted Lord Home, Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, former Prime Ministers all, who looked like Tussaud replicas of themselves. ("In his dotage, sorry to say. Makes no sense at all," somebody breathed, pointing at Wilson, nodding in a corner with a fixed smile on his face.) My host was the fourth Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal, a great-grandson of the Labrador fur trader who had been associated for seventy-five years with the Company, twenty-five of them as its Governor. The current Strathcona turned out to be a tall, vital and charming gentleman with a great white beard and hair growing all over him, sprouting out of his shirt cuffs and collar. "I'll risk the beef," he said, as we settled into the 592 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Peers' Dining Room, a setting straight out of an Alexander Korda extravaganza, with silver serving dishes and waiters who look as if they had been carved out of Pears soap. A graduate in engineering from McGill University and a former minister of state for defence in Margaret Thatcher's cabinet, he lived on one of his ancestor's many estates, on the Isle of Colonsay in the Inner Hebrides. He finally cleared up the mystery of what happened to the CPR's original last spike and produced some fascinating new evidence about his great-grandfather's relations with the HBC. IN THE CORNER OF THE LORDS'TEA-ROOM sat Viscount Amory, who was first appointed to cabinet by Winston Churchill, had served as Chancellor of the Exchequer under Harold Macmillan, and was the last British Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company (1965-70). Derick Heathcoat Amory resembled a mellow and very wise owl. But his eyes were alive with that special look of absorbed experience that only a man with a million miles on his meter can convey. We chatted away the afternoon, looking at the barges heading along the Thames towards Ratcliffe Wharf, where HBC supply ships had once been loaded for their ocean crossings. He was intrigued by my tape recorder ("Isn't that amazing-all in that little black box!") and spoke with barely concealed puzzlement about Lord Thomson, the Canadian billionaire who had acquired control of the HBC following his tenure. "I was amazed he put so many eggs in one basket," he said, "but he is a man of honour, and the last time I met him he became quite sentimental about the Company. He told me at dinner, almost with tears in his eyes, 'Derick, you may think of me as a hard-faced Canadian financier who wants to see what he can get out of this Company. If ever you catch ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 593 me at that game, let me know. You will never find me doing that!"' My final visit m as to Beaver House, the 11Bc's London headquarters, and lunch at the Strathcona Restaurant on Garlick Hill with Arthur Frayling. Then head of the HBC's fur auction house-the world's largest-he had spent fifty-eight years with the Company yet could still muster the enthusiasm of a boy on the first day of summer camp. MunchingTrout Cleopatra, he described his obsession with the Bay. "It's nota job, it's a calling," said he. "To be a Bay man has always caused me to feet that one is working for a Company with a fairly big foot in history. Where is the value commercially in such a feeling? There is none. But I always felt, as did most oldtime Hudson's Bay employees, that I was contributing to something a little outside the ordinary commercial run. I can't really put it into words, because I can't see too much sense in it. But thats the way I feel." THAT'S THE WAY I FEEL too, and it was while touring Canada's Axctic-between my British visits-that I came closest to touching the Company's spirit. The HBC then operated astring of 173 stores and fur-trading posts in Canada's Arctic. In a series of airborne sweeps , into Baffin Island, up to Resolute and around the great arcs ofJames and Hudson bays, I interviewed many of these Bay men and their aboriginal clients, the Injians and Inuit who people this volume. The time-worn faces of these fur-trade veterans, durable mercenaries out of Scotland, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, were permanently feathered from liletimes spent outdoors. Even if the real glory days were long gone, it still meant something to work for the Company in Canada's North. Managemerit's cloying paternalism, poor pay and the frustration 594ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS of being a cog in the machinery of an often comatose bureaucracy were tempered by the idea of being part of a tradition as grand as the Royal Navy's. Canada's North is a state of mind, having more to do with attitude than with latitude. Even official definitions of the Arctic differ, some restricted to territory above the Arctic Circle, an arbitrary line at 66.320 north, while others place its limits somewhere beyond the tree-line, a boundary that dips 870 miles below the Arctic Circle at James Bay and rises 220 miles above it at Horton River. The outrageous dimensions of Arctic geography~13 million square miles, spread over five time zones- dwarfed yetenchanted die Baymen. The best of them saw it as an empty land filled with wonders, even if they recognized that it offered only a temporary truce with their presence. Others regarded their surroundings as a prison where cold and wind erased the hope of meaningful human endeavour. But most of the HBC field hands, at least those who stayed, viewed the North as a place with its own natural laws, where they could get to know their true feelings on a first-name basis. "Hell," I was told by James Deyell, then head of the HBCs Ungava District, who had arrived in 1965 from the Shetlands, "I was born the equivalent of three hundred miles north of here. I came right out of grammar school at seventeen because the only other choice I bad at home was joining the merchant navy or living off my father. I was getting $2,500 a year, which I thought was marvellous-an unheard-of salary in the Shetlands for a trainee. Since I arrived here, I've never had time for an identity crisis. When you're surrounded by silence, you find out in a hurry who you are. Once the life grabs you, it's permanent and it never lets you go. Certainly working for the Bay is more than just a job-, for some reason, you perform above your imagined capacity. At the end of the day, you can certify that you were there, that you made a difference." ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 595 The Canadian Arctic has oniv two seasons, winter and August, its weather varying from clear, sparkling heat waves to white-outs that reduce visibility to the inside of a dwelling and the human comfort zone to the immediate circumference of its stove. The cold is unimaginable. One HBC trader described how he and his companion managed to survive a typical winter in their Company house: "The weather grew colder and colder and, atjim's suggestion, I moved from my room upstairs down to the kitchen, where I slept on top of the table. Then came the day when even Jim was forced to leave his bedroom to sleep with me in the kitchen. Then the living room, and finally the office, became uninhabitable. . . . If I had to go only to the store I would dress as though I was going on a hunting trip." Another HBC Factor, WO. Douglas at Baker Lake, loved eggs and imported a few chickens every summer. In winter, lie not only had to bring them indoors but ended up knitting little duffel coats for them. The resident Bay traders lived and worked in a strange world. In summer, the northern sun never sets; then for eight months it seldom rises. For two-thirds of each winter the moon remains below the horizon. During those gloomy intervals, the main natural light source is the shimmering Aurora Borealis, hanging over the polar horizon like a spangled theatre curtain. Winter temperatures drop below -550F, causing steel to snap like celery stalks, tires to become as brittle as glass and to detonate. Human senses are stretched to their outer limits as the moisture in the atmosphere freezes, breaking down into countless ice particles that attack exposed skin. Ptarmigans make the sound of tearing silk as they painfully propel themselves through the fTigid atmosphere. NORWAYHOUSE, NEAR THE TOP of Lake Winnipeg, was the inland rallying point for the I IBCs canoe brigades on their way to tidewater at York Factory on Hudson Bay. 596 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The Company's Northern Council met here intermittently between 1821 and 1860, and the ghost of Sir George Simpson still haunts the place. It was here, too, in 1875, that Treaty Number Five was negotiated by which the Saulteauxand Swampy Cree ceded to Canada their possessory rights over the surrounding hundred thousand square miles, one of the worst deals the Indians ever made. While on one of my northern probes, I met Adam Dick, Chief of the War Lake Indian Band, born in a tepee seven miles northwest of Split Lake in 1897, then living at Norway House. He had started trapping beaver and snaring rabbits at the age of eight. "My dad made me a bow and arrow and snowshoes, and my mum made me a bag," he recalled. "When I began hunting by myself, I caught one rabbit and four prairie chickens. Later, I worked twenty-three years for the Hudson's Bay as a cribber, freighting supplies by dog team or canoe to twelve trappers' camps. They paid me sixty-five dollars a month. I never got a raise and never got a pension. I brought them lots of furs but I didn't get anything from them." The chief, who was eighty-seven when I saw him and had yet to acquire his first grey hair, had only one kind thought about the Company. "There was never any room in the sled for me because they piled all the space up with supplies. So I had to run behind it ... I guess that's why I'm so healthy." Before leaving Norway House, I asked how nearby Bull Island got its name. I wish I hadn't. When a bull gored a local Bay man named Isbister, the animal was smeared with tar, taken by boat to the small rocky outcrop, and set on fire. Nobody ever goes to Bull Island now. At Fort Severn, I spent a long afternoon with Manasseh Munzie Albany, aged ninety-seven, a hunter and ship's pilot who used to lug seven bags of mail to York Factory and back every winter, and his friends Reverend Jeremiah Albany and Abel Bluecoat. They told me about ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 597 life at Fort Severn: gasoline costs $6 a gallon, there is no electricity, and it's $9 for a four-litre can of naphtha that lights a cabin for three nights. Nearly everybody is on welfare, barely getting by. Only 270 people live at Severn, but the Bay store's annual sales top $350,000, with average niark-ups of 40 percent. Not so long ago a ninety-foot freighter loaded with eighty tons of foodstuffs for the Bay, operated by an Inuk named Lewis Voisey, ran aground nearby, and the weather turned so nasty the ship had to be abandoned for the winter. Next spring, when she was refloated, not a single item of the vessel's cargo was missing except six cans of pop, con- sumed by the captain while cleaning out the bilge. He paid the HBC for the six-pack. Rupert House, where I spent a fascinating two days, is the oldest of the Bay settlements, built in 1668 by M6dard Chouart, Sleur Des Groseilliers, who led the first trading expedition into the Bay. There is palpable tension here between the HBC' and its captive customers. The Cree measure their feelings for the Company by the price it pays for muskrat and beaver skins. "Why do they need to make me pay back my lousy $25 credit, when they arrive here in a $2-million plane?" is a common complaint. (Twenty whites and a thousand Cree live here, and there's enough traffic to fill a DC-3 four times a week.), A local Indian named Isaiah Salt, who spent forty years working for the LIBC, told me the most he ever made was $25 a month. This is Billy Diamond country, and it is he, as Grand Chief of the Cree, and not some Company functionary, who reigns supreme. It was at Cape Dorset that the artist James Houston spent a decade introducing the Inuit to print-making. I had always been mystified by how such luminous artistry could flourish in a climate that a Company trader once described as being so cold that "people are born with jumper cables as umbilical cords." Houston, who had 598 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS' learned the graceful alchemy of print-making in Japan, inspired the local stone carvers to try this new art form, which quickly brought the best of them world fame. I remembered Houstons wonderful story about the time he gathered his artists for an early-morning pep-talk because he wanted them not only to produce prints of great originality but to make enough money to support their families in what was then a cashless society. He made his point by slapping down several dollar bills on the print-room table. "When I returned to the shop late that night," he told me, "I found one of our most talented print-makers just completing a stone-cut of his version of a Canadian dollar bil L He had cut it oversize, he said, to increase its value." The going rate for marijuana joints at Broughton Island is fifty dollars, and the market is brisk. The HBC used to buy 30,000 sealskins a season here, but Brigitte Bardot's protests killed all that. The only remaining cash crop was selling hunting tags to American tourists who wanted to shoot polar bears; the local quota was twentytwo tags, and they fetched $3,000 each. When I cornered an Inuk and asked how fair the HBCs prices really were, he was lost for an answer because there was no alternative outlet to match quotes against. Head lettuce was selling at $2.98, which didn't seem unreasonable. One of the minor ironies of the Arctic these days is that it's the visitors who wear the furs while the Inuit keep warm in army-surplus down-filled parkas. Dog teams have all but disappeared; teenaged Inuit with mirror sunglasses race their snowmobiles in endless circuits of the settlement's one street. Resolute Bay, Canada's second-most-northern community, had lost its horizon when I arrived; the sky was the same pitted-pewter hue as the land. Hugging the 74th parallel and about a thousand miles from the North Pole, Resolute has the worst climate and the worst economy in ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 599 Canada. I couldn't interview Mayor George Eckalook because he was busy. One of the few people with a job, he was driving the settlement's only garbage truck. The place was dotted with snowmobile skeletons and boarded-up houses, including a complex of Ottawasponsored apartment buildings that had to be abandoned because the plumbing was embedded in the north wall, where it froze for good. An earlier bureaucratic initiative moved Inuit families here from Port Harrison and Pond Inlet. They were told the hunting would be better, but nobody notified the animals. The Resolute Inuit are proud and independent. In 1982, when the Bay store burned to the ground and its credit records were destroyed in the blaze, within hours, every Inuk at Resolute had reported his or her outstanding credit to the local manager. A quick check with head office confirmed that the total tallied precisely with the Company's figures. HAVING COME To THE END of the nearly ten years devoted to this three-volume study of the Hudson's Bay Company, I find myself surrounded by literary debts. The half-million words contained in Company ofAdventurers (1985), Caesars of the Wilderness (1987) and Merchant Princes (1991)-plus the illustrated Empire of the Bay (1989)-were my own, but their inspiration sprang from many sources. My prime obligation is to the five hundred or so men and women I interviewed about the HBC. Most of these resource people are listed in the appendices of the three books. I have donated the tapes and transcripts of the interviews to the Provincial Archives of Manitoba in Winnipeg, where, after a decent interval, they will be publicly available. At the same time, I'm grateful to the Company's current owners and executives for allowing me unrestricted access to archives and files without demanding even a glance at my manuscript. 600 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS These books could never have been written without the inspired determination of Shirlee Smith, who until recently was head of the IIBC Archives in Winnipeg. She not only encouraged the idea of a popular history of the FIBC but her personal readings of my chapters proved invaluable. Anne Morton of' the Archives has also been treinendously helpful. John de B. Pavne, a former f IBC executive and political alchemist, was of immense assistance. I have greatly benefited from generous professional advice and personal support of such distinguished scholars as Tim Ball, Abe Potstein, Blair Stonechild, Alan Wilson, Hartwell Bowsfield, W. Kave Lamb, John S. Galbraith and the late Richard Glover. They and others encouraged this project because they understood what I was trying to accomplish and subscribed to my notion that truth is not necessarily the sum of all the ascertainable facts. The preparation of the sections ofthis book dealing with the North was greatly assisted by the wisdom of Stu Hodgson, the former C ommissioner of the Northwest Territories, NIVT cabinet ministers Nellie Cournoyea and Gordon -Wray, Senator Willie Adams and Peter Ernerk. Their advice was particularly appreciated. Janet Craig and Martin Lynch, who have edited all mv books, performed their usual magic, bravely attempting to make my overheated prose more comprehensible. George Whitman and the late Al Hochbauni became my friends during the research for these volumes. Their grace and kindness, their sharing of perceptions and knowledge made it worthwhile. I regret that Sir William "Tony" Keswick passed away before this volume was publishe~. Thanks go also to Cynthia Good, publisher at Penguin Canada, whose dedication and contribution to this series I gratefully acknowledge; Mary Adachl, for her fabulous copy editing; Kathryn Dean, for choosing ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 601 and captioning the books' illustrations; Chris Blackburn, for compiling the Index and the Chronology of the present volume; Neil West and Jim Gordon, for their conscientious word processing; Hilda Earl, for assistance with the Chapter Notes, Bibliography and Resource People; and, above all, Pat Harding, my loyal and indefatigable assistant, for putting up with me, co-ordinafing my untidy life as well as my hectic work schedule. As always, a salute to the bravura Artistry in Rhythm of Stan Kenton, who kept me alive and kicking. When I started work on Company of Adventurers, it seemed like an uncomplicated excursion into Canadian history. Now, so many words and years later, I leave the project, happy to have resurrected, however briefly, many heroes and villains whose existence had too long been ignored by Canadians convinced their country's history is dull. It isn't, and it never was. Trying to re-create 32 0 years of history has been a tough assignment; attempting, as I have, to write it in the manner of an itinerant story-teller has been harder still. It is done as well as I could do it. This book owes its existence to many people; the responsibility for its many imperfections is fully my own. Cordova Bay and Deep Cove, B.C. P.C.N. August 1, 1987-August 1, 1991 APPENDICES Chronology 1867 compensate HBC Chief Factors British North America Act and ChiefTraders: in return for provides for the admission of a settlement, the officers agree Rupert's Land and the North to give up any share of future West Territories to the new land-sales profits. British Confederation.Columbia joins Confederation on the promise of a railway link 1869 with eastern Canada. Smith Donald A, Smith is in charge of recommends the use of steam the Labrador and Montreal (its- boats to improve HBC trans tricts of the Hudson's Bay Com- portation. pany. The Canadian government agrees to purchase Rupert's 1873 Land from the Company. Smith's vote is crucial in "Pacific William McDougall is appointed Scandal" debate: he goes against Lieutenant-Governor of Macdonald's government, which Rupert's Land and the North resigns. Formation of the North West Territories, but is refused West Mounted Police. Red entry to Red River by a National River incorporated as Winnipeg. Committee of the M&is, object ing to sale of the HBCs lands, 1874 without their consent. Rt. Hon. George Goschen appointed Governor of HBC. 1870 Smith elected a Liberal M.P. M6tis under Louis Riel meet to discuss the proposals from 1875 Ottawa brought to Red River by Federal government begins con Donald A. Smith. The Manitoba struction of Pacific Railways. Act, forming the new province of Manitoba and including pro- 1876-1878 visions for M6tis rights, is passedRecession leads to a decline in by the Canadian government. HBC share values. No dividends Smith is elected to the Manitoba paid in 1877 or 1878, legislature. 1879 1871Smith and partners form the St Donald Smith gains a seat in Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba the House of Commons. He Railwa~ As the link with Win negotiates new Deed Poll to nipeg is completed, the line gains 602 APPENDIX ONE 603 a temporary monopoly on west- 1891 ern Canadian freight. Smith Beginning of three-year reces resigns as HBC Land Commis- sion. HBC reorganizes and sioner but continues to buy pushes land sales. stock. 1893 1880 Deed Poll extinguished: HBC Eden Colvile appointed HBC officers now receive only a salary. Governor. Main Canadian office 1894 moved from Montreal to Win- Hislop and Nagle open Arctic nipeg. Land boom in Winnipeg posts. over next three years. CPR syn dicate is formed and signs con- 1896 tract with government. IiBC stores and land sales develop, lessening importance of 1881fur trade. Smith appointed High HBC opens retail store in Win- Commissioner for Canada. nipeg. Simpsons moves to Queen Street location in 1897 Toronto.Old North West Territories achieve responsible government. 1883HBC establishes stores in Yukon Smith elected to HBC Board as to supply prospectors. Donald major shareholder. Smith becomes Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal. Red River 1885 flood. Queen Victoria's Dia North West Rebellion tinder mondjubilee is celebrated. Louis Riel. Last spike of the CPR is driven. 1898 Yukon becomes a separate terri 1886tory, with its own government. Smith knighted. 1899 1887Revillon, furrier from France, HBC retail store opens in Van- competes with HBC in Hudson couver. Smith returns to federal Bay and Northwest. parliament as a Tory. Bislop and 1900 Nagle fur company creates com- job Bros. opens fishing station petition with HBC. in Labrador (later bought out by NBC). Furs are in fashion in 1889Europe. Many Inuit succumb to Donald Smith appointL-d disease. Governor of HBC, serving until 1914. HBC co-operates with 1901 CPR and government to pro- Marconi sends first wireless sig mote prairie settlement. nals across the Atlantic, opening 604 APPENDIX ONE access for independent fur 1910 traders to latest market informa-Stockholders' group challenges tion. Competition continue,, Strathcona's control over the from Hislop and Nagle and Board, and wins significant from Revillon.influence. The HBC is divided into three departments: land, 1902stores and furs. Expansion of The Boer War ends. British vic- department stores in western tors helped by Strathcona's gift cities begins. of a regiment of roughriders. 1911 1903First HBC post established on Alaska Boundary Dispute, aad Baffin Island; Chesterfield Inlet establishment of the Alaska- post opened. Northern Trading Canada boundarv~ HBC com- Compan~ established, in compe plains about U.S'. whalers tition with IIBC and Revillon. trading with Canadian Inuit. Strathcona commissions con Amundsen begins his voyage struction of Nascopie. across the Arctic (to 1906), ~is 1912 the Far North gradually opens I IBC names Canadian Advisorv up. Committee. 1905 1913 The provinces ofAlberta and The Northern Trading Saskatchewan are created. Great Company buys out Hislop and increase in immigration to the Nagle Company. HBC dividend West means buyers for HB( reaches an unprecedented it) land. percent. 1906 1914 Beginning of eight years of high Death of Lord Strathcona, "the dividends as the HBC profits greatest figure in the history of from land sales. Lord the fludsons Bav Companv." Sir Strathcona announces that I IBC Thomas Skinner becomes 6ov will retain mineral rights on ernor. North American fur pur lands sold.chases halted by war conditions; many aboriginals deprived of 1909 food and supplies. Strathcona becomes chairman of 1915-1919 newly formed Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which enters into a HBC contracts with French supply agreement with the government to transport goods British Admiralty. HBC estab- and munitions by steamship in lishes its first trading post in thewar zone. Eastern Arctic. Richard 1916 Burbidge of Hai-rods examines Opening of the Panama Canal, FIBC stores for the Board. with eventual adverse effect on APPENDIX ONE 605 NVinnipeg's position as a coin- "house brands," e.g., Fort Garry inercial centre. Sir Robert tea and coffee. Talks with Simp Molesworth Kindersley sons regarding merger come to appointed Governor of the nothing. HBC. 1924 1917After years of competition, HBC Northwest Game Actattempts buys out Lamson and Hubbard to regulate the fur trade and to and its subsidiary, the Alberta protect musk ox and caribou. and Arctic Transportation Company. 1918 Greatly increased competition 1925 from Lamson and Hubbard. Establishment of HBC Overseas HBC land sales continue at ris- Settlement Ltd. in partnership ing prices.with Cunard Lines and with the co-operation of the CPR. 1919Charles Vincent Sale appointed HBC directors note the com- HBC Governor. B,~yeskimo sinks pany is subject to both U.K. and with a year's supplies for north Canadian taxation, while compe- ern posts; passengers rescued by tition pays only Canadian tax. Nascopie. Beaver House opened Considers moving sorne opera- in London for fur sales. tions to Canada. 1926 1920 HBC agreement with Marland Celebration ofHBCs 250th Oil Co. to explore for oil on anniversary. Governor Kinders- prairie lands. Opening of new ley visits Canada. First issue ofWinnipeg store. Concern that HBC magazine, The Beaver, trading posts are adversely appears. Competition with affecting caribou migrations. Revillon continues. 1927 1920-1929First northern air-freight planes HBC continues the duvelopment sent to Churchill, and two rail ofits general retail stores; opensways reach Hudson Bay. The a Newfoundland fishing and splendid new HBC steamship packing industry; sells whaling Bayrupert is wrecked off products; and explores for oil inLabrador. Frederick Banting western Canada. Offices are criticizes HBCs treatment of opened in Paris and New York. Inuit. Fifteen new posts are established in the Canadian Arctic. 1928 Sale and his Board come under 1922 attack from C.L. Nordon and First domesticated be~tver bred. other shareholders for the com Standardization of thirty-five pany's poor earnings record. 606 APPENDIX ONE The Imperial Privy Council 1937 decides that gold and silver on Shares in Revillon sold off. First HBC lands belong to the federal organized commercial use of government.North West Passage. Short wave radio transmitters installed 1929 at northern posts. The federal government trails fers to the provincial govern 1938 ments control ofnatural Dividends resumed after seven resources in Manitoba and years. HBC purchases Northern Saskatchewan. HBC fulfils its Traders Ltd. and Canalaska obligation to discover a Norih Trading Company, adding to its West Trading Passage by the posts and transportation system. interlocking voyages of three of 1940 its trading vessels across the Many Arctic posts eliminated. Canadian Arctic. Hudson's Bay Amalgamation of C.M. Lamp Oil & Gas Company formed. son with I IBC. 1930 1943 Depression affects HBC, and Interest in Job Bros. sold. many posts are closed. 1945 1931 Chinchilla ranching started. Philip Chester appointed Radio telephone replaces radio General Manager for Canada, telegraph in North. Purchase of and more authority is delegated wholesale tobacco businesses of to the Canadian Committee. John Erzinger Ltd. and Scales Sale resigns as Governor; and Roberts Ltd. Patrick Ashley Cooper ap pointed in his place. Cooper 1946 is not pleased with his findings Board reorganized. Philip on a visit to Canada. Chester given seat on English Board, and named Managing 1932 Director for Canada. Chester sets out to shake up 1947 Canadian operations. British Hudson's Bay Oil & Gas has 50 Governor and Canadian Man- percent interest in five produc ager are frequently in disagree- ing oil wells at Leduc, Alberta, ment over the next two decades. and makes many more produc 1934tive oil and gas discoveries over Cooper undertakes an inspection the next two decades. Nascopie tour of Hudson Bav. strikes an uncharted reef off Cape Dorset, and sinks with a 1936one-year supply of trade goods Purchase of Revi llon's Canadian and provisions for the Eastern assets.Arctic. Christian Dior's "New APPENDIX ONE 607 Look" signals a decline in furs as1959 a fashion item.Richard Murray succeeds Philip Chester as Managing Director IQ48 for Canada. White fox prices reach ~i new low, causing hardship for Inuit 1960 dependent on trapping. HBC buys the Montreal-based Henry Morgan department 1950 store chain. HBC assists efforts to promote sales of Inuit carvings. Wood- 1962 ward's opens Canada's first sub- Hudson's Bay Oil & Gas has a urban shopping-centre store, but major gas strike north of HBC turns down opportunities Edmonton-the largest gas field to move into shopping centres in Canada. through the 1950s. 1963 1952 HBC begins move to suburban Cooper resigns, and William shopping malls. Johnston (Tony) Keswick is appointed HBC Governor. He 1965 introduces a more personal The HBC adopts "The Bay" approach to management. designation. Viscount Derick Heathcote Amory appointed 1953 Governor. Nlax Bell ofC algary attempts to acquire control of HBC. Henry 1968-1969 Benson becomes an HBC Direc_ Hudson's Bay Oil & Gas plans tor. Benson and Lord I leyworth exploration for oil on extensive begin attempts to reorient the properties in the Arctic. firm, but their progressive pro- 1968 posals are turned down by the York Factory, closed since 1957, rest of the Board. is transferred to the federal gov 1956ernment as a national historic Sir Winston Churchill is site. awarded the title "Grand Seigneur of the Compa ny of 1961) Adventurers."An attempted merger of Simp sons, Simpsons-Sears, and the 1957 HBC falls through. Donald Canadian Committee members Scott McGiverin joins The Bay become HBC directors. as Managing Director, Retail Stores. 1958 The HBC Board convenes in 1970 Winnipeg, meeting in Canada May 2-300th anniversary. for the first time. Headquarters are moved from 608 APPENDIX ONE London, England, to Winnipeg. into automation, testing a video George T Richardson appointed shopping service. Losses for the HBC Governor.year come to $122 million. 1972 1983 HBC acquires A. J. Freiman The FIBC sells its preferred Ltd. and Middlesex Warehouse shares in Dome Petroleum. Ltd. McGiverin appointed Pres ident of the HBC. More subur- 1984 ban stores opened. Another year of big losses for The Bay. Under McGiverin, 1973sales have increased, but so has The Bay acquires a majority debt. The high interest rates of interest in Markborough Prop- the early 1980s have created a erties Ltd., a real-estate firm. Acrisis. John Tory, speaking for deal involving HBC mineral Ken Thomson, orders drastic rights is made with Siebens Oil changes in management & Gas. direction. 1974 1985 Toronto store opens at Bloor McGiverin resigns as president and Yonge. HBC operational but remains Governor. A three headquarters move to Toronto. man team ofJohn Tory, George 1978 Kosich and lain Ronald takes The Bay adds more department over top management. stores: first the Zellers chain, 1987 with the Fields chain, and then The Bay sells its northern stores, the Simpsons stores. The HBC and fur auction house, ending is now Canada's leading retailer.317 years of connection with the 1979Canadian North. George Kosich Kenneth Thomson buys 75 per- becomes president, and imposes cent of The Bay for $641 mil - stern standards for profit lion. The Bay acquires large achievement. interest in Dome Petroleum. 1989 1980First profit since 1979, thanks to HBC buys major interest in big gains in merchandising and Roxy Petroleum Ltd. real estate. 1981 1990 Dome Petroleum wins control The Bay spins off Markborough of Hudson's Bay Oil & Gas. Properties Inc. and acquires Towers department stores. 1982Retail sales revenues increase, McGiverin appointed Governor but the Simpsons stores remain of the HBC. The Bay moves a disaster. APPENDIX ONE 609 1991 merged into The Bay. To take Sinipsons Division is (losed advantage of lower taxes and down: seven net Simpsons operating costs, The Bay con stores are sold to Seari Canada, siders the move of some opera and the remaining seven are tions to the U.S. APPENDIX TWO Resource People During research for the three volumes of Company of Adventurers, nearly a thousand men and women who were either part of the HBC, or had been touched by its activities, were interviewed. They are listed as Resource People in the Appendices of all three books. Many of these interviews were done by Camilla Turner, and I am most grateful for her wise and imaginative contributions. The tapes and transcripts of all the recorded interviews have been donated to the Provincial Archives of Manitoba, and will eventually be opened for public perusal. N.H. (Nick) Abramson Hon. Ron Basford VancouverFormer Minister of Consumer and Corporate Affairs Senator Willie Adams Ottawa The Senate Ottawa Dave Bowker Sales manager John C. AmesWestrade Wholesale Ltd. 'vice-president and secretary Victoria Canadian Pacific Ltd. Montreal Dr Hartwell Bowsfield Professor Virginia Baldwin York University Virginia Baldwin Company Toronto Toronto Allan W Brent Timothy Ball Former president Department of Geography Simpsons Ltd. University ofWinnipeg Victoria Winnipeg Sherry Brydson Ian Barclay Toronto Director, HBC Ian A. Barclay & Associates D.G. (Pete) Buckley VancouverFormer head, Shop-Rite Stores John C. Barrow White Rock, B.C. Former chairman of the board, A] Burrows CEO, and director Former head, HBC Wholesale Simpsons-Sears Ltd. Division Toronto Victoria 610 APPENDIX TWO 611 G.Allan BurtonHon. Nellie Cournoyea Former chairman and C1 0 Minister of the Government of Simpsons Ltd. N.W.T. 'loronto Yellowknife J.R. Cavers Al Daniels Professor Emeritus Former consultant to IIBC University of Guelph San Francisco Guelph, Ontario Dora F ' Darbv Former secretary to Governors Syd ChapmanSir Patrick Ashley Cooper and Former financial adviser to Lord Sir William Keswick Thomson(Retired from HBC London in Toronto1969 ;ifter 41 years of service) Now residing in Beckenham, Robert (Bob) Chesshire Kent, England Former manager, HBC Northern Stores Division Paul Davoud Former general managej, HBC Chief pilot, HBC Fur Trade Department Kingston, Ontario Kingston Chief Billy Diamond Elizabeth Chester Former Grand Chief of the Grand Council of the Crees Daughter-in-law of Philip (of Quebec) Chester Val d'Or, Quebec Vancouver Hugh Dwan Posy ChisholmFormer head of Fur Sales, HBC Toronto and New York London Freeman Clowery Tex Enemark Archivist Former president Bank of Montreal B.C. Mining Association Sherbrooke, Quebec Vancouver WL. Cobb John A. English Former assistant general Former vice-president, manager, Northern Stores personnel, HBC Department, HBC Toronto Now residing in Shediac Cape, John Enright N.B. and Nrictoria, B.C Retired HBC accountant Vancouver Alan Cooke Director Peter Ernerk I lochelaga Research Institute M.L.A., Government of N.W.T. Montreal Yellowknife 612 APPENDIX TWO Charles Waldron Evans Hon. Elijah Harper Former president of The Bay Minister of Northern and Thornhill, Ontario Native Affairs, Manitoba Sir Eric Faulkner Winnipeg Deputy governor, HBC, Pierre Henry 1952-1955Missionary, Oblate ofMary Director, HBC, 1950-1972 Immaculate, Apostle of the Inuit Former chairman, Glyn, Mills N.WT. & Co. London H. Albert Hochbaurn Artist and Naturalist Arthur Frayling Delta, Manitoba General manager, Fur Sales, HBC Stuart Hodgson London Chairman British Columbia Ferry Corp. Professor Milton Freeman Former commissioner, NWT Department of Anthropology Victoria University of Alberta EdmontonRev. Dr Gerald Hutchinson E.J. (Scotty) Gall Thorsby, Alberta Head of transport, Western Marie lbell Arctic, HBC, 1923-1966 Director, Legal Services Now residing in Victoria HBC Rita Green and staff Victoria Statistics Canada TedJohnson Advisory Services, Pacific Former head of The Bay Buying Region Office Vancouver Toronto Brian Gross Sir William Keswick Treasurer, HBCGovernor, HBC, 1952-1965 Toronto Chairman, Matheson & Co. David Guest Ltd. Blake, Cassels & Graydon London (Lawver involved in transfer of George Kosich HBC from London to President, HBC Winnipeg) Toronto Toronto A.A. Guglielmin Martin Lennon Executive vice-president Leicester, England Bay Simpsons Merchandise John Levy ServicesFormer president, Zellers Toronto Vancouver APPENDIX TWO 613 .f.G. Links I Jugh MacLennan Former director, HBC Author Calman Links Ltd., Fm rier to Montreal I let Majesty'Fhe Queen D.W. Mahaff London y Senior vice- presiden t, Finance Charles B. Loewen and Administration, HBC President Toronto Loewen, Ondaatje, McCutcheon RoyMegarry Son-in-la,A of former I I BC publisher, Globe andAlail managing director Philip Toronto Chester loronto james Melville Nlichael Lubbock Vice -president and director Former HBC employe( 'rhe Woodbridge Company Ottawa Limited Toronto L.F. McCollum Pieri e Mignault Director, I ludson's Ba~ Oil & Former head, Quebec Division, Gas Co. IIBC (Former chairman, Continental Price Club of Canada Oil Co_; chairman eineritus, Montreal Mercantile'lexas) Dallas, TexasJames Richard (Dick) Murray Managing director, IIBC, Donald McGiverin 1959-1972 Governor, IIBC, 1982- Nou residing in Victoria 16ronto F.F. (Fd) Newlands Alexander.j. \4aclntosb Van(ouver Former deputy governor, I IBC '16ronto Peter ES. Nobbs Vice -president, Corporate John McIntyre Finance Former vice-president, Real `Vlidland Bank Canada Estate, HBC Former HBC treasurer 16ronto 16ronto XV , D.C. (Don) Mackenzie Ntivoko Okino XV ' D.C. Mackenzie Consultants Fhe Woodbridge Company Former HBC director Limited Calgary Toronto Doug Ma(Lachlan john de B. Payne GuardianPublic relations director, HBC, York Factor~ 1947-1957 XVinnipeg Montreal 614 APPENDIX TWO D.H. (Des) Pitts Ben Sivertz Former head of Northern Former commissioner, N.WT Stores, HBC Victoria Winnipeg Jack Skolnick Diane Rajh New York Researcher E.J. Spracklin Deep Cove, B.C. Former district manager, George Richardson Keewatin District Governor, HBC, 1970-1983 Northern Stores Department, (President, James Richardson & HBC Sons Ltd.) Winnipeg Winnipeg Herb Stovel Lord Roll oflpsden Heritage Trust S.G. Warburg and Co. Ltd. Toronto London Lord Strathcona and Mount lain Ronald Royal Former executive (Descendant of Donald A. vice - president, HBC Smith, Ist Baron Strathcona and Toronto Mount Royal) London Larry Rowe Vice-president, Information Josh 1eemotee Services, HBC Inuit Tapirisat of Canada Toronto Frobisher Bay, N.WT Chesley Russell David Thomson Former HBC employee President, Lavis Inc. Sidney, B.C. Toronto Lynn Scully Kenneth R. Thomson HBC Retail Thomson Newspapers Ltd. Vancouver Proprietor, 76 percent, HBC Toronto Joe Segal J. Donald'Figert Kingswood Capital Corp. Former director, Burns Fry Ltd. Vancouver Toronto Ron Sheen Marvin Tiller Former HBC employee Former head, Northern Stores, Victoria HBC Ian D. Sinclair Winnipeg Chairman, CPR Jim Tory Toronto Lawyer and former director APPENDIX TWO 615 Simpsons Ltd. Bill Wilder TorontoFortner director, Simpsons Ltd. Toronto John Tory President and director Thomson Corp. Ltd. R.G. Williamson Toronto professor of Anthropology Department of Anthropology Liz Tory and Archaeology Governor, Shaw Festival, University of Saskatchewan Niagara-on-the-Lake Saskatoon (Animator extraordinaire) Toronto Professor Alan Wilson North West Cove Joy Turner Hubbards, Nova Scotia Documentalist, Canadian Plains Research CentreJj. (Woody) and Kay Wood University of Regina Former HBC Factor and his Regina wife Frank Walker Victoria Executive assistant to Philip Chester of the Canadian Peter Wood Committee, HBC, 1951-1959 Fortner executive vice-president, Montreal HBC Toronto George E. Weightman Former manager, Market Flon. Gordon Wray Research, HBC, and Member Minister of the Government of Retail Management Committee NWT. Vctoria Yellowknife Bernie Weston Trader and retailer Jordan Zinovich Skin & Bones Fur-trade historian Toronto New York APPENDIX THREE Chapter Notes CHAPTER IP. 15. "To rest is to rust": IN " L. TI IF MAN W1 10 BECAM V A Morton, unpublished NIS biog COU NTRYraphv of Donald A. Smith, Ch. P. 4., Is a Canadian: Peter C. V epigraph. Newman, Flame ol Power, p.49. P. 16. Scotland's history: John P. 4. Thc Smith midicate: ibid Keegan, Six Armies in Nornzandy, p. 167. P. 7. the world~jumping-offpl,tce-P. 17n. Scottisbpuritanism: W.TR. Preston, The Life and Hugh MacLennan, in interview Times of Lord Strathcona, p. I i.with author, 18 September 1984. P. 9. "Who is Smith?".- quoted in WR. Richmond, The Life ofl,ord P. 17. "wift, is said to have Strathcona, pp. 182-83. quoted in Pierre Berton, The Last,~pike, pp. 353-54. P. 11. All his life &nnth was attendedjames [Jan] Morris, CHAPTER 2 Heaven's Command, p. 347. GROWING UP COLD P. 11. Apartfi-om their illegihility:P. 2 1. Her voice was low: Beck-les Alan Wilson, Introduction, in Willson, The Life ofLord Strath I lartwell Bowsfield, ed., The Let-cona andAlount Royal, p. 6. ters off,harlesjohn Brydges P. 2 1. xithout erroi; pause or con 1879-18S2, p. x% ii. fitsion: ibid., p. 7. P. 11. "races struggling to emeige ":P. 2 2. "1 have already visited": Lord Carnarvon, quoted in R.G. Donald A. Smith, quoted ibid., Moyles and Doug Owram, Intpe- pp. 24-25. rial Dreams and Colonial Realities, p. 14.P. 2 3. "Capada is a count)-v P. 12. There were always others: Evans, quoted in Peter C. Preston, Life and Tim - es ofTordNewman, Flame oj'Power, StrathCOnd, p. 26~. p. 5 2. P. 13. "Wbdt a sti ange creature P. 2 5. "took a ftiendly in tcrest George Stephen, quoted in Albro quoted in Willson, Life ofLord Marti n,,7amesy. flillandthe Strathcona, p. 50. Opening ofthe Northwest, p. 43 6.P. 26. "an~y upstart, quill-driving P. 14. He loved the solitude ofa apprentices": George Simpson, crowdjohn Macn3LIghton, quoted ibid. quoted by E.A. Collard, Mont - P. 26. "You would have to travel": real Gazette, 10 May 1976, Donald A. Smith, quoted ibid., p. 6. p. 5 9. 616 APPENDIX THREE 617 P. 2 7. "Your counting house depart-P. 3 7. no matter haw poor the post: ment": George Simpson, quoted WR. Richmond, The Life ofLord in WL. Morton, "Donald A. Strathcona, p. 66. Smith and Governor George Simpson," The Beaver, Autumn P. 39. "To-day we all assembled": 1978, p. 5.quoted in Willson, Life ofLord P. 2 8. "Let them go, too": DonaldStrathcona, Vol. 1, p. 133. A. Smith, quoted in Willson, P. 39. Then the astonished ear: Life ofLord Strathcona, p. 63, Charles Hallock, "Three Months in Labrador," Part 11, P. 2 8 n. "Hang Donald V Harper's New Monthly Magazine, quoted ibid., p. 56. 22, no. 132, 1861, p. 759. P. 2 9. "the most suipicious andP. 40. "Smith was ahoutforty faithless set": Nicol Finlayson, years old": Sir Leopold McClin HBCA 1338 e l 2 and - tock, quoted in Willson, Life of B38 e l 2d.Lord Strathcona, Vol. 1, p. 157. P. 3 2. "He is allfire ": RichardP. 40. "1 believe": Donald A. flardisty, quoted in WL. Mor- Smith to George Simpson, ton, unpublished MS biography quoted in Newman, Flame of of Donald A. Smith, Ch. IV, p. 9.Power, p. 55. P. 34. "no command oftis passions ".-P. 4 1. ""en you want to bring": Donald A. Smith in letter to George Sim son to Donald A. George Simpson, quoted ibid., p p. 14. Smith, quoted in Morton, "Donald A. Smith and Governor P. 34. has [ve?y] much to learn: George Simpson," p. 9. Donald A. Smith in letter to P. 41. "Smith, the officer in George Simpson, quoted ibid. charge": Eden Colvile to Curtis P. 34. It isjustpossihle: Donald Lampson, quoted in Willson, A. Smith in letter to George Liji- oj'Lord Strathcona, Vol. 1, Simpson, quoted ibid., pp. 194-95. pp. 14-15.P. 42. "1 n~yselfam becoming": P. 3 5. "A man who ba~ been Donald A. Smith, quoted in frozen": Donald A. Smith, Douglas MacKay, The Hon quoted in Willson, Lire ofLord ourable Company, p. 290. Strathcona, Vol. 1, p. 122n. P. 43. "The o~iect I most wanted": Pp. 3 5-3 6. Because the HBG con-Donald A. Smith, quoted in trolled: Alan Cooke in interview Willson, Life ofLord Strathcona, with author. Vol. 1, p. 204. P. 3 7. Indidns starving to death:P. 43. "Really, why shouldMr. Alan Cooke, A Historv oj'the Stephen": Isabella Smith, quoted Naskapi of'Scheftervilh, p. 87. ibid., p. 207. 618 APPENDIX THREE P. 44. "1 called today ": HBC F~ic-P. 57. "prompt display ofvigour": tor, quoted in Richmond, Life ofWilliam McDougall, quoted Lord Strathcona, 1). 8 1. ibid, p. 205. CHAPTER 3P. 5 7. "done his utmost": Sir John BRINGING LOUIS RIELI 0 A. Macdonald, quoted in Sandra HEEL Gwyn, The Private Capital, P. 48. The plains -,vere as thou-p. 117. sands: W.L. Morton in "A Cen tury of Plain and Parkland," in P. 58. "a dead man ": William R. Douglas Francis and Howard M,,tavish, quoted in Willson, Palmer, The Prairie West, p. 11).Life of'Lord Strathcona, Vol. 1, p. 284n. P. 50n. "a haven ofwarmth": quoted in Eric Wells, Winnipeg, P. 5 8 n. "an injustice to the people Where the New R~Tt Begins: A n John Bruce, quoting William Illustrated History. Mactavish, in House of com P. 5 1. "the incubus ofthe Company'smons Debates, 1876, pp. 811-12. monopo~y ": James Ross, quoted inP. 59. 'The tendency ofNorth Frank Rasky, The Taming ofthe American events: New York Sun, Canadian West, p. 202. quoted in peter C. Newman, P. 5 1. "the greedy London direc-Flame oj'Power, pp. 56-57, tory": William Mactavish, quoted ibid., p. 202. P. 60. "to volunteer to correct": Donald A. Smith, quoted in P. 5 In. "I will not speak": WilliamWillson, Life ofLord Stratbcona, Mactavish, quoted in Beckles p. 182. Willson, The Life of'Lord Strath cona and Mount Royal, Vol. 1, P. 60. "Ifno settlement occurs". pp. 281-82.Donald A. Smith, quoted ibid., P. 52. "a stoker in hell": WilliamVol. 1, p. 307. Mactavish, quoted in Dictionary P. 63. "Imperial Government has ofCanadian Biography, Vol. IX, no intention": Sir John Young's p. 530.proclamation, quoted in W.R. P. 54. "You go nojarther": LouisRichmond, The Life ofLord Riel, quoted injoseph Howard, Strathcona, pp. 106-7. Strange Empire, a Narrative ofthe Northwest, p. 98. P. 65. "1 am here to-day": Donald A. Smith, quoted ibid. P. 55. "to keep those wildpeople quiet": Sir John A. Macdonald, P. 67. "We must make Canada quoted in Frank Rasky, The respect us": Louis Riel, quoted in Taming ofthe Canadian West, Ilartwell Bowsfield, Louis Riel, pp. 203-4.The Rebel and the Hero, p. 49. APPENDIX THREE 619 P. 67. "Oh, let me out ofthis": CHAPTER 4 Thomas Scott, quoted in THE GREAT FIRE CANOES Willson, Life ofLord Strathcona, Vol. I, p. 363.P. 80. "A corporation has no con science": WE Butler, quoted in P. 67. "The secret ofThontas ScottBeckles Willson, The Life ofLord burial": Alexandre Nault, quoted Stratbcona and Mount Royal, in Winnipeg Tribune, 6 March Vol. 1, p. 155. 1961, p. 12. P. 68n. "Wc tried Riel": iuror P. 8 1. "The sudden -,vitbdrawal": quoted in G.F.G. Stanlcy, "Louis William Mactavish, letter, in Riel and the Prairie Uprising," Correspondence Inward, D p. 193.10 1, #145, Mactavish to Joseph Howe, 16 May 1870, p. 167, P. 71. "benevolent constabulmy": HBCA-PAC. Col. Garnet Wolseley, quoted in -James [Janj Morris, Heaven R 82. "Gentlemen, this Company": Command, 1). 350. HBC shareholder, quoted in Arthur Ray, "Adventurers at the P. 7 1. "Hope Riel will ha7 e bolted":Crossroads," The Beaver, Col. Garnet Wolseley, quoted in April May 1986, p. 10. Frank Rasky, The Tamin~f of'the Canadian Iliest, pp. 207-8. R 85. "coolly turned the boat": Manitoban, quoted in Theodore P. 72. "more suitablefor". R.G. Barris, Fire Canoe, p. 30. MacBeth, quoted in Robert Stewart, Sam Steele: Lion ofthe P. 85. "Hey! You put": Steamboat Frontier, p. 24. captain, quoted in Bruce P. 73. "banditti": Howard, Wishart, "Paddle Wheels on the Strange Empire, p. 208. Prairies," The Beaver, Dec. 1989 jan. 1990, p. 3 1. R 74. 1yield tip to you": Donald A. Smith and Adams G. Archi- P. 86. "We go from one bank": bald, quoted in Richmond, Lady Dufferin, quoted in Barris, Life ofLord Strathcona, p. 143. Fire Canoe, p. 37. P. 75. "ourjust rights": Louis P. 8 8. "was trying to waltz Riel, quoted in Willson, Life of Manitoba Free Press, quoted in Lord Stratbiona, Vol. 1, p. 3 54.Wshart, "Paddle Wheels on the Prairies," p. 32. P. 75. "Icongratulate".- Louis Riel, quoted in Morris, Heaven P. 88. Horses with buckskin riders: Command, p. 349. Barris, Fire Canoe, p. 20. R 76. He was a man ofinrelli- P 90n. "the greatest marine gewce: Bowsfield, Louis Riel. Thedisaster": Saskatoon newspaper, Rebel and the Hero, p. 7. quoted ibid., p. 191. 620 APPENDIX THREE P. 90. "0 my God": Louis Riel, R 114. His arrival in Winnipeg: quoted ibid., p. 85. Alan Wilson and R.A. Hotchkiss in Dictionary ofCanadian Biogra P. 90n. no-a' beckons a congregation:pby, Vol. XI, p. 124. ibid., p. 256. R 117n. CHAPTER 5W.L. Morton, quoted in Peter PROGRESSION ANDC. Newman, The Canadian BETRAYALFstahlishvient, Vol. 11, The P. 100. "Our immediate destiny Acquisito; v, p. 3 03. FIBC Factor quoted in Douglas P. 117 n. '*in the progress women MacKay, 'The Honourable have made,": E. H. Macklin, Company, pp. 285-86. quoted ibid., p. 302. P. 103. "Ij'we bad insisted": P. 117. "The office now is" [and] Roderick McKenzie quoted in "Bedlam let loose": Charles J. Beckles Willson, The Lift oj LordBryclges to William Arinit, Stratbcona and Mount Royal, IlBCA, A 1212 1, fo. 40 and Vol. 1, p. 5 16. fos. 122-23. P. 104. "It is all veiy well"janiesP. 117. were more crowded: Lockhart quoted ibid., Vol. 1, Merrill Denison, Canada's First pp.-521-22.Rank, Vol. 11, p. 2 10. P. 106. "The Chief Commissioner P. I IQ. "I amsati.~fied": Charles J. cares": James Lockhart, quoted Bryclges to G.J. Goschen, ibid., Vol. 1, p. 52 1. quoted in Alan Wilson, Intro duction in Hartwell Bowstield, P. 100. "It may not be out 0 ed., The Letters ofCbarlesjobn place": Donald A. Smith, letter, Bry ey IS79-IS82, p. x1in. in Hardisty Papers, G-AIA-tile . 119i 76, Donald Smith to Richard P. 120-47-med with: Alan Wilson, Hardisty, 31 May 1873, Glen- ibid., P. lxxxiv. bow Institute, CAgary. P. 12 1. erl ed on the fide: John S. P. 108. "Wbere i-voy mans a Galbraith, "Land Policies of the liar": quoted in Grant I ludson's Bay Company, MacEwan, Between the Red and 1870-191 ;," Canadian Historical the Rockies, p. 29. Review, 32, no. I (March 1951), P. I 11. lf*ever an organization:P. 9. Michael Bliss, Northern Enter-P. 122. "H~ trace all these prise, pp. 194-95. SirJohn Rose to SirJohn A. P. I I ',. Looking to tbesmall IN'lacdonald, quoted in Shirlec A. amount: 'A"illiarn Armit to Don- Smith, "A Desire to Worry Me ald A. Smith, 1113CA, A6 5 1, fos.Out," The Beaver, Dec. 19 87 225-226, London, 19june 1878. Jan. 1988, p. 8. APPENDIX THREE 621 P. 12 3. "My long conn& tion CHAPTER 6 Donald A. Smith, quoted in The STEAL OF EMPIRE Times, 28 Nov. 1883. P. 133. Forfortyyears: charac P. 12 3. Smith ~ actions: Shirlee A.terization of Donald A. Smith, Smith, "A Desire to Worry Me WTR. Preston, The Life and Out," pp. 8-9.Times ofLord Strathcona, P. 124. "eve?y appearance ql": pp. 13-14. Charles J. Brydges, letter to SirP. 134. His philosophical disposi John A. Macdonald, quoted tion: on Donald A. Smith, ibid., ibid., p. 11. p. 175. P. 12 5. "1 see no prospect":P. 13 7. "a curse to the country": James L. Cotter, letter of 10 JulyDr John C. Schultz in House of 1886, quoted in Willson, Life of'Commons Debates, 18 April Lord Strathcona, Vol. 11, 1877, and Manitoba Free Press, pp. 39-40. 21 April 1877. P. 12 6. While competent in the P. 13 7. a mixture ofputty: woods: George McTavish, Behind description ofWinnipeg, quoted the Palisades, p. 2 3 8. in Pierre Berton, The National Dream, p. 2 2 5. P. 12 8n. "I have a pain here ": Robert Campbell, quoted in P. 137. "Winnipeg and Barrie" Clifford Wilson, Robert report, quoted in WL. Morton, Campbell, p. 175. Manitoba: A History, p. 17 1. P. 140. "Upon you and the P. 130. This very s-tartlinginfor-influence". SirJohn A. Macdon mation: N.M.W.J. McKenzie, ald to Donald A. Smith, quoted The Men ofthe Hudson'~ Bay in Peter C. Newman, Flame of Company, p. 46. Power, p. 60. R 13 0. Here was a great: ibid., P. 140. "Wefirst noticed": Angus p. 137.McKay's journal, quoted in J.G. MacGregor, Senator Hardisty P. 130. "1 have waited" J. Ogden Prairies, 1849-1889, p. 108. Grahame, letter of 21 Mav 189 1, quoted in Willson, Lift of Lord P. 143. "To the health": MPs, Strathcona, Vol. 11, p. 185. quoted in Preston, Life and Times ofLord Strathcona, p. 84. P. 130. "The fiat has goneforth" P. 143. "1 would be most willing Roderick Ross, quoted ibid., Donald A. Smith, quoted in p. 186.Newman, Flame of'Power, p. 60. P. 13 1. "the prince ofliumbugs":P. 143. "DonaldA. has": letter, PAC, Roderick MacFar- Parliamentary page, quoted in lane papers, MacArthur to Dun- Preston, Life and Times ofLord can MacFarlane, 15 Feb. 1878. Strathcona, p. 85. 622 APPENDIX THREE P. 144. "1 could lick ": Sir John V6eneration ofPolitics and Politi Macdonald, quoted in Newman, cians, pp. 112 -14, quoted in Flame ofPower, 1). 01. Cynthia NI. Smith with Jack P. 144. "Sirjohn is dead": LiberalsMcLeod, Sirjohn A.: An Anecdo in House of"Commons, 5 Nov. tal L~fe ofjohn A. Macdonald, 1873, quoted in Sandra Gwyn, pp. 72-73. The Private Capital, p. 13 1. P. 152. Torv members: Preston, P. 144. "Mr. Smith was a rept e- Nly Generation of Politics and sentative": Charles Tupper's Politicians, p. 112, quoted ibid. Orangeville speech, reported in P. 152. "Thatfellow Smith": Sir House of Commons Debates, John A. Macdonald, quoted in 1878, Vol. V, p. 2560, as quoted Donald Creighton, John A. Mac in Preston, Life and Times oj'Lorddonald: The Old Chieftain, p. 240. Stratbcona, p. 307. P. 145. The key to Smith's actions:P. 152. Now, Siryobn: DrJohn David Cruise and Alison C. Schultz, letter, PAC, Mac Griffiths, Lords oj'the Line, p. 72.donald Papers, Schultz to Mac P. 146. "We are now simp~y": donald, 28 May 1878. Eden Colvile to James A. Gra- P. 15 2. "the primaiy object of the hame, 5 June 1874, HBCA railway": Donald A. Smith, A.7 4, fos. 198-99. quoted in Manitoba Free Press, R 146. "Few figures in politit al20 Aug. t878. history": regarding Donald X. P. 153. keep the Company neutral: Smith, Gustav-us Myers, A His- William Armit to James A. Gra toty ofCanadian fVealth, Vol. 1, hame, HBCA, Al, Grahame to p. 266.Secretary, 10 Aug. 1878, and P. 150. "It is impossible": Lord reply. Dufferin letter, PAC, Mackenzie P. 153. "nofavour to ask": Donald Papers, Dufferin to Mackenzie, A. Smith, quoted in Preston, Lif~ 10 Aug. 1877.and Times ofLord Strathcona, P. 150. "put money in": SirJohn pp. 119-20. A. Macdonald, House of Com- P. 154. "1 am sorry to say": Don mons Debates, 1878, Vol. IV, ald A. Smith and a supporter, pp.1690-91.election of 1878, quoted in P. 15 1. "which would put a stop Newman, Flame ofPower, p. 50. Sir John A. Macdonald, House P. 154. A new current was in of Commons Debates, 1878, motion: Ralph Allen, Ordeal by Vol. V, pp. 2 5 5 6-5 7. Fire, p. 13. P. 15 1. Finally Black RodP. 15 5. The immensi~y of the tree- entered: W.T.R. Preston, Aly less Prairie: WL. Morton, in APPENDIX THREE 623 unpublished MS biography of P. 163. "The time has now come": Donald A. Smith. Louis Riel, quoted in Hartwell Bowsfield, Louis Riel, The Rebel P. 156. This was the climate: and the Hero, p. 7. Pierre Berton, The National Dream, p. 13 6.P. 167. "All suppliesf~rnisbed": Joseph Wrigley, quoted in J.E. P. 15 6, "the most stupendous con-Rea, "The Hudson's Bay Com tract": Preston, quoted in New- pany and the North-West Rebel man, Flame ofPower, p. 67. lion," The Beaver, Summer 1982, P. 158, "W~ did not like him p. 47. J.H.E. Secretan ofVan Horne, P. 16 8. "We tossed zip chairs quoted ibid., p. 80. Will i am Van Horne, quoted in P. 160. "It ma be that": Donald David Cruise and Alison YGriffiths, Lords ofthe Line, p. 15 S. A. Smith to George Stcphen, quoted inAlcGill News, Mont- P. 168. "the Canadian Pacific real, March 193 2, p. 3 1. Railway": Sir Charles Tupper, P. 160. "HAf-E NO MPANS": describing Sir Donald A. Smith, quoted in Beckles Willson, The W.C. Van Horne to Donald A. Life of'Lord Stratbcona andMount Smith, quoted in Newman, Royal, Vol. 11, p. 132. Flame ofPower, p. 64. P. 161. 'forthe planet Jupiter": P. 168n. bonification: PAC MG 29, Sirjohn A. Macdonald to A5, vol. 22, IV, p. 52, Letter from George Stephen, quotcd ibid. F.A. McKenzie to Mr Garson, 22june 1915. P. 161. "an idle, ice-bound": Lib-R 169. "The last spike": William eral critic, quoted ibid., p. 83.Van Horne, quoted in Pierre P. 16 1. He was the great Donald Berton, The Last Spike, p. 413. A. Smith described in Preston, P. 170. "Itseemed": Sandford Life and Times ofLordStratbcona, Fleming, quoted in Lawrence p. 133. Burpee, Sandford Fleming, Empire P. 162. Onceagain tbepartnersbip:Builder, P. It 8. Creighton, John 14. Macdonald: P. 170. "the work has been done": The Old Chieftain, pp. 397-98. William Van Horne, quoted in P. 162. "It's to the government":Berton, The Last Spike, p. 416. Donald A. Smith to Gcorge P. 170. "All aboard": quoted ibid. Stephen, quoted in Newman, Flame ofPower, p. 64. P. 170n. The last spike was an ordinaiy nail: Lord Strathcona, P. 163. "Theday the CPR busts": ain letter to author, 10 March CPR director, quoted ibid. 1989. 624 APPENDIX,rHREE P. 17 In. "They didnt tell us": P. 182 n. "Canada has been mod CPR employee, quoted in Peter est": Sir Wilfrid Laurier, speech, C. Newman, "An Unseemly End quoted in John Robert to the Railway Saga," Maclean~, Colombo, Colombo's Canadian 5 Feb. 1990. Quotations, p. 332. P. 172. The Canadian Pacific Rail-P. 183. There were Rajputprinces: way: Michael Bliss, Northern James [Jan] Morris, Farewell the Enterprise, p. 195. Trumpets, pp. 21-22. P. 17 3. "Building that railroad":P. 18 3. The British as a whole: William Van Horne, quoted in Morris, Farewell the Trumpets, John Robert Colombo, Colomho~ p. 3 0. Canadian Quotations, p. 611. P. 184. "the dervishes ofAnglo Saxondom": O.D. Skelton, The P. 17 3 n. "How much does the sta-Life and Letters ofSir Wi6Frid ble ho ' y ": story about William VanLaurier, p. 60. Horne, Newman, Flame of Power, p. 88.R 185. Asa warm darknessfell: June Callwood, The Naughty P. 174. "Now, there ~ a very neatNineties, p. 2 1. place": Donald A. Smith, quoted in Willson, Life ofLord Strath- P. 186. "The All-Red Line": Sir cona, Vol. 11, p. 125. Sandford Fleming, quoted in Lawrence Burpee, Sandford P. 175. "Remember,,7ames": Don- Fleming, Empire Builder, p. 199. ald A. Smith, quoted in New man, Flame ofPower, p. 5 1. P. 18 7. "Now we must attend" doctor to Lord Strathcona, CHAPTER 7quoted in Willson, Life ofLord CANADA IN A SWALLOW- Strathcona, Vol. 11, p. 406. TAIL COATP. 189. '~ielding to the earnest R 180. "There is one man ": Sam entreaties": Sir Thomas Shaugh Hu hes, quoted in Beckles Will_ nessy on Lord Strathcona, 9 quoted in WR. Richmond, The son, The Life ofLord'Stratbcona Life ofLord Strathcona, p. 2 2 6. and Mount Royal, Vol. 11, p. 154. P. 190. "The Sabbath is over": P. 180. 1 have no claim": Sir Lord Strathcona, quoted in Donald A. Smith, quoted ibid. Peter C. Newman, Flame of P. 18 In. "A Canadian soldier": Power, p. 66. British housewife to High Com- P. 190n. "I still remember vividly": missioner Vincent Massey, Dr Wilfred Grenfell, of Lord quoted in Norman Webster, Strathcona, quoted in Willson, "Massey's War," Globe and Mail, Life ofLord Strathcona, Vol. 11, 10 July 1980, P. 1. p. 479. APPENDIX THREE 625 R 192. "],oidSti-athcoi,apie.vi(It,s":R Mi. "to aid in doing the right Gaspard l,'arrer, quote d in thiog": Roderick MacFarlane to I leather (;i1bert, Awa(ening an I IBC director, quoted in Continent, pp. 163-64 Be( kles Willson, The Lit" of'Lord R 19 3. "Gice the gentl, wan Strathcona and,11ount Roy'll, Vol. Lord Strathcona, quoied in 11, 1). 201. Newman, Flame ofPo-,:,er, p. 68. R 20i. at, historicaltoncern: 1IBC P. 194. "HisLabradorl.orthbip": dircctor, quoted ibid. Queen Victoria, of Lord Strath- R 205. "till Hellfira basement": Cona, quote,1 in Willson, Lilt, ofRudyard Kipling, quoted in 1,ord Srrathcona, Vol. 11, p. 3 16.W * L. Morton, unpublished AIS P. 194. "Unck Donald": Edward biography of Dona ld A. Sinith. k1l, quoted ibid., p. 427. 1 ~ 2 06. It little mattered: R. G. P. 196. "Let the a,atcbfires be lit"Mo ' vles and Doug Owrarri, Inipe Sir Wilfrid Laurier, quoted in rial Dreams and Colonial Realities, Callwood, .\augbty Nineties. p.42. P. 196. "the useless ruffians": LordP. 2 07. "Caleb would stand": Minto, quoted in Robert Stew- Martha Ostenso, quoted in art, Sam Steele: Lion oj the Fron-Dai id C. Carpenter, "Matri tier, pp. 2 ; Q -40. archs and Patriarchs in Canadian Prairie Fiction," in Howard 11 198. "Oj"t l the regimcnts ": DailyPalmer, Tbe Settlement oj'tbe apress, quoted ibid., p. 2 5 1. [Vest, p. 167. 11 , 199. "7bc occasion of his ownP. 2 10. "The ai-rogance of'the toast": The 7-imes, quotc-d in Canadian": Hamburger Newinan, Flamc oj'Pov er, p. 67. Nacbrichten, quoted in Willson, Lij~ ot'Lord Stratbcona, Vol. 11, 1) 199. "1 learrived a bit right P. 294. Agar Aclainson, quoted in Sandra Gwyn, The, Private Capital, p. 3 63.P. 2 12. "the Hudsons Bay Coin R 199. "it U'as vely diffi(vilt": S.pan), by their dealings": Lot(] Macnaughtan, Aly Can,idian Strathcona to shareholders, Memories, p. 94. quoted in HBC, "Report of the GoN ernor and Committee of the R 200. "He is Canada": A.G. Fludsons Bay Company to be Gardiner, quoted in N(.,wiiian, laid before Sbareholders, 6 jub~ Flame oj'Power, p. 65. 1908," p. 12. CHAPTER 8P. 2 14. "Conipa?q policies were not TI IF RECKONINGchanged" * - Philip Chester, "The First 250 Years," unpublished P. 204. rewarkabk vitality: Econo-MS history of the Hudson's Ba~, mist, 2 June 1906. Company, p. 4. 626 APPENDIX THREE P. 219. "[Lord Strathconal was R 2 2 6. "In sorrouful memory most kind": R.L. Borden quoted tribute of Dowager Queen in Willson, Life oj'Lord Strath- Alexandra, quoted in Willson, cona, Vol. 11, p. 432. Life ofLord Strathcona, Vol. 11, P. 220. "on every rock": Sydney p. 463. Smith, quoted in James [Jan j P. 2 26. "1 remit and cancel": will Morris, Pax Britannica, p. 429. of Lord Strathcona, quoted in WTR. Preston, The Life and P. 2 2 1. "That would never have Times ofLord Strathcona, happened": quoted in Pax Britan- pp. 272-73. nica, p. 425. P. 222. "It was not as a mercantileCHAPTER9 company": Lord Strathcona ON THE TRAIL OF THE quoted in R.W. Ferrier, The ARCTIC FOX History ofthe British Petroleum Company, Vol. 1, p. 159. P. 2 3 2. For at least 150 years: William G Watson, "A South P. 223. "detachment ofmanner": ern Perspective on Northern Ethel Hurlbatt, quoted in Economic Development," in Willson, Life ofLord Stratbcona, Michael S. Whittington, co Vol. 11, p. 475. ordinator, The North, p. 8. P. 223. The whole scene:J.W Ped- R 2 3 2 n. to prevent the United ley, Biography of Lord StrathconaStates: British Colonial Office, and Mount Royal, p. 168. quoted in David Judd, "Canada's Northern Policy: Retrospect and P. 2 24n. "Lord Strathco,na ": DrsProspect," Polar Record, 14, no. Barlow and Pasteur on last words 92 (May, 1969), p. 593. of Lord Strathcona, quoted in WL. Morton, unpublished MS P 2 3 3. At one time: Bob biography of Donald A. Smith. Chesshire in interview with P. 22 5. "We need notfear".- Sir author. Charles Davidson, of Lord Stratheona, quoted in Willson, P. 2 3 3 n. Rbat ~ so difficult about Life of'Lord Strathcona, Vol. 11,that: story of Father Henri from p. 460.Stuart Hodgson, in interview with author. P. 225. "Since Sirjohn Macdon alds time": Sir Wilfrid Laurier, P. 2 3 5. The Fskimo makes his or of Lord Strathcona, quoted in her appearance: Hugh Brody, Liv Pedley, Biography ofLord ing Arctic: Hunters oftbe Cana Strathcona, pp. 182-83. dian North, p. 19. P. 2 2 5. With no advantages: TheP. 2 3 5. The "Evkimo " smiles: Times, 22 January 1914. Brody, Living Arctic, p. 19. APPENDIX THREE 627 P. 2 3 5. The Eskimos were vety Arctic 1,,skimo, pp. 234-35, ~7nart: Jj. Wood in interview quoted ibid., p~ 259. with -author. P. 245. "They were so i . nnocent a P. 2 3 8. One could look acro~s: people": Klengenberg, quoted in Archie Hunter, Northern I-raders:R.Aj. Phillips, Canadas North, Caribou Hair in the Stew, 1). 60.p. 7 5. P. 2 3 9. "The vooner the caribou areP. 247. Aline, a single, had a hay gone": trader quoted in Philip tick: Elizabeth Taylor, quoted in Godsell, Arctic Trader: Tbe Grace Lee Nute, "Paris to Account ol'Twenty Years with the Peels River in 1892," The Hudson's Bay Company, p. 274. Beaver, March 1948, p. 20. P. 240. a case ofthe Indian - ibid.P. 250. Snowingjast, very tough wind: Ralph Parsons, quoted in P. 2 40, 1 have inade it my study:Larry Gingras, Medals, Tokens George Simpson, letter to Lon- and Paper Money of the HBC, don Committee, 1822, quoted in P. 80. Caesars ofthe Wilderness, hc, p. 226.R 2 5 2. He was naturally reserved: P. 24 1. So fond are these poor Ralph Parsons described in A.L. people: Grahani, in Andruw Fleming, Perils ofthe Polar Pack, Graham ~ Observations on P. 3 3 1. Hudson'~ Bay, 176 7-91, 1). 2 3 7.P. 2 5 2. The Company is a hard R 242. It was not some primitive taskmaster: of Ralph Parsons, blood lust: Daniel Francis in Arc-Flenry, Toke Munn, Prairie Trails tic Chase: A History of Wbaling ina nd 4rctic Bywa~ys, p. 2 7 1. Canadas No rtb, pp. I 1- 12, P. 2 5 S. a Alan, preeminently: in P~ 242. Thei e is something Gontran de Poncins, Kahloona, extremely painfiii: Williai n p. 2 5. Scoresby, from An Account ofthe Arctic Regions, Vol. 1, p. -172, P. 258. Vdgo in there: Ej. Gall, quoted in Daniel Francis, Arctic in interview with author. Cbase, p. 1.P. 259. the market value ofa rifle: R 244. a paradise ofthose who Philip Godsell, Arctic Trader, reject all restraint: Hudson Stuck,p, 73, A Winter's Circuit of Out A rcticP. 2 59. The man would ans-Ler: Coast, p. 320, quoted in Morris Duncan Pryde in Nunaga: Ten Zaslow, The Opening oftbe Cana- )~ars ofFskinto Life, p. 215. dian North, 1870-1914, p. 258. R 26 1. It sold good rifles: Albert P. 244. when girls were not 11ochbaurn, in interview with obtainable: C.E. Whittaker, author. 628 APPENDIX THREE P. 2 62. The new barter economy: P. 2 72. Most masters ofthe Com Diamond jenness, quoted in pany~posts: Annie Redsky, Brody, Living.4rctic, p. 23n. quoted in Edith May Griffis, R 262. It was the accepted thing to" The Lady of the Bay," The do: Ej. Gall, in interview with Beaver, Winter 1960, p. 48. author.P. 2 72. When I was in charge ofa R 2 63. The Eskimos werejust as post: Cornwallis King, quoted in J . ealous: Cheslev Russell, in inter-Trader King (as told to Alary view with auth . or. Weekes), p. 178. P. 263. Harris'wives were quite aP. 2 73. "Your ability to keep this mixed lot: on Inuit-white mar- book " ' - quoted in Heather riages, in Sydney A. Keighley, Robertson, ed., A Gentleman Trader, Tripper, Trapper: The LifeAdventurer: The Arctic Diaries of oJ'a Bay Man, p. 100. R.H.G. Bonnycastle, p. 1. P. 263. "Ulhat would happen ij'I P. 273. Story of Pierre Mercredi asked": de Poncins, in Kabloona, and the oxen: from Barbara pp. 127-28.Hunt, ed., Rebels, Rascals P. 2 65. Farfrom being the i asualRoyalty, p. 54. and promiscuous affair: Ernest P. 2 7 3. It was a pretty primitive Burch, in "Marriage and existence: WL. Cobb, in inter Divorce Among the North view with author. Alaskan Eskimos," in Paul P. 2 7 5. One day thisftllow: Stuart Bohannan, ed., Divorce and Afte An Analysis ofthe Emotional r'Hodgson, in interview with and Social Problems ofDivorce, author. pp. 152-53.P. 2 7 5. When things were not P. 2 6 7. So here we were: J.IX going well: Senator Charlie Watt, Anderson, in Fur Trader~ Story, quoted in "A Short History of p. 80.Outside Contact," Taqralk (Inuit Magazine), Jan.-Feb. 1978, P. 269. The northern traders'loy-pp. 30-32. alty: Bob Chesshire, in interview with author.P. 2 76. The Bay would grubstake people: Stuart Hodgson, in inter P. 2 69. God was the Company: andview with author. story ofjim Deckers as told by WL. Cobb in interview with CHAPTER 10 author. KILLING THE COMPETITION P. 2 7 0. it disappeared into him: Ray Price, The Howling Art tic: P. 2 80. Growing numbers offur The Remarkable People Who Made buyers and traders: Arthur Ray, Canada Sovereign in the Farthest The Canadian Fur Trade in the North, p. 213. IndustrialAge, p. 50. APPENDIX THREE 629 11 28 1. 1 r(mcmber one linic JohnR 200. Aftcr more and more con Montague, quoted in "Fur 4deiation on the subject: jean Traders," i to Them Day. , 1973, Revillon, in letter to Patrick 1). 25. Ashley Cooper, 5 December 193 ~,, ibid. 11. 282. Thci xcre consid,rcd out laws: Jordan Zinovich on I lislopP. 2 Q0. H~e ba7,c good grounds to and Nagle personnel, i,i inter- clain1jean Revillon, in letter, ~ iew with nithor. 16 December 193 i, ibid. 1'. 285. "When the tideftil": P. 292 n. Months later: Clarence George Venables, quoted in Birdseve, in "The Birth of an L. F. S. Upi on, "The " reck of Industry," The Beazxr, Septeni the Eldorado: Strange Tale of her 1941, 1). 24, reprinted Shipwreck," The Beavc,-, Autumn Auttinin 1980, p. 12. 1968, p. 28. CHAPTER I I 1). 286. "When we gotup each T1 11, ' NASCOPIE niorning": George Venables, CHRONICLES quoted ibid., p. 30. P. 296. Signifying many things P. 286. "a.~ unknown to theparty":to many people: Henny Nixon, Globe, quoted ibid., p. ;I - "SS RMS Nascopie, 1912-1947: P. 288. Only those who have A Biography of a Ship,"Argo nauta: The Newsletter ofthe worked: Philip Godsell, in An ticCanadian Nautical Research Trader, p. 158.Socictv, 4. no. 3, 1987, p. 4. P~ 2 88. 7b open up a stoi e againstP. 296, There may have been some the Ba - y: W.L. Cobb, in interview"luck "about it: Roland Wild, with author.Arctic Command.- The Story Of R 289. Ijnytaskedhim 7:,ho won: Smellie oftbe Nascopie, p. viii. Rj. Renison, quoted bv "'alter P. 298. "Would you like au.Vtbing to Gordon in interview w ith author-eat?": ibid., pp'. 3-4. 11 ' 2 89. that showed a profit: P. 298. When the Port inspectors Wallace Laird, quoted in R.1 1. made their routine cbeck: ibid., Cockburn, "Revillon Alan." 'The pp. 90-91. Beaver, February Mar(h 1990, 1). 15. R 299. When we arrived no one fi-om shore dared: Archie Hunter, R 2 89. Arrangements sbould be in Northern Traders, p. 8. definitely inade: background of HBC takeover ofRevillon P. 300, At ever y port where we Freres, in I I BC internal trierno,stopped. Ernie Lyall, in An Arctic FIBCA, Unclassified, DD, 176- Alan: Six~y-Five 1~ars in Canada's Revillon Fr~res. North, p. 40. 630 APPENDIX THREE P. 3 00. The sight oj'tbere great ves-P. 315. One time, this Eskimo sels: Alootook Ipellie, quoted ininterpreter: Chesley Russell, in Penny Petrone, ed., Northern interview with author. Voices, p. 246. P. 3 16n. Using a large ten-gallon P. 304. A strange spectacle the deckspail: H.M. Ross, in The Appren presented.- Isobel Hutchinson, tice's Tale, p. 60. quoted in Heather Robertson, ed., A Gentleman Adventurer. P 317, [11ej accepted a more inti The Arctic Diaries ofR.H. G. mate responsibility: Leonard Bonnycastle, pp. 211-13. Budgell, quoted in "Recollec P. 3 0 5. Pity. She still had: Ej.tions of Rigolet," Them Days 60 Gall, in interview with author. Years Ago, August 1975, p. 13. P. 3 0 7. 1 knew where all the reefsP. 3 17. "these simple, primitive were: Ej. Gall, in interview withfolk" and description of Inuit: author. PA.C. Nichols, in "Enter P. 3 0 7. The current was runni . ngThe Fur Traders," The Beaver, prettyj~st: Ej. Gall, in interviewWinter 1954, p. 37. with author.P. 317. Take beed: Eskimo Book oj' P. 308. It's all bunk about the Knowledge, quoted in Hugh North West Passage: Ej. Gall, in Brody, The People's Land, p. 2 1. interview with author. P 3 17. Sometimes we could be P. 3 09. One evening in September:trading: Ernie Lyall, in An Arctic Barbara Heslop, in "Arctic Res- Man: Sixty-Five Years in Canada's cue," The Beaver, March 1944, North, pp-. 2 10-11. p. 9, reprinted Autumn 1980, p. 7 1. P. 311. Dashing out on deck: J. W.P. 318. The Company will make a Ilast stand: Winnipeg Free Press, Anderson, quoted in Fur Traders 24 Oct. 1913, quoted in Arthur Story, p. 242. J. Ray, The Canadian Fur Trade P. 311. Willis got into a dory andin the IndustrialAge, p. 95. rowed back: George Whitman, on the wreck of the Nascopie, in P. 3 18. purgatory ledgers: ibid., interview with author. p. 105. P. 3 13. "Our big helper has hit theP. 318. 1 think any experienced bottom": quoted in Penny Petrone,trader: Philip Godsell, quoted ed., Northern Voices, p. 166. ibid., p. 96. CHAPTER 12P. 319. the Company had lost con NORTHERN GRIDLOCK trol in the north: Heather P. 3 15. The real boss ofeach, settle-Robertson, in A Gentleman ment: Ej. Spracklin, in inter-viewAdventurer: The Arctic Diaries of with author.R.H.G. Bonnycastle, pp. 14-15. APPENDIX THREE 631 P. 320. "the portable-hoarding- Steensel, ed " People ofLight and house school": Vilhjalmur Dark, P. 57. Stefansson quoted in Frank Rasky, The North Pole or Bust: P. 3 2 8. We landed at Fort Resolu Explorers ofthe North, 1). 386. tion: Paul Davoud, in interview with author. P. 3 2 0. We soon found: J ohn Mikkelborg, in "Reindeer from P. 3 2 8. Sure. We paid: an Inuk at Lapland," The Bay, 1949-50, Fort Rae, quoted in Richard p. 3 7.Finnic, Canada Moves North, P. 3 2 2. "a native cannot live onp. 103n. white man ~jbod": Dr Frederick P 3 3 0. They had carefully studied: G. Banting's observations on the H.M. Ross, in A Manager~ Tale, Inuit, quoted in Michael Bliss, p. 184. Banting: A Biography, p. 173. P. 323. take overfull control of P. 3 32. In a country where old lard tbefur trade: Banting, in letter pails: Graham Rowley, quoted in to O.S. Finnic, HBCA A-92 photo display at Northwest Can. 2 5 1.Territories Pavilion, Expo 86, Vancouver. R 323. the native should be encour aged: Banting, ibid. P. 3 ; 2. There was a big war: Octave Sivanertok, quoted in R 3 2 3. It is obvious: Governor photo display at Northwest Charles Sale, letter to W. W. Territories Pavilion, Expo 86, Cory, 28 Feb. 1928, HBCA Vancouver. A-92 Can. 2 5 1. P. 3 3 3. Endemic upper respiratory P 324. 2000 MILES OFF. adver- diseases: R.G. Williamson, in tisement in The Beaver, March interview with author. 1933,p.249. P. 3 ; 6. The Mountie told me: P. 3 24n. Indeed, I won't.- Rev. Get-Matthew Innakatsik, quoted in aid Card, quoted injean Godsell, photo display at Northwest I Was No Lady, p. 190. Territories Pavilion, Expo 86, R 324. You had time: Laco Hunt, Vancouver. in Barbara Hunt, ed., Rebels, P. 3 3 7. One by one, they appeared: Rascals & Ro-yalty, p. 2. Jean Godsell, in I ff7as No Lady, R 3 2 5. 1 suddenly realized: p. 8i. Gilbert LaBine, quoted in Peter C. Newman, Flame ofl'ower, P. 33 8. These are not cold sculp p.156.tures:James Houston, in "Inuit Sculpture: The Spirit in the P. 326. "That is a bad tbing": anStone," Town and Country, May Inuk, quoted in Maja Van 1984. 632 APPENDIX THREE V 338. Oshaweet,)A,, ajamous P. 3 47. "1 know people were bap E'skinio car-,,cr: Houston, quotedpier in the old da - ys": William in Sol Littman, "The Souvei,ir Kuptana, quoted in photo dis That Grew," !Vacleans, Septc ru- play at Northwest Territories her 197~, 68C-081). Pavilion, Expo 86, Vancouver. 1) , 340. 'They wen strongly against11. 147. "Idon't know": JimmN the move: Ben Sivertz, in inter- Kdabuk, quoted by Stuart view with author. I Iodgson, in interview with author. 1). 342. to lay downftesh produce:P. 347. [The Hudson's BaN Marvin Tiller, in presentation toCompanyl made easier live'v: Min the NWT Council, 27 May nie Freeman, in "Living in Iwo 1981.Hells," Inuit Toda-v, 8, Oct. 1980, reprinted in M. Zaslow, ed., .4 P. 3 41. We are probably regarded:Century oj'Canadas Arctic Islands, Richard Murray, in letter to 1880-1980,p.272. Lord Amory, 2 Dec. 1966, HBCA, Unclassified, DD G7B. CHAPTER 13 THE LORDS AND THE P. 342. When I lived in an ArcticGOOD OLD BOYS tradingpost: A. lanner, in "The End of Fur Trade History, 11 Pp. 3 54-5 5. to go whoring in the Queen's Quarterly, 90, no. I East: Richard Murray, quoting (Spring 1983).Philip Chester, in interview with author. P. 344. "The image ofthe classit P. 3 5 5. 1 conj~ss we are: David Eskimo": S. Hall, in The Fourth Kilgour, in letter to Lord World: The Heritage ofthe Arctic Amory, 2 5 Nov. 1966, David and Its Destruction, p. 12 2. Kilgour personal files. P. 3 45. The Hudson's Bay Com - P. 3 5 5. When a North American: pany helped the government:Joe Harris, quoted in David Josh Teemotee, in undated letter Kilgour letter to Lord Amory, to author.2 March 1966, David Kilgour personal files. P. 3 45. 1 wasjust starting out asp 356. It wassoon clear: Albert Chiefat Rupert: Chie Bi y Diia- Hochbaum, in letter to author, mond, in interview with author. 31 May 1985. P. 346. Igot to know: Ben Sivertz,P. 3 56. 1 once asked: Sir William in interview with author. Keswick, in interview with author. P. 340. The Company took a lot,k at our needs: Diamond, in interview P. 3 5 6. 1 was going to say: J. G . with author.Links, in inter-view with author. APPENDIX THREE 633 P. 356. Wefrankly had. Lord Pp. 3 69-7 0. checked the girls' Amory, in interview with author. work stations: Dora Darby, in P. 3 5 7. One frail old proprietor:interview with author. Links, in interview wii h author.P. 3 7 0. He was a peculiar sort of chap: Bob Chesshire, in inter P. 358. During the 1930s: Sir Ericview with author. Faulkner, in interview with author. P. 371. 1 look to tbefuture: Sir Robert Kindersley, quoted in P. 359. We all bated boi rowing: SirPhilip Godsell, Arctic Trader, William Keswick, in interview p. 175. with author. P. 3 72. For a while: ibid., P. 360. a gateway through which: pp. 166-67. William E. Curtis, in Chicago Record Herald, quoted in Peter P. 3 7 2. As I gazed at the flickering C. Newman, The Canadian lights: ibid., p. 172. Fstablisbment, Vol. 11, The P. 3 74. The consequence ofthis lay Acquisitors, p. 299. out:James Bryant, Department P. 362. cautious, canny, reac- Stoi e Disease, pp. 183 -84. tionary: W.L. Morton, Manitoba: P. 3 7 8. democracy has its valu A History, p. 501. able and strongftatures: G.W. P. 3 62. of no practical value: PhihpAffiro, quoted in Allan Levine, Chester, in letter to Patrick Ash-unpublished MS on George ley Cooper, 10 June 1940, Allan, p. 6. HBCA Unclassified. CHAPTER14 P. 3 6 3. The actual bene its: TRANS-ATLANTIC BLOOD Richard Murray, in letter to FEUD Lord Amory, 12 Dec. 1966, P. 3 8 2. Many of them had HBCA Unclassified DDG 7B. acquired: Anne Morton, "Charles P. 3 6 3. the Canadian Committee ofElton and the Hudson's Bay the Hudson's Ba : Kilgour, in let-Company," The Beaver, Spring y 1985, p. 25. ter to Lord Amory; 28 Dec. 1966, David Kilgour personal files. P. 3 82. Amongst his cbiefweak curios_ nesses: comment on P. J. Parker P. 365. more ofan historical in Lord Ebury, Report to C.V ity: Philip Chester, in letter toSale, 8 July 1930, HBCA William Keswick, 11 Aug. 1955, Unclassified 1-7-1 Admin NA. HBCA Unclassified DD CG2. P. 383. Mr Chester is, in my opin P. 3 68n. 10 letters, that is includ-ion: ibid. ing tbefir.vt three: C.V Sale, let- ter to Jean Mormet, 7jan. 1916, P. 3 8 3. jullpoweis ofattorney for AFG 5 629.the due exercise thereof- Memo to 634 APPENDIX THREE Canadian Committee from C.V. P. 3 90. As soon as I arrived: Ash Sale, 27 Aug. 1930, Unclassified ley Cooper, "Memorandum of Cc Vol. X 10, fo. 118. Canadian Vsit - 193 L" HBCA #1041292. P. 3 8 3. There seemed afterwaniv to be some misconception: George P. 3 90. great and thoughtless Allan, Calgary Speech, 28 Dec. extravagance: Ashley Cooper, 193 1, Unclassified CCO files Unclassified, DD G3, P.A. 1-7-1 Admin NA Cdn Cooper 2 9 12 3 1, attached to Committee.PA. Cooper to G.W. Allan, 21 Jan. 1932. P. 3 86. For my shortcomings: C.V Sale, quoted in Anne Morton, P. 390. Like taking hold: Frank "The Looking-Glass Vision: The Walker, describing Philip Minute Books of the Hudson's Chester, in interview with BayCompany, 1914-1931." author. P. 392. Not on the Sabbath.': P. 387. 1 alone selected: MontaguElizabeth Chester, regarding Norman to Charles L. Nordon, Philip Chester's family in inter 29june 1931, HBCAA 10 & 11. view with author. P. 3 8 7. Your task is to rebuild:P. 3 94. "Ij*there ~ kids in the house Montagu Norman to Patrick Fred Herbert, bailiff, quoted by Ashley Cooper, quoted in John Enright in interview with London Record, 31 May 1952. author. P. 3 8 8. Are we to devote ourselves:P. 39i. Why must I besurrounded: Patrick Ashley Cooper to Gen- Philip Chester, quoted by Ron eral Court, 29 July 193 1, pain- Sheen in interview with author. phlet, p. 16.P. 3 95. You know, whenever I look P. 3 88. No. It cannot be both: at YOU: Philip Chester, quoted Patrick Ashley Cooper, ibid, p. 17.ibid. P. 3 89. It was pure~y an oversight:Pp. 395-96. You! You! I told - you George W Allan, letter to Ash- what to do: Philip Chester, ley Cooper, 30julv 1931, H13CA quoted by Bob Chesshire, in DD GS3-Chairman, C.C. interview with author. 1931-35.P. 3 9 7. While I was a tough bird: P 3 89. a pot oftea: Ashley Philip Chester, letter to E.F. Newlands, 7 Dec. 1960, HBCA Cooper, quoted in James Bryant, EA 35, Box 3, Chester's Misc. Department Store Disease, p. 108.Correspondence, 1945-75. P. 390. 1 was dismayed.- Ashle) P. 397. living on Mount 0~ympus: Cooper, quoted in Tom Mahony John English describing Philip and Leonard Sloane, The Great Chester, in inter-view with Merchants, p. 2 13. author. APPENDIX THREE 635 P. 397. He used to brief. Pete P. 408. Make a wreath: Captain Buckley describing Philip Thomas Smellie, quoted ibid., Chester, in interview with p. 142. author. P. 409. On his triumphant return: P. 399. 1 was given a seat: PhilipAshley Cooper described by Chester in letter to GAV. Allan, Philip Chester, unpublished 6 May 1933, Series B. history of the Hudson's Bay P. 40 In. we are, ofnecessity: Company. George W. Allan in letter to P. 412 n. removing and tampering: Ashley Cooper, 9 Aug. 1933, Pullen story from "London HBCA DD G3 - Chairman, CC Letter," The Beaver, June 194 1, 1931-35. p.54. P. 404. Extraordinary. I have lots:P. 413. the greatest soldier. Vis Ashley Cooper, quoted by Sir count Alanbrooke, described in William Keswick, in interview Robert Blake, "Key Figures of with author.the Second World War" (review P. 404. 19 3 3 was a year ofdepres-of biography of Manbrooke), sion and losses: Philip Chester, Illustrated London News, June "The First 250 Years," unpub- 1982,p.92. lished history of the Hudson's P. 415. Yes, Patrick, I'm sure: Bay Company.Conrad S. Riley, quoted by Bob Pp. 405-6. Sir George Simpson in Chesshire in interview with his 30-foot canoe: R.H.H. author. Macaulay, Trading into Hudson's Bay, p. 19.P. 416. go whoring in the East: Philip Chester, quoted by P. 406n. Possibly arranged: PhilipRichard Murray, in interview Chester, unpublished history of with author. the Hudson's Bay Company. P. 419. "1 got your letter": letter P. 406. It is no exaggeration: quoted in Tom Mahony and Macaulay, Trading into Hudson's Leonard Sloane, The Great Bay, p. 39. Wercbants, p. 30. Pp. 407-8. We ... leave you: Ashley Cooper, quoted in R.Aj. CHAPTER15 Phillips, Canada ~ North, CANADIAN AT LAST pp. 78-79.P. 427. Max~ idea ofrealdebauch P. 408. They kind oftent up: ery: Bell described byjim Cole Captain Thomas Smellie, man, quoted injearmine Locke, quoted in Roland Wild, Arctic "Max Bell," Star Weekly, 12 Feb. Command, p. 146. 1966, p. 16. 636 APPENDIX THREE P. 42 8. 1 put on a clean white ~hirt:R 440. Tbc atmosphere was indeed WJ. Keswick, in letter to Elmer extraordinary: Richard Murray to Woods, t5jamiary 1953, 11BCA W.J. Keswick, 17 November Unclassified DD G8A. 1959, H11CA DD G7. P. 428. At times he shouted: Bell1). 440. the most hellishly modern: described by "j. Keswick Richard Murray, quoted in Sev in letter to Elmer Woods, ruour Freecigood, "Fludsons 18 March 1953, 1 IBCA Bav: Return to Greatness," Unclassified, DD G8A. Fortu n e, An gust 1958. P. 429. 1 must reth-esoon: Sir Pp. 442-43. Those wbeatfarmers Winston Churchill, quoted in ftom Winnipeg: Aird Nesbitt, Richard Nixon, In the Arena, quoted in Robert Moon, "Nes p. 361.bitt of Ogilvie's: Montreal taste maker," Executive Magazine, P 429. thespectacle of'that September 1966, p. 38. immense estatejanies [Jan] Mor ris, Farewell the 7i-umpets, p. 547.P. 443. thcsick man: I IBC described in Roger Croft, P. 430. any such position wouhl he"Retailing, with a dash of glamor incompatible: Elmer Woods to oil: the new HBC is a longterm Wi. Keswick, 30june 1955, attraction," Financial Times of HBCA Unclassified DD G8A. Canada, 5 Jan. 1967, p. 1. P. 430. 1 have received the P. 443. Astroll through any Bay attached.- W.J. Keswick to H13C [department store unit]: The Bay directors, HBCA Unclassificd described in 1950s and 1960s in DD G8A.James Bn1ant, Department Store P. 43 0. Ile is a marvel: ViscountDisease, p . 111. Alaribrooke on Churchill, P 447. This summer marked: quoted in Lord Moran, Winston Arthur Ray, "York Factory: Churchill.- The Srrugglefor Sur- The Crisis of Transition" vival, 1940-196~, p. 695. 1870-1880," The Beavo; P. 43 2. This honour will he appre-Autumn 1982, p. 35. ciated: Sir Winston Churchill, P. 448. as quiet~y and as innocently quoted in "Sir Winston, the aspossible: Sir William Keswick, Grand Seigneur, has to hesi- letter to Richard Murray, 17 tate, " Johannesburg Star, June 1964, HBCA Unclassified, 28 April 1956. DD G7A 1964. P. 43 3. 1 cannot attempt to descrihe:P. 449n. I am now coming to life: Philip Chester to W.J. Kes,~% ick,Lord Amory, letter to Richard 4 Februarv 195.4, IIBCA DD Murray, 14june 1967, HBCA G 4A. Unclassified, DD G7C. APPENDIX THREE 637 P. 454. transftr is a historical CHAPTER 16 move: Richard Murray, letter to McGTVERIN'S RUN Lord Amory, 5 Dec. 1967, HBCA Unclassified DDCG 4. Pp. 47 7-7 8. 1 talkedfor aboutforty minutes: Philip Chester, "The Pp. 45 6- 5 7. bad not only failed:Fi rst 2 5 0 Years, " unpublished Richard Murray, letter to Lord MS history of the Hudson's Bay Amory, 17 Feb. 1970, David Company [n.p.j. Kilgour personal files. P. 47 8. There might be something: P. 457. not only is there a lack:Lord Amory in letter to Richard Lord Amory, letter to David Murray, 21 Oct. 1968, HBCA Kilgour, 2 March 1970, David Unclassified, DD CG7, Simp Kilgour personal files. sons File. P. 45 7. We reached exactly the rightP. 48 6. a professional son ofa bitch: conclusion: David Kilgour, letterDonald R. Katz, The Big Store: to Lord Arnory~ 9 March 1970, Inside the Crisis and Revolution at David Kilgour personal files. Sears, p. 882. Pp. 457-58. During the unheroic CHAPTER17 years: Lord Amory, letter to YOt TNG KEN David Kilgour, 12 March 1970, David Kilgour personal files. P. 498. "there is a limit": Kenneth Thomson quoted in Robert P. 458. Your'for thefire andashes"Lewis, "Looking for missing exchange: Richard Murray, letter links," Maclean's, 22 Dec. 1980, to Lord Amory, 2 5 March 1970, p. 16. David Kilgour personal files. P. 499. "1 can't imagine": Ken P 458. It is incredible: Richard neth Thomson quoted in John Murray, letter to Lord Amory, 27 Partridge and Dan Westell, June 1970."Thomson merger to create vast acquisition opportunities," Globe P. 459. Godforbid that I vhould beand Mail, 16 March 1989. involved. David Kilgour, letter to Richard Murray, -13 Julv 1970. P. 499. "1 regret giving up": Roy Thomson quoted in Peter C. P. 46 1. The die is cast: H BC Newman, "Table Talk of Roy Adventurer, quoted in'rom Thomson," Maclean ~, Dec. G ireen, "Company of Adventur- 1971, p. 41. ers votes for New World," Win nipeg Tribune, 29 May 1970. P. 499n. "It wouldn't have suited P. 462. At tbispoint.- Te)L Enemarkme": Roy Thomson quoted ibid. regarding the HBC Charter P. 500. "Madam, I've paid patriation ceremony, in letter toenough": Roy Thomson quoted author, 7 Jan. 1983. in Norman Peagam, "CaDadian 638 APPENDIX THREE Dynasty: Like Fattier, Like Son' P. 515. isn't the circulation: Rus No, But All Goes Well in sell Braddon, Roy Thomson of Thonison Empire," WallStreet Fleet Street, p. 3 5 1. _7ournal, 27 May 1080, pp. 1, 14. P. 5 16. "JJ'e run our newspapers": P. 500. "I've madei lot": Roy Kenneth Thomson, testimony Thomson quoted in Newman, at Kent Commission hearings, "Table Talk of Roy Thomson." 13 April 1981. P. 5 0 1. "Nobody has any sympa -P. 516. a transitionfrom light: thy": RovThomson quoted ibid- Harold Evans, Good Times, Bad P 5 02. "Mr Thomson, you really Times, p. 7. are cheap!": Roy Thomson story P. 5 16. "Each one has tofind from James B. Lamb, Press Gang: Kenneth Thomson quoted in Post- War Life in the World of ArthurJohnson, "Two papers die Canadian Newspapers, p. 166. as Thomson, Southam tighten P. 503. "MyJavorite color:" Roy belts," Globe and.11ail, 28 Aug. Thomson story from Newman, 1980, p. 2. "TableTalk of Roy Thomson." P. 520. "1 wisbyou luck": Fred P. 500. "1 could do without culture ":Eaton, quoted in "Store Wars" Roy Thoinson quoted ibid. (script for TV show), p. 18. R 5 09. "They say business is th cP. 5 2 1. "Idon't like all this ": law": Roy Thomson quoted ibid. Kenneth Thomson, quoted in Richard Conrad, "Thomson P. 5 10. "Most people wouldsay closes big deal-for wine," Roy Thomson quoted ibid. Toronto Star, 5 April 1979, P.'5 I On. "My wij~ made me ": p. At. Kenneth Thomson quoted in P. 522. "George, Iwant to dosome "The most cost-conscious exec- shopping": Marilyn Thomson, utive, " Financial Post Magazine,quoted in George Whitman's 18 Sept. 1988, p. 8. unpublished journal; remainder of account of Thomsons'north P. 512. Disliking Ken Thomson' - ern journey from same source. Richard Gwyn, "Dullness at the Top Dulls Many Thomson CHAPTER18 Papers," Toronto Star, 14 April DISASTER AND 1981, p. 7. DELIAT-RANCE P. 5 13. a vicious organization: P. 5 3 0. " 9 ~'re absolutely Clifford Pilkey quoted in David delighted": John A. Tory, quoted MacFarland, "The Accidental in Winifred Nobel, "The Bav Tycoon," Saturda ' y Night, Octo-tightens up inventories," Finan ber 1980, p. 28. cial Post, 22 Dec. 1979. APPENDIX THREE 639 P. 5 3 3. Iftbere is an example: P. 5 74. "1 don't think its appropri Yorkton Securities studN quoted ate": analyst quoted by Terry in Investors Digest, 14june 1983,Brodie in "Shakeup at the Bay," 1). 1138.Financial Times of Canada, 8 June 1987. 1). 5 3 3. "Nobody knows wbdt women ": Marilyn Brooks quoted EPILOGUE in Barbara Aarstemsen, "Rough Titnes in the Rag Trade," Report R 578. "the soul-sharpeningsatis on Business Magazine, Oct. 1988, J~ction ": Harry J. Boyle quoted 1). 158.in Peter C. Newman, Sometimes a Great Nation, p. 2 1. P. 545. Ifthe HBC is alive: Sir P. 5 8 1. The honoured old initials: Eric Faulkner in letter to author,W Kaye Lamb quoted in Peter Easter Sunday, 1988. C. Newman, Caesars oj'the P. 5 5 0. Do vou believe that theWilderness, he, p. xxi. removal: Barry Critchlev and P. 5 84. "the Company havefir Brian Baxter, "HBC executives cighi~jears":Josepb Robson dipping their ballpoints in quoted in Peter C. Newman, poison," Financial Post, Company ofAdventurers, he, p. 145. 24 Oct. 1988. P. 584. "cloak to protect the trade": CHAPTER 19North West Company agent LAST LORD OF THE BAY quoted in Newman, Caesars of P. 558. "David, m ' y grandson ":the Wilderness, p. xix. Roy Thomson, quoted in Rus- P. 586. an oilman's dream: "From sell Bradclon, Roy Thomson of' Beaier Skins to Deep-Freezers Fleet Street, p. 3 5 6. and Oil," Fortune, Aug. 19i8, Pp. 5 6 3 -64. "the best pirture inP. the world": Lord Clark, quoted ACKNOAXLEDGEMENTS in Donn Downey, "British rue loss of art treasure to Canadian,P. 5 Q0. '~our extrovert English Globe and,Wail, 3 May 1989, Man or woman ": John Le Carr6, p. A8.The Secret Pilgrim, p. 120, APPENDIX FOUR BibliogTaphy This listing is a selection from the main texts and journal articles consulted (luring the writing of this volume. The Chapter Notes in Appendix Three provide further information for those pursuing research, or for readers curious about the sources of the quotes used in the book. Allen, Ralph. Ordeal by Fire: Asch, Michael I. "Some Effects Canada, 1910-1945. Canada of the Late Nineteenth Cen History Series, Vol. 5. tury Modernization of the Fur Toronto: Doubleday: Popular Trade on the Economy of the Library, 1961.Slavey Indians." Western Canadian Journal ofAnthropol Anderson, James Watt. Fur ogy, 6, no. 4 [1976]: 7ff. Trader's Story. Foreword by Lord Tweedsmuir. Toronto: Atwood, Mae, ed. In Rupert~ Rverson Press, 196 1. Land: Memoirs of Walter Traill. Anderson, William Ashley. Angel Toronto: McClelland and ofHudson Bay: The True Story Stewart, 1970. ofMaud Watt. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1961. Annesley, Pat. "The Lady Awak- Baikie, Margaret. "Labrador ens." Equity, November 1985: Memories." In Them Days 108-10. [n.d.]. Artibise, Alan E J. "Boosterism Ballantyne, R.M. Hudson's Bay, and the Development of or Every-day Life in the Wilds of Prairie Cities, 1871-1913." In NorthAmerica. London: R. Douglas Francis and Black-wood, 1848. Howard Palmer, eds., The Prairie West: Historical Read- Banfield, A.WE "The Barren ings. Edmonton: Pica Pica Ground Caribou." [Ottawa]: Press, 1985, pp. 408-34. Canada, Department of Resources and Development, ed. Town and City: Northern Administration and Aspects of Western Canadian Lands Branch, [n.d.l. Urhan Development. Canadian Plains Studies no. 10. Regina: Barr, William. "On to the Bay." Canadian Plains Research The Beaver, Autumn 1985: Centre, 1981. 43-53. 640 APPENDIX FOUR 641 Barris, Thco,lore. Fire Canoc: "Bill Cobb Retires After 37 Prairie Steamboat Davs Revis- Years' Service." .1 loccasin ited. Toi onto: McCI(Iland and T,lv,[~rapb, June 1965: 2 6-2 Stew-art. 1977. Birdwvc, Clarence. "The Birth Batten, jai k. CanadaUovcs llest-ot an Industry." The Bcave); ward, IS8011890. Canadas September 1941; reprintcd, Illustrated Heritage. -loronto: Autumn 1980: 12--13. lack McClelland N.S.L. Nat kiral Science of Canada, 1977. Bliss, Michael. Northern Enter pi ise: Five Centurie's ofCanadian "Beaver House." The Reaver Business. Toronto: McClelland [19281. and Stewart, 1987. Beavis, L.R.W "Titania, Queen - - - - . Banting: A Biography. of the ( 'lippers." T& Beave?; Toronto: McClellancland September 1942: 35 -37. Stewart, 1984. Begg, Alexander. History ofthe Bone, Jack. "Ernie Lyall, the Nortb-[Vest. 3 vols. lbronto, 'Arctic Man."' Northwest 1894. Evplorer, i, no. 4 (September Berger, Carl, ed. Impe? ialisni and1086): 29-30. Nationali.,-tn, 1884-1914:,-l Bonriccastle, R.H.G. A Gentle Conflict in Canadian l`hougbt. manAdventurer: TbeArctic Issues in Canadian I listorv. Diaries oj'Ricbard Bonnycastle: Toronto: Copp Clark, 1909. see entry under Robertson, Heather. and Ramsay Cook, eds. Thc [Vest and the Nation: Bou le, John. The Imperial Essays in Honour of WL. Alor- Achievenient: The Rise and ton. Toronto: McCh Iland and T-awforniation ofthe British Stewart, 1976.Empire. Orig. publ. 1974. Har inondsworth,Nliddlesex, Eng Berton, Pierre. The Loa 5pike: land: Penguin Books, 1977. The Great Railway, 1881-1885. roronto: AlcClelland and Bo" sfield, Hartwell. Louis Riel: Stewart, 1971.7 be Rehel and the Hero. T)ronto: Oxford Universitv The National Dream: Press, 1971. The Great Railwi~y, 1871-1881. Toronto: McClelland and d. The Letters of Stewart, 1970.Charles John Brvlkff, 1879-1882: Hudsons Bay - e d. Historic I leadlines:Company Land Commissioner 14 Century ofCanadian News Introduction by Alan Wilson. Dramas. Canadian Illustrated I MRS, Vol. 3 1. Winnipeg: Library. 'Ibronto: McClelland Hudsons Bay Record Society, -and Stewart, 1967. V) 7 7. 642 APPENDIX FOUR - - - , ed. Tbe Letters of Bruce, jean. Phe Last Best West. Charlesjohn Brydges, Toronto Montreal Win 1883-1889: Hudson's Bay Com- nipegNancouver: Fitzhenry & pany Land Commissioner. Intro- Whiteside in association with duction byj.E. Rea. HBRS, the Multiculturalism Pro Vol. 33. Winnipeg: Hudson's gramme, Department of the Bay Record Society, 198 1. Secretary of State, 1976. - - - , ed. Louis Riek Selected Bruernmer, Fred. Seasons ofthe Readings. New Canadian Eskimo: A Vanishing Way of Readings. Toronto: Copp Life. Orig. publ. 1971. Paper Clark Pitman, 1988. back, 'Foronto: McClelland Braddon, Russell. Roy Thomson of and Stewart, 1978. Fleet Street. Orig. publ. 1965. Bryant, James. Department Store London and Glasgow: Disease. Toronto: McClelland Collins Fontana Books, 1968. and Stewart, 1977. Briggs, Asa. A Social History of Bryce, George. The Remarkable England. Orig. publ. 1983. History ofthe Hudson ~ Bay Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Company. London: Sampson England: Penguin Books, Low, Marston, 19 10. 1985. Budgell, Leonard. "Recollec Brock, Paul. "She Prowls the tions ofRigolet." In Them Arctic." TheSkipper, Septem- Days 60 Years Ago (ed, Doris ber 1965.Saunders], August 1975: 4-24. Brody, Hugh. LivingArctic: Burch, Ernest S., Jr. "Marriage Hunters oftbe Canadian North. and Divorce Among the London Boston: Faber and North Alaskan Eskimos." In Faber in collaboration with Paul Bohannan, ed., Divorce the British Museum and and After. An Analysis ofthe Indigenous Survival Interna- Emotional and Social Problems tional, 1987.ofDivorce. Garden City, N.Y.: - - - . The People's Land. Doubleday & Co., 1970: Whites and the Eastern Arctic. 152-81. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Burgess, Lois M. "Influences England: Penguin Books, Affecting the Transfer of 1975. Ruperts Land: Some Aspects Brooks, J. Chadwick. "HBC and of the Attitudes of Five Gov 'The Old Lady': The Com- ernments and Peoples to the pany's Association with the Transfer of Rupert's Land Bank of England Has Been from the Hudson's Bay Com Continuous Through Two pany to Canada, July 15 th, Hundred Years." The Beaver, 1870." Master's thesis, Uni March 1934: 32ff. versity of Ottawa, 1963. APPENDIX FOUR 643 Burpee, Lawrence J. Sandford Carmichael-Galloway, Andrew Fleming, Empire Builder Lon- Strome Ayers. "Who resem don: Oxford Universitv Press, bles the Scots? What a silly 1915. question." Globe andVlail, 26 November 1999. Burton, C.L. A Sense of Urgen~y: Alemoirs ol'a Canadian Mer- Carter, Kim. "Remembering the cbant. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 'Arctic Man."' Inuktitut, no. 1952. 64, Fall 1986: 63-65. 13 arton, G. A] Ian. A Stot e oj-Chalmers, John W. Horseman in Alemories. 'Ibronto: NIcClel- Scarlet: Sam Steele ofThe land and Stewart, 1986. Mounties. Frontier Books. Toronto: W J. Gage, 196 1. Butler, William Francis The Great Lone Land: A Narrative et al., eds. The Land o of Travel and Adventure in the Peter Pond. Boreal Institute for Nortb-ff~st ofAmerica. Northern Studies, Occasional Reprint. Edmonton: liurtig Publication no. 12. Echnon Publishers, 1968. ton: Boreal Institute for Northern Studies, 1974. Charters, Statutes, Orders in Callwood,june. The Naughty Council, &c., Relating to the Nineties, I S9011900. Canada's Hudson's Bay Company. Lon Illustrated Heritage. roronto don: Hudson's Bay Company, Jack McClelland N.S.L. Nat- 1963. ural Science of Canada, 1977. "The Christie Family and - Po rtrait of Canada.H.B.C." Tbe Beaver, August Garden City, N.Y.: Double- 1923:1-17. day, 198 1. Campbell, Bruce D. Wbere the Coates, Kenneth. Canada~ High Winds Blow. New York: Colonies:A History oftbe Yukon and Northwest Territories. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1946. Canadian Issues Series. Campbell, Lydia. "Sketches of Toronto: James Lorimer, 1985. Labrador Life." In Them Days, 1980. , and William R. Mor rison. Land oftbe Midnight Campbell, Nlarjorie Wilkins. Sun: A Histoiy ofthe Yukon. The Saskatchewan. Rivers of Edmonton: Hurtig Publishers, America Series. New 1988. York Toronto: Rinehart, 1950. Coats, Robert H., and R.E. Gos Canisell, ( ' harles. Son ofthe nell. Sirjames Douglas. The North. Toronto: Ryerson Makers of Canada, Vol. 20. Press, 1954.Toronto: Morang & Co., 1908. 644 APPENDIX FOUR Cobb, W J. "Interesting YearsCooper, Patrick Ashley. Trading ith the HBC." Moccasin Tele-into Hudson's Bay, A Narrative graph, Winter, 1970:25-27. ofthe tisit ofPatrick Ashley Cooper Thirtieth Governor of Cockburn, R.H. "Revillon Man: the Hudson's Bay Company to The Northern Career of A. Labrador, Hudson Strait, and Wallace Laird, 1924-193 t." Hudson Bay in the Year 1934. The Beaver, February-March From the journal of R.H.H. 1990:12-26.Macaulay. Winnipeg: Hud Collins, Robert. The Age of Inno-son's Bay Company, 1934. cence, 187011880. Canada'~ Copland, A. Dudley. Coplalook: Illustrated Heritage. Toronto: Chief 7~-ader, Hudson ~ Bay Jack McClelland N.S.L. Nat- Company, 1923-1939. Win ural Science of Canada, 1977. nipeg: Watson & Dwyer Colombo, John Robert, ed. Publishing, 1985. Colombos Canadian Quotations. Corley, T.A.B. A History oftbe Edmonton: I lurtig Publishers, Burmab Oil Company 1886 1974. 1924. London: Heinemann, "The Company in London." The 1983. Beaver, September 1935: Cotter, H.M.S. "Famous H.B.C. 31-36. Captains and Ships." The Cooke, Alan. A History ofth Beaver, June 192 1: 3 2-3 3. Naskapi ofScbefferville. M:',nt-"The Cover Picture: Mount real: Naskapi Band Council of Everest and The Hudson's Schefferville, 1976. Bay Company." The Beaver, June 1933: 52. Naskapi Independence and the Caribou. Montreal: Creighton, Donald. John A. Centre for Northern Studies Macdonald: The Old Chieftain. and Research, McGill Univer- Toronto: Macmillan Company sity, 1981. of Canada, 195 5. - - . "The Montagnais. - - . The Passionate The Beaver, Summer 1985: Observer. Selected Writings. 13-19. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1980. - - . "The Ungava Venture of the Hudson's Bay Com- Crowe, Keith J. A Histiny of the pany, 1830-1843." Ph.D. the- Original Peoples ofNorthern sis, Darwin College of Canada. Arctic Institute of Cambridge University, 1969. North America. Orig. publ. 1974. Reprinted, Cooper, Mrs. [Anne] Ashley 100 Kingston Montreal: McGill Years- ofHexton. [N.p.]: Mrs. Queen's Univ~rsity Press, Ashley Cooper, 1982. 1982. APPENDIX FOUR 645 Cruise, Dax id, and Ali~,on In John F. Foster, ed., The Grjffith~. I.ordsofthf Line. Dcvcloping 14 esr: Evsays in New York: Viking Penguin, Canadian Histori, in Honor of 1988.Lt zris II. Thomas. F(Inionton: "C.S. Rilev loins Canadian Universitv of Alberta Press, IQ83. Committee." The Be,ive); Sep tember tQ-)8.Dictlonary oj'Canadian Biograpbl% 'li)ronto: Lhuversitv of' Djle, Tim. flarrods: T1.,e Store Toronto press, (~7oj. ix) 1976; and the J.tgend. London: Pan (~'ol. x) 1972; (~'ol. xi) 1982. Books, 1981. Dunae, Patrick A. "'Making Dalryinpit, Aj. "'Cap' Ross of Good': The Canadian West in the Saskatchewan." The British Bovs' Literature, Beaver,june 1944:20-23. 1 89o- 19 14.- Prairie Forum, 4, De Coccola, Raymond. and Paul no. 2 (Fall 1979): 165ff. King. The Incredible h,skimo: Life Among the Barren Land Fskimo. Surrey, B.C. Blame, Frasnius, Peter, as told to Henrv WA: Hancock Housu Publish- Thompson. Buffalo Days and ers, 1986.Alights. Introduction bv Irene Spry. Calgary: Glenboxv Deed Poll b - y the Governcr and Alberta Institute, 1976. Compan~j, oj'lludsons Bay, for (-,'onducting- Their Trade in Fttagiak, Agnes, co-author. North America, dndjbr "Four Inuit Women." Inuit Defining the Rights and Pre- Today, 5, no. 6 (June 1976): scribing the Duties of Their 20-31. Officers. London: Sir Joseph Causton and Sons, 1871. E'vans, Harold. Good Times, Bad Times. London: Weidenfeld Dcmaree, Allan T "The Old and Nicolson, 1983. China hands who know how to live with the new Asia." Fortune, November 1971: Farb, Peter. Wanv Rise to Civi 132-34,214,216. liz,ition: The CulturalAscent of' Denison, Merrill. Canadas First the Indians of North America. Bank: A History of the Bank of' 2nd rev. cd. New York: E.P. Alontreal. 2 vc, , Is. Toronto: Dutton, 1968. McClellan(] and Stewart, 1966,1967.Ferrier, R.W. The Histoty of the British Petroleum Compan ' V. (fen Otter, A. A. "The I ludsons Vol. 1: The Developing Kars, Bay Company's Prairie Trans- 1901-1932. Cambridge: Cam portation Problem, 1870-85." bridge University Press, 1959. 646 APPENDIX FOUR Ferris, Paul. The City. Orig. Fort St. James National Historic publ. 1960. Rev. ed. Har- Park: Provisional Development mondsworth, Middlesex, Eng- Plan. [Ottawa]: National His land: Penguin Books, 1965. toric Sites Service, Depart ment of Indian Affairs and Finnie, Richard. Canada Moves Northern Development, North. Ne", York: Macmillan, (1969-701. 1942. - - - "Trading into the Foster, John E., ed. The Develop ing H ~st: Essays in Canadian North-West Passage." The Histo?y in Honor ofLewis H. Beaver, December 1937: Thomas. Edmonton: Univer 46-53. sity of Alberta Press, 1983. - - - . "Stefansson and the Francis, Daniel. A Histwy of Rein deer Caribou Dream." World Whaling. Markham, North, 25, no. 3 (May june Ont.: Viking, 1990. 1978): 94. Arctic Chase: A History Flanagan, Thomas. Louis 'David' of Whaling in Canada's North. Riel. Prophet oj'the New World. A Break-water Book in the Orig. publ. 1979. Canadian Arctic and Northern Life Lives Series. Halifax: Series. Canada: Breakwater Goodread Biographies, For- Books, 1984. mac Publishing, 1983. Discove?y ofthe North: Riel and the Rebellion: The F-irploration ofCanadas 1885 Reconsidered. Saskatoon: Arctic. Edmonton: Hurtig Western Producer Prairie Publishers, 1986. Books, 1983. Francis, R. Douglas, and ed. The Diaries o Touis Howard Palmer, eds. The Riel. Edmonton: Hurtig Pub- Prairie West. His-toricalRead lishers, 1976.ings. Edmonton: Pica Pica Fleming, Archibald Lang. Press of University of Alberta Archibald the Arctic. New York: Press, 1985. Appleton-Century-Crofts, Freedgood, Seymour. "Hudson's 1956. Bay: Return to Greatness." - - - . Perils oj'the Polar Pack.Fortune, August 1958: Toronto, 1932. pp. 72ff. Fort St. James Conceptual Devel- Freedman, Jim, and Jerome H. opment %ectives and Plan: Barkow, eds. Proceedings ofthe Fort St. James National HistoricSecond Congress, Canadian Park, British Columbia. Etbnologv Society. National [Ottawa]: Indian and North- Museum of Man Mercury ern Affairs, 197 5. Series, Canadian Ethnology APPENDIX FOUR 647 Service, Paper #28. Ottawa: "Land Policies of the National Museum of Canada, Hudson's Bay Company, 1975.1870-1913." Canadian His-tori cal Review, 3 2, no. I (March "From Beaver Skins to Deep- 1951): 1-21. freezers and Oil," Fortune, August 1958. -- - "A Note on the Frost, Stanlev Brice. McGill Uni-Mackenzie Negotiations with the Hudson's Bay Company, versity: For the Advancement of 1875-1878." Canadian Histori Learning. Vol. 1, 1801-1895; cal Review, 34, no. 1 (March Vol. 2, 1895-1971. 1953): 39-45. Kingston Montreal: McGill Queen's University Press, Garrod, Stan. Sam Steele. The 1980,1984.Canadians: A Continuing Series. Don Mills, Ont.: Fry, Joseph N., and J. Peter Fitzhenry and Whiteside, Killing. Canadian Budness Pol- 1979. icy:A Casebook. Scarborough, Ont.: Prentice-Hall Canada, "George F. Galt" [obituary]. The 1983. Beaver, June 1928: 6. Frye, Northrop. Divisions on a Getty, Ian A. L., and Antoine S. Ground: Essays on Canadian Lussier, eds. As Long As the Culture. Edited, with a pref- Sun Shines and Water Flows: A ace, byjames Polk. 'Ibronto: Reader in Canadian Native House of Anansi, 1982. Studies. Nakoda Institute Occasional Paper No. 1. Van Fulford, Roger. Glyn~, couver: University of British 1753-1953: Six Generations in Columbia Press, 1975. Lombard Street. London: Macmillan, 1953. Gibbon, John Murray. Canadian Fullerton, Douglas H. Graham Mosaic: The Making ofa North ern Nation. Toronto: McClel Towers and His Times A Biog- land and Stewart, 1938. raphy. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986. Gibson-jarvie, Robert. The City of London: A Financial and G albraith, John Kenneth. The Commercial History. Cam Scotch. Orig. publ. 1964. Balti-bridge: WoodheA-Faulkner more, Maryland: Penguin with Commercial Union Books, 1966.Assurance Co. Ltd., 1979. Galbraith, John S. "The Hud- Gingras, Larry. Medals, Tokens son's Bay Land Controversy, and Paper Money ofthe Hud 1863-1869." Mississippi Valley son's Bay Company. [N.p.j: Historical Review, 3 6, no. 3 Canadian Numismatic (December 1949): 4i7-78. Research Society, 1975. 648 APPENDIX FOUR Gilbett, Heathcr. Awakenin~ and, 4ni ination. Microfiche Continent: T& IJ ol'Lord Report Series 85. [Ottawa]: Mwint Stephen. Vol. 1: Parks Canada, 1983. IS29-91. Aberdeen, Scotl.ind: Aberdeen Unk ersitv Pres, Gregor, Alexander. Vilhjahnur 196~.Stefimsson and the Arctic. We Built Ginacla Series, ed. Keith - - - . The Fnd oftbe Roa. 1: Wilson. Agincourt, Ont.: Book The Lif~ ofLord1lount Societv of Canada, 1978. Stepben. Vol. _): 1891-1921. Griffis, Edith May. "The Lady of Aberdeen, Scotland: Aberdeen the Bav." 7"be Beavei; Winter Universitv Pres~, 1977. l9w: 48. Godsell, jean W ' I Was No Lady Grover, S.H. "The Church of St ... I Followed the Call oj'th,,Ethelburga theMirgin." The Wild: The Autobiography oj a Beavei;.1une 1928: 8. Fur Trader's Wil~. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1959. Gwyn, Sandra. The Private Capi tal.-Anfi,ition and Love in the Godsell, Philip H. ArcticFrader: Age oj'A lacdonald and Laurier TheAccount oj' , 1wenty Year., Toronto: McCl el land and with the Hudsons B4 Compan~y. Stewart, 1984. Orig. publ. 11) 3 2. 6th ed. i ev. Toronto: Macmillan of Hall, Sam. The Fourth World: Canada,1943.The Heritage oj'the Arctic and Goldenberg, Susan. The Thomson Its Destruction. New York: Empire. New York: Beaufort -Adfred A. Knopf, 1987. Books; Toronto: Methuen, I lallock, Charles. "Three 1984. J'Vlonths in Labrador." Part 1. Granatstein, J. L., Irving M. 11aipersVcw,11lonth~yV1aga Abella, David J. Bercuson, R. zine, 22, no. 131 (1861): Craig Brown, 11. Blair 577-99, Ncatby. Twentieth Century - - - "Three Months in Canada. Torojito Montreal: Labrador. " Part 11. flaipers McGraw-Hill Rverson, 1986. Ve-,.,, Monthly,11agazine, 22, no. Gray, F arle. The G reat Canadian13-2 (1861): 743-65. Oil Patch. Toronto: Maclean- Harrington, Richard. The Inuit: Hunter, 1970.Lije As It Was. Edmonton: - "Born of English andI lurtig Publishers, 198 1. U.S. Parents." Oilweek, 20, no. I ledges, James B. Building the 28 (September 1969): 16-21. Canadian IT'est: The Land and Colonization Policies of the Cana Great Plains Research Consul- dian Pacific Railwa ' y. New York: tants. Fort St. James Costuming Macmillan, 1939. APPENDIX FOUR 649 Heslop, Barbara. "Arctic Res- I lumber, Charles J -, ed. Canada's cue." The Beaver, March 1944, Native Peoples. Canada Heir reprinted Autumn 1980: loom Series, Vol. 2. Missis 70-76. sauga, Ont.: Heirloom Hildebrandt, Walter. 'The Battle Publishing, 1988. ofBatoche: British Small War- Hunt, Barbara, ed. Rebels, Rascals fare and the Entrenched Mitis. & Royalty: The Colourful North Studies in Archaeology, Archi- oj'Laco Hunt. Yellowknife, tecture and History. Ottawa: N.WT: Outcrop, 1983. National Historic Parks and Hunter, Archie. Northern Sites Branch, Environment 7~aders: Caribou Hair in the Canada, 1985.Stew. Victoria, B.C.: Sono Nis Homick,'Feresa H. "A Social Press, 1983. Histor~ of Fort St. James, 1896." [N.p.], 1984. "In Celebration." The Beaver, Houston, James A. "Inuit Sculp- May 1920. ture: The Spirit in the Stone." Inglis, Alex. Northern Vagabond: Town and Count7y, May 1984: Tbe Life and Career of_7.B. 110.7 ~rrell. Toronto: McClelland Howardjoseph. Strange Empire: and Stewart, 1978. Louis Riel and the Metis People.Inkyo [pseud.]. The Reflections of Orig. publ. 1952. Toronto: Inkyo on the Great Company. James Lewis and Samuel, London: London General 1974. Press, 193 1. Hudson ~ Bay Company. A General Jackson, J.A., Gordon W. Court ofthe Governor and Com- Leckie, and WL. Morton, pany ofAdventurery ofEngland eds. Papers Read before the His 'Trading into Hudsonv Bay was torical and Scientific Society of held on Wednesday, Yuly 29, Manitoba. Set. 3, no. 6. Win 1931, at Beaver House, Garlick nipeg: Advocate Printers, Hill, London, E.C. London: 1951. The Times Publishing Co. [19311.Jackson, J.A., and W.L. Morton, eds. Papers Read before the His Hughes, Stuart. The Frog Lake torical and Scientific Society of "Massacre": Personal Manitoba. Set. 3, no. 5. Win Perspectives on Ethnic Conflict.nipeg: Advocate Printers, Edited and with introduction 1950. by Stuart Hughes. Carleton Library no. 97. Toronto: "James A. Richardson joins McClelland and Stewart, Canadian Committee." The 1976. Beaver, March 1928: 153. 650 APPENDIX FOUR Jardine, Matheson & Company. Kerr, Donald. "Wholesale Trade An Historical Sketch. Hong on the Canadian Plains in the Kong: Jardine, Matheson, Late Nineteenth Century: [n.d.j. Winnipeg and Its Competition." In R. Douglas jenness, Diamond. Eskimo Francis and Howard Palmer, Administration: 11. Canada. eds., The Prairie West: His Technical Paper no. 14. torical Readings. Edmonton: Montreal: Arctic Institute of Pica Pica Press, 1985: North America, 1964. pp. 130-37. - - - . Eskimo Admin . istration:Keswick, Maggie, ed. The Thistle V. Analysis and Reflections. Technical Paper no. 2 1. and the 7ade: A Celebration of Montreal: Arctic Institute of 150 Years ofyardine, Matheson North America, In.d.]. & Co. London: Octopus Books, 1982. Katz, Donald R. The Big Stort: Kilbourn, William. TheMaking Inside the Crisis and Revolutionofthe Nation: A Century of at Sears. New York: Viking Challenge. Canadian Illus Penguin, 1987.trated Library. Orig. publ. Keate, Stuart. Paper Boy: The 1965. Rev. ed. Toronto: Memoirs ofStuart Keate. McClelland and Stewart, Toronto Vancouver: Clarke, 1973. Irwin, 1980.Klengenberg, Christian. Klen Keegan, John. Six Armies in genberg oftbe Arctic: An Auto Normandy: From D-Day to the biograpby: see entry under Liberation ofParis. Orig. pub). MacInnes,16m. 1982. Harmondsworth, Mid dlesex, England: Penguin Knox, Olive. "The Question of Books, 1983.Louis Riel's Insanity." In J.A. Jackson, Gordon W. Leckie, Keighley, Sydney Augustus, in and WL. Morton, eds., collaboration with Ren6e Fos- Papers Read before the Historical sett Jones and David Kirkbv andScientific Society ofWani Riddle. Trader, Tripper, Trap- toba. Ser. 3, no. 6. Winnipeg: per: The Life ofa Bi~y Man. Advocate Printers, 1951: Winnipeg: Rupert's Land 20-34. Research Centre Watson & Dwyer Publishers, 1989. Krech, Shepard, 111. Native Kelly, L.V. "Lady in Distress." Canadian Anthropology and The Beaver, June 1951: 25-29. History: A Selected Bibliography. Winnipeg: Rupert's Land Kemp, H.S.M. Northern Trader Research Centre, University Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1956. of Winnipeg, 1986. APPENDIX FOUR 651 Lamb, James B. Press Gang. Post- Lower, J.A. Canada: An Outline War Life in the World of Cana- History. Orig. publ. 1966. Rev. dian Newspapers. Toronto: ed. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Macmillan of Canada, 1979. Ryerson, 1973. LeBourdais, D. M. "North West - - - . Western Canada: An River." The Beaver, Spring Outline History. Vancouver 1963:14-21. Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1983. Letourneau, Rodger. "The Grand Rapids Tramway." The Lyall, Ernie. An Arctic Man: Beaver, Autumn 1977: 47-54. Sixty-five Y~ars in Canada's North. Orig. publ. 1979. Levine, Allan G. "The London- Canadian Lives Series. Hali Winnipeg Connection: The fax: Goodread Biographies, Management of the Hudson's Formac Publishing, 1983. Bay Company in the Elarly Twentieth Century" [paper]. "Augustus Nanton, Maca ulay, R. H.H. Trading into Hudson's Bay: see entry under Western Canada's greatest Cooper, Patrick Ashley. financier"' Manitoba Business, [no date, no vol. number], MacBeth, R.G. "Famous For pp. 34-35.res." The Beaver, December Links, J.G. The Book ofFur. 1929:307-8. [London]: James Barrie, 1956. - - - . "Strathcona." The Littlejohn, Bruce, and Jon Beaver, September 1922: 3-5. Pearce, eds. Marked by the MacFwan, Grant. The Battlefor Wild: An Anthology of Litera- the Bay. Saskatoon: Western ture Shaped by the Canadian Producer Book Service, 1975. Wilderness. Toronto: McClel land and Stewart, 1973. Between the Red and the Rockies. Toronto: University of Littman, Sol. "The Souvenir Toronto Press, 1952. That Grew Up." Ma, leans, September 1975, 68c-68d. MacGregor, James G. Edmonton Trader.- The Story of_7ohn A. "London Letter." The Beaver, McDougall. Toronto: McClel June 1941: 54.land and Stewart, 1963. "Lord Waverley." Illustrated - -- - . Senator Hardisty London News, June 1982. Prairies, 1849-1889. Saska Lopez, Barrv. Arctic Drcams: toon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1978. Imagination and Desii e in a Northern Landscape. New York: Maclnnes, Tom, ed. Klengenberg Charles Scribner's Sons, 1986, ofthe Arctic: An Autobiography. 652 APPENDIX FOUR London '16ronto: jomithan 'VlcNaught, Kcnneth. The Cape, 1932.Pen~uin History oj'Citnada. Orig. publ. 1469. Rev. and Alacinnis, Joe. The Breadalbane reprinted. London: Penguin Ah,enture. A lontrealf loronto: Books, 1988. Optimum Publishing I inerna tional, 1982.MACMILIghtan, S. Aly Canadian Mack, Capt. G. Echnund. Weniories. London: Chapinan "Breaking the Ice for the and Hall, 1920. Allies." The Beavei; De( ember Macnaughton, John. Lord 1938:20-25.Strathtona. Makers of Canada - "Nascopie Dou nsScrics, Anniversarv Edition. Submarine." The Beavel-june London and Toronto: Oxford 1939: 19-21; reprinted, Uni% ersity Press, 1926. Nutunin 1980. McRae, Hainish, and Frances MacKay Donald. The Square Cairricross. Capital City: Mile: ~~ierchant Princes of London As a Financial Centre. Montreal. Vancouver Toronto: Orig. publ. 1973. Rev. ed. Douglas & McIntyre, 1987. London: Methuen, 1984. MacKay, Douglas. The Hon- McTavish, George Simpson. ourable Company: A History Of Rebind the Palisades:AnAutohi the fludsons Bay Company. o~rapby. Sidney, B.C.: Evelyn T)ronto: McClelland and Gurd, 1963. Stewart Bobbs-Merrill, 1936. McKenzie, N.M.W.J. The Wen of* Mahom, Torn, and Leonard the Hudson's Bay Company, Sloane. The GreatAfercbants: 1670A.D.-1920,4.D. Fort Amer1ca's Foremost Retail Insti William, Ont.: The Author, tutions and the People IV& 1921. Alade Them Great. Orig. publ. 1949. 2nd ed. rev. New York: McLaren, Moray. Understanding Harper and Row, 1966. the ~cots: A Guide for South Britons and Other Foreigners. Malcolm, Nndrcw H. The New York: Bell Publishing, Canadians. Orig. publ. 1985. 1956, 1972.Ioronto New York: Paper McLean, Don. 1885: Metis Jacks, 1986. Rebellion or Government (,on- Martin, -Mbro. James J. Hill and spiracy? Winnipeg: Pemmican the Opening of the Northwest. Publications, 1985. New York: Oxford University Macleod, R.C. The NWAIP and Press, 1976. Lau, Enforcement, 1873-1905. 1VIathews, JohnJoseph. Lij~ and Toronto Buffalo: University Death ofan Oilman: The Career of Toronto Press, 1976. of'E. W. Alarland. Norman, APPENDIX FOUR 653 Okla.: University of Okla- Moran, Lord. Winston Churchill: homa Press, 1951. The struggle for survival, 1940 1965. Taken from the diaries Mayles, Stephen. William Van of Lord Moran. London; Horne. The Canadians: A Constable, 1966. Continuing Series. Don Mills, Ont.: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, Morice, A.G. The History ofthe 1982.Northern Interior ofBritish Columbia. Orig. pub]. 1904. Meilleur, Ifelen. A Pour ofRain: Reprinted Fairfield, WA: Ye Storiesfrom a West Coast Fort. Galleon Press, 197 1. Victoria, B.C.: Sono iNis Press, 1980.Morley, William F.E. Ontario and the Canadian North. Cana "Merchandise to All the World." dian Local Histories to 1950: The Beavei; June 193 ): 42-43. A Bibliography, Vol. 3. Mikkelborg, John. "Reindeer Toronto: University of from Lapland." The Bay [Lon- Toronto Press, 1978. don StaffNlagazinel, 1949-50: Morris, James [J an]. Farewell the 37ff.Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat. Milne, Jack. Tradingfor Milady Orig. publ. 1978. Ilarmonds Furs: In the Service ofthe Hud- worth, Middlesex, England: son~ Bay Company 1923-1943. Penguin Books, 1979. Saskatoon: Western Producer - - . Heaven ~ Command: An Prairie Books, 1975. Imperial Progress. Orig. publ. ,N iirsky, Jeannette. To the Arctic!1973. Harmondsworth, Mid The Story oj'Nortbern Erplo- dlesex, England: Penguin ration from Earliest Times to theBooks, 1979. Present. Introduction by lvrilh-- - . Pax Britannica: The jalmur Stefansson. Orig. publ. Climax ofan Empire. Har 1934. Chicago: University of mondsworth, Middlesex, Eng Chicago Press, 1970. land: Penguin Books, 1968. Moberly, Henryjohn, in collab- Morton, Anne. "Charles Elton oration with William Bleasdell and the Hudson's Bay Com Cameron. Wben Fur JVas pany." The Beaver Spring King. London Toronto: J.M. 1985:22-29. Dent and Sons, 1929. - - - . "The Looking-Glass Money, Anton. This Was the Vision: the Minute Books of North. Toronto: General Pub- the HBC 1914-193 1 " [paper]. tishing, 1975.Morton, Desmond. The Last Montague, John, with Isaac War Drum: The North West Rich. "FurTraders." In Them Campaign of]88~. Toronto: Days, 1973, [n.p.j. A.M. Hakkert, 1972. 654 APPENDIX FOUR - - - . A Short History of' History oj'the Great Canada. Edmonton: Hurtig American Fortunes. Orig. publ. Publishers, [c.1983]. 1909. Modern Library ed. Morton, WL. Alanitoba: A His- New York: A.S. Barnes, 1937. tory. Orig. publ. 1957. 2nd ed. "My Mother's Home." [The Toronto: Uni~versity of HBC Packet]. The Beaver, Toronto Press, 1967. September 1933: 9. - - "Donald A. Smith and Governor George Simpson." Nanton, Paul. Arctic Break Tbe Beaver, Autumn 1978: tbrougb: Franklin's Expeditions, 4-9. IS19-1847. Introduction by Trevor Lloyd. Orig. publ. - - . Unpublished biogi a- 1970. Paperback, Toronto phy of Donald A. Smith. Vancouver: Clarke, Irwin, Mowat, Farley. Canada North. 1981. Canadian Illustrated Library. Naylor, R.T. The History of Toronto: McClelland and Canadian Business l8i57-1914. Stewart, 1967.Vol. 1, Tbe Banks and Finance Capital. Foreword by Eric Canada Nortb Now K-ierans. Toronto: James Tbe Great Betrayal. Toronto: Lorimer, 1975. McClelland and Stewart, 1976. Newman, Peter C. "A Vanished Heritage." Review of A. Dud - Tundra. Toronto:ley Copland, Coplalook: Cbiej' McClelland and Stewart, Trader, Hudsons Bay Company, 1973. 1923-1939. In The Beaver, Moyles, R.G., and Doug August September 1986: Owram. Imperial Dreams and 56-57. Colonial Realities: Britisb Views- - - . The Canadian Estah of Canada 1880-1914. lisbinent. Vol. 2: The Acquisi Toronto: University of tors. Toronto: McClelland and Toronto Press, 1988. Stewart, 1981. Mulvaney, Charles Pelham. Tbe - - - . Flame oj'Power. Intimate History of the North- West Rebel-Profiles of Canada's Greatest lion of] 88 5 Toronto: VBusinessmen. Orig. publ. 1959. H. Hovey, 1885.Paperback, Toronto: McClel Myers, Gustav-us. A History oj' land and Stewart, 1965. Canadian Wealtb. Vol. 1. Orig. - - - . Sometimes a Great publ. 1914. First Canadian ed. Nation: Will Canada Belong to Introduction by Stanley Ryer- the 21st Century? Toronto: son. Toronto: James Lewis & McClelland and Stewart, Samuel, 1972. 1988. APPENDIX FOUR 655 - "The 'nble'Falk ofOle~on, Robert. "The Commis Roy Thomson." Macleans, sioned Officers of the Hud December 1971, 41. son's Bay Company and the Deed Poll in the 1870's, with Newth, A.M. Britain and the P~irticular Emphasis on the World, 1789-1901. Orig. Fur Trade Party, 1878-1879." publ. 1967. Rev. ed. Master's thesis, University of Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Manitoba, 1977. England: Penguin Books, "The Past Hundred 1968. Years." The Beaver Spring Nichols, RA.C. "Entei The1970: 14-23. Fur Traders." The BCdVCr "Opportunity in the Fur Trade." Winter 1954: 37-38 The Beaver, March 1928: Nixon, Henny. "SS HA4S 174-75. Nascopie, 1912-1947 A Biog- Owi am, Douglas. -rhe Myth of raphy ofo Ship." Ar~t~onauta: Louis Riel." In R. Douglas The Nez,sletter oftbe Canadian Francis and Howard Palmer, Nautical Researcb Society, 4, Tbe Prairie West: Historical no. 3, Sept. 1987. Readings. Edmonton: Pica Pica Press, 1985: 163-81. Nixon, Richard. In the 4rend: A Memoir oj'Victory, A ceit and Palmer, Howard. Tide Settlement Renewal. New York: Simon of the West. Calgary: Univer and Schuster, 1990. sity of Calgary, Comprint Nortbern Frontier, Nortbern Publ., 1977. Homeland Report of the Pedley, J.W Biograpl~y oj'Lord Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Stratbcona and Alount Royal. Inquiry: Vol. I [Berger Introduction by Sir John Inquiry]. Ottawa: Minister of Willison. Toronto: J.L. Supply and Services Canada, Nichols, 1915. 1977. Peel, Bruce. "First Steamboats Nugent, Jo. "The World's G reat on the Saskatchewan." The Department Stores, ~ince Bt aver, Autumn 1964: 16-2 1. 1850, entertainers and friends, Pelly, David E Expedition:An of the family and community.' Arcticjourney Tbrough History The Rotarian, February 1982: 26ff. on George Back ~ River Toronto: Betelgeuse Books, 198 1. Nute, Grace Lee. "Paris to Petrone, Penny, ed. Nortbern Peel's River in 1892." The Voices: Inuit Writing in Englisb. Beaver, Outfit 278, no. 4, Toronto: University of March 1948: 19-23. Toronto Press, 1988. 656 APPENDIX FOUR Phillips, Alan. Into the 20th Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Century, 190011910. Canada's England: Penguin Books, Illustrated Heritage. Toronto: 1986. Jack McClelland N.S.L. Natural Science of Canada, Preston, W.TR. The Life and 1977. Times ofLord Stratbcona. Toronto: McClelland, Good Phillips, R.Aj. Canada~North. child & Stewart, 1914. Toronto: Macmillan of - - . My Generation ofPoli Canada,196" .tiCS and Politicians. Toronto: Pinkerton, Robert E. The Gen- D.A. Rose, 1927. tlemen Adventurers. Introduc- - - . Strathcona and the tion by Stewart Edward Making of Canada. New York: White. Toronto: McClelhind McBride, Nast, 1915. and Stewart, 1931. Price, Ray. The Howling Arctic: Pohle, Klaus. "The Lethhrid~e The Remarkable People 11ho Herald: A Case Study in Made Canada Sovereign in the 'Thomsonization."' Master of Farthest North. Toronto: Peter journalism thesis, Carleton Martin Associates, 1970. University, Ottawa, Ontario, 1984.Priestley, J.B. Victoria'sHeyday. Orig. publ. 1972. Har Poncins, Gontran de, in collabo- mondsworth, Middlesex, Eng ration with Lewis Galantiere. land: Penguin Books, 1974. Kabloona. New )ork: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941. Pryde, Duncan. Nunaga: Ten Years ofEskimo Life. Orig. Pope, Maurice, ed. Public Sew- publ. 1972. New York: Ban vant: The Memoirs ofSiryoseph tam Books, 1973. Pope. Toronto: Oxford Uni versity Press, 1960. R.TL. [Charles Vining.] Big Porter, William A., and Bert wigs: Canadians Wise and Oth Porter. A Backward Look at the erwise. Toronto: Macmillan of Forefolk qfLord Thomson of Canada,1935. Fleet and North Bridge. London: 1976 [privately Rangifer: Proceedings- ofthe Fourth printed].International ReindeerlCdribou Symposium, Whitehorse, Yukon, Pratt, A.M., and John H. Archer. Canada, 22-25Aug-ust 198~. The Hudson's Bay Route. [N.p.]: Harstad, Norway: Nordic Governments of Manitoba Council for Reindeer and Saskatchewan, 1953. Research, 1986. Prebble, John. john Prebble~ Rasky, Frank. The North Pole or Scotland. Orig. publ. 1984. Bust: Explorers ofthe North. APPENDIX FOUR 657 lbronto: McGraw-I] ill Ryer- Toronto: McClelland and son, 1977-Stewart in association with the Multiculturalism Program, The Taming oj'tbe Cana- Department of the Secretary dian West. Toronto: McClel- of State of Canada and the land and Stewart, 19(,7. Publishing Centre, Supply Rav, Arthur. "Adventurers at theand Services Canada, 197~. Crossronds: At Momentous Report to the Proprietors ofthe and Stormy Summer Meet- Hudson's Bay Company, by the ings in 187 1 the Future of theSpecial Committee appointed at Hudson's Bay Company Was an informal meeting ofcertain Charted." T& Bedvei; Proprietors held on 22nd,7uly, April Mav 1986: 4-12. 1930, to be Laid Befire the Pro Tbe Canadian Fur prietorson l6thjanuary, 1931. 'Frade in the IndustrialAge. London,1930. Toronto: University of Reynolds, Thomas A. [Martin Toronto Press, 1990 Hunter, pseud.j. Canadian - - . "Rivals for Fur." The Wilds. Columbus, Ohio: A.R. Beaver, April May 1990: Harding, 1907. 30-39, from The Canadian Fur Rich, E.F, "The Perpetual Gov Trade in the Industria I Age. ernor." The Beaver, Autumn - - . "York Factoiy: The 1974: 18-22. Crisis ofTransition, Richmond, W.R. The Lij~ of 1870-1880." The Beaver Lord Strathcona. London Autumn 1982: 27ff. Glasgow: Collins, [n.d.] Rea, J.E. "The Hudson's Bav The Riel Rebellion- 1885. A Companv and the North- Frontier Book. Surrey, B.C.: West Rebellion." The Beaver, Heritage House Publishing, Summer 1982: 43-57. 1984. Rea, Kj. Fbe Political Economy of'Roberts, Lance W "Becoming the Canadian North: An Inter- Modern: Some Reflections on pretation qftbe Course oj*Devel-Inuit Social Change." In Ian opment in the Northern A.L. Getty and Antoine S. Territories ofCanada to the I ussier, eds., As Long As the Early 1960s. [Toronto]: Uni- Sun Shines and Water Flows: A versity of Toronto Press in Reader in Canadian Native association with the Univer- Studies. Vancouver: Universitv sity of Saskatchewan, 1968. of British Columbia Press, 1975: 299ff. Reid, W Stanford, ed The Scottish Tradition in Canada. ARobertson, Heather, ed. and History of Canadas Peoples. conip. A Gentleman 658 APPENDIX FOUR Adventurer: The Arctic Diaries Sampson, Anthony. The New ofR.H.G. Bonnycastle. A Europeans: A Guide to the Richard Bormycastle Book 2. Workings, Institutions and Toronto: Lester & Orpen Cbaracter of Contemporary Dermys, 1984.fflestern Europe. London: Hod Robin, 0. B. "I low the Fort St. der and Stoughton, 1968. James National Historic Park Schooling, Sir William. The Came into Being." Unpub- Governor and Company of lished manuscript. 1979. Adventurers of'England Trading into Hudson's Bay during Two Robinson, William M. Novice in Hundred and Fifty Years the Nortb. Surrey, B.C. Blaine, 1670-1920. London: Hud WA: Hancock House, 1984. son's Bay Company, 1920. Ross, Hugh Mackay. A Man- Scoresby, William. An Account oj' agers Tale. Winnipeg: Watson the Arctic Regions. Vol. 1. New & Dwyer Publishing, 1990. ton Abbot, Devon, England: - - - . The Apprentice ~ 7ale. David and Charles, 1969. Winnipeg: Watson & D,~Nyer Publishing, 1986. Sealey, Gary D. "History of the Hudson's Bay Company, Ross, W. Gillies. Whaling and 1870-1900." Master's thesis, Eskimos: Hudson Bay 1860- University of Western 191 ~. National Museum of Ontario (London), 1969. Man Publications in Ethriol ogy, no. 10. Ottawa: National Searle, Ronald, and Kildare Museums of Canada, 197 5. Dobbs. The Great Fur Opera: Annals of'tbe Hudson ~ Bay Rostecki, Randy R. "Winnipeg Company, 1670-1970. Land Politics in the 1870s," Toronto: McClelland and The Beaver, Spring 1985: Stewart, 1970. 42-48. Royal Commission on Newspa- Selwood,john. "Mr Brydges' Bridges." The Beaver, Summer pers [Kent Commission). Tbe 1981:14-21. Yournalists. Vol. 2, Research Publications. Ottawa: Minis- - - - I and Evelyn Baril. ter of Supply and Services "The Hudson's Bay Company Canada,1981.and Prairie Town Develop Royal Commission on Price ment, 1870-1888." In Alan E Spreads. Report. Ottawa: J. Artibise, ed., Town and City: King's Printer, 1937. Aspects of Western Canadian Urhan Development, Canadian Russell, Chesley. "The Devon Plains Studies no. 10. Regina: Island Post." Tbe Beaver, Canadian Plains Research Spring 1978: 41-47. Centre, 1981. APPENDIX FOUR 659 - "Land Policies of thePioceedings oftbe Second Con Hudson's Bay Comp;my at g-ress, Canadian Etbnology Soci Upper Fort Garry: 1869- et-Y. National Museum ofMan 1879." Prairie Forum, 2, no. 2 Mercury Series, Canadian (November 1977): 101-19. Ethnology Service, Paper #28, Sex6, Marcel. Two Centuries of' 1975. Fur-Trading, 1723-1923: Stanley George F.G. The Birtb Romance ofthe Revillon Fami~y. Of Western Canada: A History of' Paris, 1923.the Riel Rebellions. Orig. puk Shortt, Adam, and Arthur 1936. Toronto: Universitv of G. Doughty, eds. Canada and Toronto Press, 1961. Its Provinces: A History ofthe "The FurTrade Partv Canadian People and Their Institutions by One Hundred Part 1: Storm Warnings." Th~ Associate~. Vols. 1-23. Toronto:Beavei; September 1953: Glasgow, Brook, 1917. 35-39. Skelton, 0,I). The Life,ind - - "The Fur Trade Party Letters oj'Sir Wi0crid Laurier Part 2: United We Stand . . ." 2 vols. Toronto: S.B. Gundy, The Beaver December 1953: University ofToronto Press, 21-25. 1921. Steele, I larwood. The Afarcbing Skinner, Constance Lindsav. Call. Foreword by Major Beaver Kings and Cabins. ~Ncw General Victor 'A~ Odlum. York: Macmillan, 193 3. Toronto: Thomas Nelson & Smith, Cynthia M., ed., with Sons (Canada), 1955. Jack McLeod. Sit-john A.: An Anecdotal L~f~ ofyobn . 4. Alac-Steele, Samuel B. Forty Kars in donald. Toronto: Oxford Uni- Canada: Reminiscences oftbe versity Press, 1989. Great North-west with Some ,-Iccount ofHis Set-vice in Soutb Smith, Shirlee Anne. "'A Desire Afiica. Orig. pUbl. 1920 [?]. ToWorrv Me Out': Donald Ryerson Archive Series. Smith's Harassment of Toronto: McGraw-1 lill Charles Brydges, 1879-1889." Ryerson, 1972. The Beavo-, 67, no. 6. Decem ber 1987 january 1988: 4-11. Stephenson, William. The Store That Timot~y Built. Toronto: Sprenger, George H. "Coping McClelland and Stewart, with Competition: The Reor- 1969. ganization of the Hudson's Bay Company after the Stevenson, Alex. "Arctic Fur Monopolv." Injim Freedman Trade Rivalry." Tbc Beaver, and Jerome H. Barkow, eds., Autumn 1975: 46-51. 660 APPENDIX FOUR Stewart, Robert. Sam Steele: LionTolboom, Wanda Neill. Arctic oftbe Frontier -lbronto: Dou- Bride. Toronto: Ryerson Press, bleday Canada, 1979. 1956. Stewart, Walter, ed. Canadian "To The Axctic. " The Beave?; Newspapers: The Inside Story. March 1933: 249. Edmonton: Hurtig Publishers, Tupper, Sir Charles. Recollections 1980. ofSixty Years in Canada. Swinton, George. Sculpture (fthe London: Cassell, 1914. Eskinzo. Toronto: McClelland Tway, Duane C. "The Influence and Stewart M.F. Feheley of the Hudson's Bay Company Arts Co. Ltd., 1972. upon Canada, 1870-1889." Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Los Angeles, Tanner, Adrian. -The End of 1963. Fur Trade History." Queens - - "The Wintering Quarterly, 90, no. I (Spring Partners and the Hudson's 1983): 176-91.Bay Company, 1863 to 1871." Canadian Historical Review, 3 3, Thomas, Lowell. Kabluk oftbe no. I (March 1952): 50-63. F vkimo. London: Hutchinson [n.d.]. - - "The Wintering Partners and the Hudson's Thomson, David. England in the Bay Company, 1867-1879." Twentieth Century (1914-79). Canadian Historical Review, 41, Orig. publ. 1965. Enlarged no. 3 (September 1960): and revised, with additional 215-23. material by Geoffrey Warner. Pelican History of England, Tweedsmuir, 2nd Baron [John no. 9. Harmondsworth, Mid- Norman Stuart Buchan]. dlesex, England: Penguin Hudson ~ Bay Trader. London: Books, 1981.Clerke & Cockeran, 1951. Thomson of Fleet, First Baron Tyrrell, C.S. "The Strathcona [Roy H. Thomson]. After I Herd." The Beaver, March Was Sixty: A Chapter ofAutohi- 1933:191-93. ography. Toronto: Thomas Nelson & Sons Canada, 1975. Tobin, Brian. "Hudson's Bav Upton, L.F.S. "The Wreck of the Eldorado: Strange Tale of House: What goes on in the Shipwreck." The Beaver, building that houses the head- Autumn 1968:27-31. quarters of the Company in Canada." The Beaver, March Usher, Peter J. Fur Trade Posts 1944:28-34.ofthe Northwest Territories, APPENDIX FOUR 661 1870-1970. [Report] North- Weekes, Mary. Trader King, as ern Science Research Group, told to Mary Weekes. The Department of Indian Affairs thrilling story ofjorty years'ser and Northern Development. vite in the North-ff'est Territo Ottawa: Department of Indian ries, related by one ofthe last of Affairs and Northern Devel- the old time Wintering Part opment, 1971.ners ofthe Hudsons Bay Com pany. Regina and Toronto: Valentine, Victor F, and Frank School Aids and 'lext Book G. Vallee, eds. Eskimo oj'tbe Publishing Co. Ltd., 1949. Canadian Arctic. Carleton Weil, Gordon L. Sears, Roebuck, Library no. 41. Toronto: U.S.A.: The Great American McClelland and Stewart, Catalog Store and How It Grew. 1968.Orig. publ. 1977. New York: Harcourt Brace jovanovich, Van Steensel, Maja, ed. People of1979. Light and Dark. Foreword by H.R.H. Prince Philip; Intro- Wells, Eric. Winnipeg Where the duction by R. Gordon New West Begins: An Illustrated Robertson. [Ottawa] Depart- History. Burlington, Ontario: ment of Indian Affairs and Winnipeg Chamber of Com Northern Development, 1966, merce[Windsor Publications, 1982. Voisey, Paul. "The Urbanization of the Canadian Prairies, Whittington, Michael S., co 1871-1916." In R. Douglas ordinator. The North. Col Francis and Howard Palmer, lected research studies. eds., The Prairie West: Histori-Toronto: Universitv of cal Readinjqs. Edmonton: Pica Toronto Press in co-operation Pica Press, 1985: pp. 383-407. with the Royal Commission oil the Economic Union and Voorhis, Ernest, comp. "His- Development Prospects for toric Forts and Trading Posts Canada and the Canadian Ofthe French Regime and of Government Publishing the English Fur Trading Centre, Supply and Services Companies." Mimeographed. Canada, 1985. Ottawa: Department ofthe Interior, 1930. Wild, Roland. Arctic Command: The Story ofSmellie oj'the Nascopi . Foreword by Sir Watson, William G. "A South- Patrick lAeshley Coope~; Intro ern Perspective on Northern duction by Dennis Jordan. Economic Development." In Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1955. Michael S. Whittington, co ordinator, The North. Toronto: Wilkinson, Doug, "A Vanishing University ofToronto Press, Guladian." The Beaver, Spring 1985. 1959: 25-28, 62. 662 APPENDIX FOUR Wilkinson, Douglas. TheArctic Introduction by Leonard W. Coast. Illustrated Natural Brockington. Toronto: History of Canada. Toronto: Thomas Nelson & Sons N.S.L. Natural Science of (Canada) [n.d.]. Canada,1970. - "Private Letters from Williams, J. "The Last Voyage the Fur Trade. A Selection of the Stork." 'The Beaver, from the Correspondence of September 1939: 44-47. William McMurray Between 1845 and 187 L" In J. Willson, Beckles. From Quebec to A.Jackson and W. L. Morton, Piccadil~y and Other Places: eds. Papers Read Before the Some Anglo-Canadian Memo- Historical and Scientific Socieq ries. London: Jonathan Cape, oj'Manitoha. Set. 3, no. 5. 1929. Winnipeg: Advocate Printers, - - . The L ij~ ofLord 1950: l9ff. Strathcona and,11ount Royal, - - "Tadoussac, the Com G. C. Al. G. G. C. V0. 2 vols pany and the King's Posts." Boston and New York: The Beaver, June 193 5: 8-12, Houghton Mifflin, 1915. 63,66. - - . The Lif~ ofLord Winchester, Simon. Their Noble Stratbcona and,11ount Royal, Lordships: Class and Power in G. CJL G., G. C. VO., Modern Britain. Orig. publ. (1820-1914). London: 1981. New York: Random Cassell, 1915. House, 1982. Wilson, Alan. "'In a Business Way': C.J. Brydges and the Wishart, Bruce. "Paddle Wheels Hudson's Bay Company, on the Prairies." The Beaver, 1879-89." In Carl Berger and December 1989 january 1990: Ramsay Cook, eds., The 14'est 30-36. and the Nation: Fssays in Hon- Wissink, Ren6e. "The Quest for our of'W.L. Morton. Toronto: Ultima Thule." Arctic Circle, McClelland and Stewart, 1, no. 1, 1990: 16-2 1. 1976:pp.118-23. Wilson, Clifford. Campbell oftbe Wonders, William C., ed. Yukon. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada's Changing North. Car Canada,1970.leton Library no. 55. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, "The Emperor at -I. 19 Lachine." The Beaver, Septem berl934:18-22.Woodcock, George. Gabriel Dumont: The,11litis Chiefand - ed. Northern Treasury:His Lost World. Edmonton: Selectionsfrom The Beaver. Hurtig Publishers, 1975. APPENDIX FOUR 663 - Skinned. North Fal-no. 17. Toronto: McClelland mouth, Mass.: International and Stewart, 1988. Wildlife Coalition, 1988. -- - - The Opening ofthe Zaslow, Morris, ed. A Century Canadian Nortb, 1870-1914. ofCanada's 4rctic Islands, Canadian Centenary Series, 1880-1980. Ottawa: Royal no. 16. Toronto: McClelland Society of Canada, 198 1. and Stewart, 197 1; paperback, 1981. - 7'he Northward apan-Ziegler, Philip. 'The Sixtb Great sion ofCanada, 1914--1967. Power: Barings, 1762-1929. Canadian Centenar) Series, London: Collins, 1988. Illustration Credits P. 2 HBCA Photograph Collection, McCord Museum of Canadian 1987 363-P-80 (N8514) History, Notman Photographic Archives, Photo no. 110, 266-11 P. 45 McCord Museum of Canadian P. 14History, Notman Photographic Hudson's Bay Company Archives, Photo no. 66962-1 Archives, Provincial Archivrs of Manitoba, HBCA Photograph P. 46 Collection, 1987 363-H-22i Saskatchewan Archives Board, (N8iO5) R-A-1294 P. 18 P. 53 Metropolitan -lbronto Reference Provincial Archives of Manitoba, Libraryj Ross Robertson Collection -Transportation - Collection, T33162 Red River Cart 45 P. 20 P 57 Painting by William George Provincial Archives of Manitoba, Richardson Hind; National Collection-Transportation Axchives of Canada C-33690 Red River Cart 5 Hall & Lowe, P. 23 Photographer From Beckles Willson, The 1,ife P. 69 of Lord Strathcona and Mount Glenbow Archives, Calgary, Royal G. C.M. G., G. C. VO. Alberta; file no. PB-540 (1820-1914), London: Cassell (NA-1400-71a) and Company Ltd., 1915; Nlet ropolitan TorODto Reference P. 77 LibraryNational Archives of Canada C-1879 P. 25 From a lithograph of the draw- P. 78 ing by Coke Smyth; Hudson's Provincial Archives of Alberta, Bay Company Archives, Provin- Ernest Brown Collection, cial Archives of Manitoba, no.B-5631 HBCA Picture Collection, P-44 (N5256) P. 84 Provincial Archives of Manitoba, P. 36 Collection-Emerson I I From.4 Woman's Way Throu~(~h Unkno-wn Labrador, Toronto- P. 92 Ryerson Press, 1908; Hudson's Provincial Archives of Manitoba, Bay Company Archives, Provin- Coil c ction-Transportati on cial Archives of Manitoba, Railway- Countess of Dufferin 1 664 ILLUSTRATION CREDITS 665 P. 94 P. 164 National Archives of( ~anada National Archives of Canada C-3447 PA-28853 (left); National Archives ofCanada C-27663 P. 98 (right) Provincial Archives of Manitoba, Collection--Immigration 15, P. 167 Photo no. N7934Canadian Pacific Archives, neg. no. 8997 P. 114 P. 171 Provincial Archives of Manitoba, Gleribow Archives, Calgary, Collection-Brydges, Charles Alberta, NA-1494-6 John I P. 177 P. 118Provincial Archives of Alberta, Hudson's Bay Company Ernest Brown Collection, Archives, Provincial Archives of no. B-5683 Manitoba. 14BCA Mal) Collec tion, G.3 847 (N8501) P. 178 National Archives of Canada P. 126 C- 14100 National Archives of Canada C-1229 P. 184 From Maclean's, I I April 1959, P. 129p. 27; Metropolitan Toronto Hudson's Bay Company Reference Library Archives, Provincial Archives of Manitoba, I IBCA Photograph P. 191 Collection, 1987 289 (N8512) McCord Museum of Canadian History, Norman Photographic R 132Archives, Photo no. 4267-View National Archives of Canada P. 197 PA-38667Glenbow Archives, Calgary, P. 149 Alberta, NA-294-1 McCord Museum of Canadian P. 201 History, Norman Photographic National Archives of Canada Archives, Photo no. 63, 346-1 C-3841 P. 159 P. 202 National Archives of Canada National Archives of Canada C-8549 C-9671 P. 161 P. 209 Provincial Archives of Alberta, Provincial Archives ofManitoba, Ernest Brown Collection, Collection-Events 14 3, Photo no. B-6220 no. N7615 666 ILLUSTRATION CREDITS P. 211 P. 278 Miss A.H. Gamlin, Photogra- Hudson's Bay Company pher; Hudson's Bay Company Archives, Provincial Archives of A,rchives, Provincial Archives ofManitoba, 14BCA Photograph Manitoba, HBCA Photograph Collection, 1987 363-F-29 Collection, 1987 363-P-8.3 (N8515) (N851 1) P. 280 P. 218 1 Judsons Bay Company Hudson's Bay Company Archives, Pro'vincial Archives of Archives, Provincial Archives of Manitoba, IIBCA Photograph Manitoba, HBCA Photograph Collection, 1987 363-K-30 Collection, 1987 374 21 (N8459) P. 2 8 3 Glenbow Axchives, Calgary, P. 230 Alberta, NA-3006-3 Richard Harrington, Photogra pher, Hudson's Bay Company P. 29) Archives, Provincial Archives of Glenbow Archives, Calgary, Manitoba, IJBCA Photograph Alberta, NA-3006-1 Collection, 1987 51 11-109 (H- 109) P. 294 Max Sauer, Photographer; P. 231) Hudsons Bay Company Canadian Museum of Civiliza- Archives, Provincial Archives of tion, National Museums of Manitoba, HBCA Photograph Canada, Ottawa, Canada, Collection, 1987 363-N-7A negative no. 39074 (N73-156) P. 244 P. 297 Geological Survey of Canada, National Archives of Canada Ottawa, Photo no. 199680 PA-102214 P. 251 Hudson's Bay Company P. 300 Archives, Provincial Archives of M,, Sauer, Photographer; Hud Manitoba, HBCA Photograph son's Bay Company Archives, Collection, 1987 363-C-510 Provincial Archives of Manitoba, (N82-295)HBCA Photograph Collection, 1987 363-C-38 16 (N8470) P 256 Richard Harrington Nationid P. 303 Archives of Canada PA- 112094 Hudson's Bay Company Archives, Provincial Archives of P. 260 Manitoba, HBCA Photograph Richard Harrington National Collection, 1987 363-B-1 1 6 Archives of Canada PA-143236 (N7934) ILLUSTRATION CREDITS 667 P. 3 06 P. 341 Charles Stuart McEuen, Pho- Reproduced with the permission tographer; National Archives of of La F6d6ration des coop6ra Canada PA- t 45040 tives du Nouveau-Qu6bec Canadian Museum of Civiliza P. 3 12 tion, National Museums of Norman Ross, Photographer; Canada, Ottawa, Canada, nega Hudson's Bay Company tive nos. 91-161 (b & w) and Archives, Provincial Archives of S90-7745 (slide) Manitoba, FIBCA Photograph Collection, 1987 363-N-8D P. 350 (N81-257) Hudson's Bay Company P 314Archives, Provincial Archives of A.A. Chesterfield Collection, Manitoba, HBCA Photograph Queen's University Archives, Collection, 1987 363-W-312 Photo no. E 1 -1 (N8077) P. 321 P. 353 W McKinlay, Photographer; Hudson's Bay Company National Archives of Canada Archives, Provincial Archives of C-71050 Manitoba, HBCA Photograph Collection, 1987 363-C-9 29 P. 326 (N8893) R. Fullerton, Photographer; National Aviation Museum, P. 358 Photo no. 10098Hudson's Bay Company Archives, Provincial Archives of P 327 Manitoba, HBCA Photograph National Archives of Canada Collection, 1987 363-P-9 1 C-25087 (N8469) P. 331 Glenbow Archives, Calgary, P. 3 69 Alberta, NA-3235-65 Hudson's Bay Company Archives, Provincial Archives of P. 335 Manitoba, I IBC Archives, Rosemary Gilliat, Photographer; Schooling, p. 121 (N8908) From Pageant of'the Nortb, Clif ford Wilson, ed., Toronto: The P. 373 Rverson Press, 1957, p, 170; Provincial Archives ofManitoba, Metropolitan Toronto Reference Coll ecti on-Foote 858 Library P. 375 P. 339 Hudson's Bay Company XV Doucette, Photographer; Archives, Provincial Archives of National Archives of Canada Manitoba, HBCAAlbuin 79-10 PA-160707 (N7236) 668 ILLUSTRATION CREDITS P. 380 P. 452 Hudson's Bay Company Hudsons Bay Company Archives, Provincial Archives of Archives, Provincial Archives of Manitoba, HBCA Photograph Manitoba, HBCA Photograph Collection, Album 53 40 Collection, 1987 363-L-11 (FI370-26) (N8471) (N8902) P. 3 91 P. 464 Hudson's Bay Company The Financial Post1j. Chris Archives, Provincial Archives of Christiansen Manitoba, HBCA Photograph Collection, 1987 363-C-27 39 P. 470 P. 403Gilbert A. Milne & Co. Limited, Hudson's Bay Company Photography. Courtesy Archives, Provincial Archives of Hudson's Bay Company Manitoba, HBCA Photograph Collection, 1987 363-C-52 342 P. 476 (N740 1) Courtesy Hudson's Bay P. 406 Company Hudson's Bay Company P. 481 Archives, Provincial Archives of The Financial PostlD. Dowling Manitoba, HBCA Album, 5 3 8 3 (L24-496) (N8903) P. 490 P. 422 Brian Willer Hudson's Bay Company Archives, Provincial Archives of P. 494 Manitoba, HBCA Photograph ITO World, Christmas Collection, 1987 363-A-24 61 1983 New Year 1984, p. 39 (N8518) P. 502 P. 425 London Express, from Roy Hudson's Bay Company Tbonison of Fleet Street, by Rus Archives, Provincial Archives of sell Braddon, Toronto: Collins, Manitoba, HBCA Photograph 1965, opposite p. 208; Metro Collection, 1987 363-K-21 politan '16ronto Reference (N8519) Library P. 431 The Central Press P'hotos, Ltd. R 517 Canapress Photo Service Peter P.442 Bregg Hudson's Bay Company Archives, Provincial Archivcs of P. 528 Manitoba, HBCA Photograph Elizabeth Bilton Photography. Collection, 1987 339 32 Courtesy Hudson's Bay (N8905) Company ILLUSTRATION CREDITS 669 P. 543 P. 556 Peter Caton, Gerald Campbell Michael De Sadeleer, Studios, File no. A 86-24-8. Photographer Courtesy Hudson's Bay Company P. 571 Erik Christensen The Globe and P. 551 Mail Hal Roth, Photographer. Courtesy Hudson's Bav P. 577 Company Courtesy Hudson's Bay Company 11.555 Canapress Photo Service Peter Mal) on p. 136 byjonathan Redman Gladstone J.B. Geographies Index Aj. Freiman department siores, Arctic Gold Exploration 467 Syndicate, 284n A. 7: Gifford (ship), 249 Armit, William, 82, 113, 121 Abbey Theatre, 204n Arsenault, Spud, 325 Abbott, John J.C., 139, 140 Arvelek, Peter, 261 Aberdeen University, 400th Ashdown, James H., 80 anniversary, 192-193 Assiniboine (ship), 85n Adamson, Agar, 199 Athahasca River (ship), 247-248, Adventurer (ship), 2 86-2 87 324 Airplanes in the North, Athabasca tar sands, 3 76n 325-328,403Atholstan, Lord, 190n Aklavik (ship), 3 06, 3 07-3 08, 3 09Atwood, Margaret, 578 Alanbrooke, Viscount, 413, 430, 435Baden-Powell, Sir Robert, 193 Alberta and Great Water-ways Baer, Hermann, 561 Railway, 324Banbury, Perley, 414 Allan, George, 377, 378, 383, Bank of E-rigland, 358-359, 581 388-389,399,401,409,415, Bank of Montreal, 5, 45, 107, 477 148,157n,188,189,204, Allan, Sir Hugh, 13 8-140, 145 475 Allen, Ralph, 15i Banting, Dr Frederick, 322-323 All-Red Route, 7, 186-187 Barings, 189, 359 Amory, Derick Heathcote, Lord Barlow, Sir Thomas, 224 Amory, 355, 356-357, 302, Barris, Ted, 88, 96n 422,423,448-450,451,454, Barter, 262 456,457-458,460,461,478 Basford, Ron, 461 Amundsen, Roald, 234, 319 Batoche, 164; battle at, 95-96, Anderson, JW, 240, 267, 308, 166 311 Battleford, 165 Anderson, SirJohn, Lord Wiver- Baychimo (ship), 303-305 ley, 369, 413, 420, 429, 435 Be~yeskimo (ship), 301 Anglo-Persian Oil Company, 7, Bayrupert (ship), 301-302 222 Bay Steamship Company, 367 Angus, Richard Bladworth, 157, R~ytigern (ship), 369 189 Beattie, Peter, 484n Anson Northup (ship), 88 Beaver House, 379, 547, Arbuthnot, Admiral Sir Robert, 548-549 220-221Beaver preserve, 3 3 1-3 3 2 Archer, Winifred, 402 Belcher Islands, 334n Archibald, Adams G., 74, 13 i Bell, Jimmy, 269-2 70 Arctic fox, 249, 253-254; declineBell, Max, 426-429 in prices, 321), 332-333; Bell, Torn, 483 irregular birth rates, 254 Bellotjoseph-Ren~, 307 670 INDEX 671 Bellot Strait, 307 Brydson, Sherry, 492-493, Bennett, Rt. Hon. R.B., 389 507-508,509,520n Bennett, Howard, 470 Buckley, D.G. (Pete), 397, 535, Benson, Sir Henry (later Lord 572-573 Benson), 356, 435-436, 437, Budgell, Leonard, 317 583 Buffalo hunting, 52-53 Bernier, Capt. Joseph, 193 Burbidge, Herbert E., 366 Berry, Capt. William, 285 Burbidge, Richard, 213-214, 216 Berthe, jean, 291 Burch, Ernest S., Jr., 2 65 Berton, Pierre, 156 Burmah Oil, 7, 220, 222n B6tournay, Justice Louis, 153 Burton, Charles L., 477, 478 Bettridge, Ray, 482n Burton, G. Allan, 478, 479-480, Big Bear, 164481,482-483,485,486-487 Binney, George, 317 Bush pilots, 325-328 Bird, Dr Curtis James, 13 5 Butler, John, 584 Bird, J.W. "Bud", 544, 574 Butler, R.J., 466 Birdseye, Clarence, 292n Butler, Capt. WE, 80-81 Black, Conrad, 559 Blake, Edward, 161 Callwood, June, 185 Bliss, Michael, 111-112, 172 Campbell, Bruce, 291 Blumes, Mark, 534n Campbell, Phyllis Audrey, 558n Blyth, Sam, 504n Campbell, Robert, 128n Boer War, 195-198, 203 Campeau, Robert, 472 Bootlegging, 370n Canada Corporations Act, 453 Borden, Robert Laird, 219 Canada North-West Land Bourassa, Henri, 196 Company, 5-6, 205-206 Bowell, Mackenzie, 171) Canada Pacific Railway Bowsfield, Hartwell, 70 Company, 139, 145 Boyle, HarryJ., 578 Canadian Committee of HBC: Boy Scout movement, 6, 193 conflicts with British board, Brintnell, Leigh, 327 351-366,377-379,388-389, Britannia Airways, 491-492 390,397-402,416-417, British Columbia, enters 429-430; given power to Confederation, 138 (lea] with daily operations, British Empire, 183-185, 186 383; membership changes in British Petroleum, 7, 222n 1940s and 1950s, 414-415, Brody, Hugh, 235 43 4-43 5. See also Chester, Bronfman, Allan, 455n Philip Alfred; Murray, Bronfinan, Sam, 454 Richard Brooks, Marilyn, 533 Canadian I landicrafts Guild, Brothers, Frank, 169 338,340 Brown, George, 151 Canadianization of HBC, 448, Bruce, John, 58n 450-463,587-588 Bryant,james, 374-375, 443 Canadian Pacific Railway Brydges, Charles John, 113-117, Company (CPR), 3, 5-6, 119-124 154-174,203-204; 672 INDEX construction, 158-160; effect 70-71,99-104,106-108, on HBC, 170-172; 1885 125,127,130-131,204-205 Rebellion and, 165-166, Chipman, Clarence Campbell, 167-168; financing, 158, 130 160-163; formation of CPR Chisholm, Posy, 494-496 Syndicate, 156-157; land Church, Evan, 482 sales, 112-113; last spike Churchill, railway built to, 329 celebration, 168-170; photos, Churchill, Sir Winston, 7, 222, 132, 161, 167, 171 429-432 Canoes in early West, 49, 50 City of Winnipeg (ship), 87 Canol project, 3 3 2 Cleveland, George, 273 Card, Rev. Gerald, 324n Cobb, Bill, 269, 273, 279, 288 Caribou, importance to Inuit, Cobbold, Lord, 436-437 238-240 Cohon, George, 503-504 Carnarvon, Earl of, 11-12 Cole, James, 154 Carnegie, Andrew, 192-193 Coleman, D.C., 362 Caron, Adolphe, 167 Coleman, Jim, 42 7 Carp, Johan, 147 Coleman, John, 526-527 Carson, Helen, 534 Collins, John Ernest Harley, Cartwright, Sir Richard, 226, 435,583 227,296 Colvile, Andrew, 115 Cazalet, Capt. Victor Alexander, Colvile, Eden, 41-42, 115, 116n, 385,413 121,122,124 Chamberlain, Joseph, 195, 196, Competition between HBC and 197-198 rivals, 279-292 Chapman, Sidney E, 512, 520n, Computer Innovations, 542 558n Conoco, 536, 537 Chesshire, Bob, 233, 269, 370, Consignment, 281 393,395-396,402,403 Constable,john, 563, 564 Chester, David Andrew, 411 Continental Oil, 427, 586, 587 Chester, Isabel, 410 Cooch, FG., 3 3 6n Chester, Philip Alfred, 214-215, Cooke, Dr Alan, 36, 37 379,381,383,388,390-397, Cooper, Lady Kathleen, 3 80, 402,404,433-434,438-439, 392,398,401,402,406 477-478, 587; feud with Cooper, Sir Patrick Ashley, 278, Cooper, 397-399, 401-402, 380,386-390,397-399,411, 413, 415, 416-42 1; life in 413, 418-421, 477, 478, 585; Winnipeg, 409-411; on Canadian tours, 400-409 suburban shopping centres, Copland, Dudley, 393 416-418; visits to London, Corelli, Adam, 329n 411,438Cornwall, Capt. S.A., 304 Chief Commissioner (ship), 89 Cornwall, Col. J.K. ("Peace Chief Factors and Chief Traders: Riverjim"), 282, 284 argue for share of sale pro- Cory, WW, 323 ceeds, 99-100; journals, 273; Cotter, James L., 12 5-12 6 treatment by Smith, 17, 19, Council of Assiniboia, 50-51 INDEX 673 Coureurs de bois, 584 Diseases among Inuit, 3 3 2, 3 3 3 Cournoyea, Nellie, 347 Disraeli, Benjamin, 70 Cowdray, Lord, 369 Distant Early Warning (DEW) Credit for Inuit, 274-277, 337 stations, 333 Creighton, Donald, 162 Dog teams, 230, 344 Creighton, Tom, 325 Dome Petroleum Ltd., 473, Cruise, David, 145 536-537 Cumberland House, 41) Dominion Land Act, 109 Cunliffe, Leonard, 212-214 Dominion Securities, 474 Doyle, Kevin, 513, 514 Dafoe, John W., 409 Drummond, Sir George, 189 D'Aigneaux, Monsieur, 285 Dryden, John, 548 Dallas, Alexander Grant, 44, 59 Duck Lake, battle at, 164, 165 Dangerfield, Jack, 43911 Dufferin, Earl of, 73n, 86, 150 Daniels, Alfred H., 44;-444 Dufferin, Lady, 86, 150 Darby, Dora, 369 Duff-Millar, W.H., 217 D'Arcy, William Knox, 221, 222 Dumont, Gabriel, 93, 95, Davidson, Sir Charles, 225 164-165,166 Davis, Robert Atkinsoti, 50n Duncan, Charles, 268 Davoud, Paul, 3 2 8, 40 Dunning, Charles, 414 Dawe, Shirley, 532 Duplessis, Maurice, 400n Dawson, Sir William, l7n Dupuis Fr~res, 471 Deckers, J im, 2 69 Duval, William, 274 Deed of Surrender, 109 Dwan, Hugh, 547-548 Deed Polls: (1821 and 1834), 99; (1871), 103, 104, 1 ;0 Eaton, Fred, 505, 519, 520 Dennis, Col. John Stoughton, Eaton, R.Y., 389 53-54, .57Eaton, Timothy, 211-212 Department stores, 210-214, Eaton Bay Financial Services 216-217,223,364,366, Limited, 471, 542 374-375,378,379,381-382, Eaton's, 418; competition with 393-395,402,465-466, HBC, 402 469-471, 577; developments Fbury, Lord, 382-383 under McGiverin, 467-487; Eden, Anthony, 429 problems in early 1980s, Edward VII, King, 194-195 529-536; turnaround tinder Eldorado (ship), 285 Tory and Kosich, 5 ~7-541, Eldorado Mine, 3 2 5 549-5 54. See also Shopping Elizabeth 11, Queen, 453 centres, suburban Elton, Charles, 381 Depression, 329-330, 381-382 Enemark, Tex, 461-462 Desmarais, Paul,456 Enright, John, 3 9 3 Diamond, Billy, 276, 345, 346 Era (ship), 244 Dickins, C.H. "Punch", 325, 327 Erik Cove, 249-250 Diefenbaker, Rt. Hon.John, 499n Ernie (ship), 283 Dior, Christian, 275 Ernerk, Peter, 276 Discovery (ship), 193, 301 Eskimo. See Inuit 674 INDEX Eskimo Book of Knowledge, 317 Fort Resolution, 281 Evans, Harold, 516 Fort Ross, 305, 309-3 10 Foster, Sir George, 206, 227 Factors. See Chief Factors and Fox. See Arctic fox Chief TradersFP Publications Limited, Family allowances, for Inuit, 513-514 334-336 Francis, Daniel, 242 Farley, Jesse P., 147 Franklin, SirJohn, 307 Farnz,orth (ship), 329 Fraser, Colin, 278 Farrer, Gaspard, 192 Fraser, Donald, 470 Faulkner, Sir Eric, 355, Frayling, Arthur, 426, 548-549 357-358,360,423,430, Freeman, Milton, 337n 433-434,449,545 Freeman, Minnie Aodla, Ferrier, R.D., 283 336-337,347 Fields department stores, 47 7 French, Lt. Col. George, 144n Films: produced by HBC, 3 74 Frog Lake, battle at, 165 Finkelstein, Max, 282 Funnell, Owen, 410 Firdayson, Nicol, 29, 241 Fur trade, 12 5-13 1; fashion Finnish Fur Sales Company, 547 changes, 81-82, 249, Fish Creek, battle at, 166 279-280; fluctuating prices, Fisher, Gordon, 515, 517 125,274-275,318,329,332; Fisher, SirJohn, 221 HBC fur business sold, Fitzgerald, Edward, 366 546-549; HBC treatment of Flaherty, Robert, 287n traders, see Hudson's Bay Flavelle, Sirjoseph, 477 Company: treatment of Fleming, Archibald Lang, 252 traders; illustrations, 2 5 1, Fleming, Sir Sandford, 120, 260, 3 14; wireless telegraphy 121n,122,154,170, in,279 186-187 FurTrade Party, 125 Foot, Sir Dingle, 454 Foreign Investment Review G.W Robinson Ltd., 467 Agency, 481, 484, 486 Gall, E.J. "Scotty", 236,258, Fort Alexander, 71 262-263,269,271,305-308, Fort Chimo, 241 419 Fort Chipewyan, 278, 281 Gallagher, Jack, 5 3 6, 5 3 7 Fort Churchill, 241 Gallagher, John, 157 Fort Churchill (ship), 302 Galt, George, 216, 365 Fort Garry, 49, 50, 55, 57, 58, 82Galt, Sir Alexander Tilloch, 181 Fort George, 2 8 5, 2 86 Gardiner, A.G., 200 Fort Hearne (ship), 302 Gay, Norbert, 52n Fortj7ames (ship), 302 George V, King, 176 Fort McMurray, 247 Gerhart, C.W "Chuck", 538 Fort McMurray (ship), 248 Getty, J. Paul, 510 Fort McPherson, 247 Gibbon, John Murray, 157 Fort McPherson (ship), 302 Gibson, Paddy, 263, 308 Fort Qu'Appelle, 113 Gillies, Donald, 286 INDEX 675 Gladstone, William Ewart, 103 1 laminer, Armand, 510 Glenlivet Distillers, 473 1 fardisty, Richard (Smith's Globe and Mail newspaper, father-in-law), 31, 32 516-518Hardisty, Richard (Smith's Godsell,jean, 248, 337 brother-in-law), 3 In, 61, 62, Godsell, Philip, 239-240, 271, 63 288,318,371,372 Harriman, E.H., 188n Goffart, Lionel, 470 Harris, Cecil "Husky", 263 Gold: discovered at Yellowknife I larris, Joe, 3 5 5, 415, 43 5 and Lake Athabasca, 3 2 5 1 larris Company, 117, 119 Gonzo (Ken Thomson,, dog), Harrison, Russ, 482 494-496,519n,527 Harris & Partners, 469n Goodyear, Donald, 309 Harrods, 2 13 Gordon, Daniel M., 4 1 layashi, Yukichi, 424 Gordon, Donald, 459 1 lead, Sir Edmund Walker, 41 Goschen, George Joachim, Henderson, Donald, 37 Viscount Goschen, 104, 105 Hendry, William, 29 Goulet, Elz6ar, 67, 73 Heneage, Admiral Algernon Gourley, Robert, 377 Charles, 220 Graham, Alan, 199n I ienri, Father Pierre, 2 3 3 n Graham, Andrew, 241 1 Ienry Morgan & Company, Grahame, J. Ogden, 130 441-443 Grahame, J ames A., 10(,, 12 7, 1 lerbert, Fred, 394 1461 ierschel Island, 243-244, 246 Grahame (ship), 247 Heslop, Barbara, 309 Grain. See Wheat expoits Heslop, WA., 309 Grand Forks (ship), 96 Heyworth, Lord, 435, 436, 437 Grand Trunk Railway, 120 1 Jill, James Jerome, 70, 88-89, Grant, Cuthbert, 64 146-147,148,157,187-188 Grant,james, 30, 33-34 Hislop, James, 282 Great Seal of Canada, 461, 462 Hislop and Nagle, 282 Grenfell, Dr Wilfred, 175, 190n Hochbaurn, Al, 261, 356 Griffiths, Alison, 145 Hodgson, Stuart, 236, 264, 266, Griggs, Capt. Alexander, 85, 147n274-275,276,334n,347 Grollier, Father Henri, 234 Hodson, Roy, 449 Grosvenor, Gerald, sixth Duke Horner, Jack, 484 of Westminster, 492 Hotchkiss, R.A., 114 Grunfeld, Henry, 511 House of Lords, 500-501, 558 Guest, David, 453-454, 462 Houses for HBC staff, 273-274 Guggenheim, Meyer, 527 Houstonjames, 338-340 Guillemette, Franqois, 67, 73 Howard, Arthur "Gat", 93 Gundy, Harry, 477, 478 Howe, Joseph, 60 Gwyn, Richard, 512-513 Huband, Rolph, 470n, 472, 545, 553 Hall, Sam, 344Hudson, Henry, 250, 408 Hallock, Charles, 39 Hudson's Bay (film), 412n 676 INDEX Hudson's Bay Company: 2 50th 437-438, 444, 586; takeover birthday celebrations (1920), of Simpsons, 477-487; 370-373; 300th anniversary, Thomson purchase, 450; accomplishments and 518-521, 529-531; Toronto failures, 578-588; archives, store opened, 469-471, 577; 463n; Canadian headquarters transportation agent for moved, 115, 471; competi- France in WM, 366-369; tors, 245-246, 279-292, treatment of traders, 17, 19, conflict between Canadian 70-71,99-104,106-108, committee and London 127,130-131,204-205; directors, 351-366, 377-379, Zellers bought, 474-477 388-389,390,397-402, Hudsons Bay Distillers, 542, 585 416-417, 429-430; core Hudson's, Bay House, 3 78-3 79 business transferred from Hudson's, Bay Oil & Gas trading to real estate, 99, Company, 3 7 7, 3 94n, 416, 101-102,106,109-110, 536,537,586-587 116-120; criticisms, Hughes, Sam, 180 322-323,341-342,345-347; Hunt, Laco, 324 divided into three depart- Hunter, Archdeacon James, 234 ments, 216; effect of CPR Hunter, Archie, 238, 299 on, 170-172; and formation Hurlbatt, Ethel, 222-223 of Canada, 579-58 1; fur Hutchinson, Isobel Wylie, 304 business sold, 546-549, 578; headquarters moved to Immigration to Canadian West, Canada, 448, 450-463, 587; 7,42-43,98,204,205-208; land sales, 102, 103-104, promotional literature, 202, 109-122,123,124,204,205, 206-207 215, 216, 223; move into the Imperialism, 11-12, 186-187 Arctic, 231-232, 240-241, Indians: dependence on HBC, 245,246-254,255-277; 81, 580; stereotype of, 235. Nascopie and other ships in See also Naskapi Indians North, 295-313; northern Innakatsik, Matthew, 3 3 6 operations, 315-347; North- Insider trading, 108 ern Stores sold, 542-546, International (ship), 85, 88, 89 553, 578; prairie steamboats, International Financial Society, 83-97; problems in 1980s, 101 469, 530-538; redirection Inuit, 173; affected by decline in after 1984, 539-554; rela- fur prices, 332-334; carvings tions with natives, 3 5-3 8, 8 1,and prints, 338-341; chang 240-241,255-257,259-267, ing world of, 344-347; 274-277,315-319,322-323, dependence on HBC, 332,333,340,341-347,580; 274-277; diseases, 332, 333; retail stores, see Department economic plight, 332-334; stores; Scotsmen as employ- Eskimo co-operatives, 340; ees, 16-17, 270-271, 580; HBC treatment criticized, shopping centres, 416-418, 322-323; illustrations, 239, INDEX 677 256, 260, 314, 341; language, Kindersley, Sir Robert 237; patterns of life before Molesworth, 215-216, 365, contact with whites, 366-367, 369; visits Canada, 236-238, 254-255; relations 370-374 with H BC, 240-24 t, King, Cornwallis, 272 255-257,259-267,274-277, Kipling, Rudyard, 205 315-319,322-323,332,333, Kittson, Norman, 147n, 148 340, 341-347, 580; sexual Klengenberg, Capt. Christian ethics, 262-267; stereotypes "Charlie", 245-246 of "Eskimo", 234-235; trans- Klondike gold rush, 280 fers of population, 189; vis- Kosich, George, 541, 544n, ited by Cooper, 406-408 549-552,554,571,573,575 lpellie, Alootook, 300 Krieghoff, Cornelius, 493, 524, 525 Jackson, A.Y., 322 Kuptana, William, 347 Jacomb, Sir Martin, 358, 482, Kusugak, Lorna, 332 545n LaBine, Gilbert, 324-325 James, Clem, 309 Labrador, Smith in, 7, 13, 14, James, Duke of York (later 15,30-44 James 11), 548Lacombe, Father, 218 James Richardson & Sons, 117 Lady Head (ship), 286 jellicoe, Lord, 408 Lady 1~indersley (ship), 303 Jenness, Diamond, 262 Laird, Wallace, 289 Johnson, Arthur, 516 Lamb, W Kaye, 581 Johnson, Walter, 326 Lambert, Allen Thomas, 459 Lampson, Curtis Miranda, 41, Kapyrka, Peter, 568 42 Karsh, Malak, 463 Lamson and Hubbard Kay, Jimmy, 542Corporation, 282-283, 293 Keegan, John, 16 Land sales: CPR, 112-113; Keighley, Sydney A., 263 1 IBC, 102, 103-104, Kennedy, B~tty, 483 109-122, 123, 124, 204, 205, Kennedy, John S., 147, 157 215,216,223 Kent, Toni, 515-516 Lansdowne, Lord, 169 Keswick, Sir William Johnston Laurier, Sir Wilfrid, 180, 182, (Tony), xi-xiv, 3 56, 3 59, 414,185,196,209,217-219,225 42 0, 42 5, 45 1-45 2, 5 3 2; asLavis Incorporated, 562 Governor, 42 3-43 3, Learmonth, Lorenz, 309, 310 436-437,447-448 Lepine, Ambroise, 73n Khrushchev, Nikita, 503 Levy, John, 476 Kilabuk, Jimmy, 347 Lily (ship), 89-90 Kilgour, David, 355, 363, Lime Street headquarters, 105 455-4i9,521Linksjoe, 351, 352, 356, 357, Kimberley, I st Earl of, 10 1, 105414,417,432n,437,438, Kincannon, Jack, 486 451,452,461 678 INDEX Liquor sales in the Arctic, 343n Manitoba Club, 116, 401 Lockhart,james, 104, 106 Manning, Les, 260 Loewen, Charles, 393, 410 Marconi, Guglielmo, 203, 279 Lower Fort Garry, 371-372, 373 Markborough Properties, 472, Lubbock, Michael, 405, 407n 491,542n,553 Lukassen, Gary, 544n, 550 Mark's Work Wearhouse chain, Lyall, Ernie, 300, 309, 317-318 534n Lyall, Hugh, 377 Marland, Ernest Whitworth, 375-377 MacArthur, Duncan, 131 Marland Oil Company, Macaulay, R.H.H., 405-407 375-377,586 MacBeth, Rev. R.G., 72 Marshall Wells hardware Macdonald, Const. Slim, 246 subsidiary, 542 Macdonald, Donald, 484n Martin, Francis E, 393 Macdonald, SirJohn A., 122, Massey, Vincent, 181n 123,139,140,150,151,152; Mathieson,jock, 330 and CPR, 156-157, Matthews, Gen. A. Bruce, 459 160-162,163,165,166;and May, WR. "Wop", 327 Pacific Scandal, 140; and Red McCann, Louis, 461-462, 463 River crisis, 55, 57, 59, McClintock, Sir Leopold, 40, 60-61, 65, 68, 73-74; Smith 307,308 votes against, 6, 141-145 McCollum, L.F., 416, 587 Macdonald, Sir William C., 174 McConnell, J.W, 362 MacEwan, Grant, 108 McDonald, Archibald, 167 MacFarlane, Roderick, 205 McDougall, William, 53, 54-57, MacIntosh, Alexanderj., 459, 58n,61,63 467,484n,586McGill University, 6, 24, Mackenzie, Alexander, 145- 146, 174-175 149,150-151,246 McGiverin, Donald Scott, 464, Mackenzie, Don, 471-472 465-477,519,529,530,532, Mackenzie, William, 216 535,539,540,542,544n, Mackenzie Air Service, 327 546, 553; acquisitions, Mackenzie River, 246, 32 3-324 468-477,480-487, 587-588; MacLachlan, Doug, 446 appointed President, 468; Macnaughton, John, 10, 14 resigns as CEO but remains Mactavish, William, 51-52, 55, Governor, 540-541 57, 58, 59, 60, 66, 81 McIlwain, Paul, 522 Mahaffy, Douglas, 472, 482, McIntyre, Duncan, 157 550n McIntyre, John, 472 Maid of Orleans (ship), 245, 246 McKay, Angus, 140-141 Mail-order catalogues, 3 3 7n McKenzie, N.M.W.J., 130 Mail-order houses, 2 81, 3 3 7 McKenzie, Roderick, 103-104 Manitoba, joins Confederation, McLaren, Duncan, 403 68 McLaughlin, Earle, 483 Manitoba (ship), 86, 89 McNeil, Fred, 475 Manitoba Act, 68 McNeill, SirJohn, 198 INDEX 679 McTavish, Donald, 271 Murray, Richard, 342, 362, 442, McTavish, George, 126-127 447,448,454,465,478,545, McTavish,J.11., 153 587; becomes Managing Megarry, Roy, 5 17-518 Director, 439-445; conflict Merchants International with Kilgour, 455-459; polit Steamboat Line, 89 ical contacts, 450, 455; Merchant'l7rading Company, 385 resigns, 467-468 Mercredi, Pierre, 273 Muskeg Limited, 324 M6tis, 52-55, 58-59, 62-67, 68, Mutual Trust, 543 73,75,91,93-96, 163-166 Myers, Gustavus, 146 Mkis Bill of Rights, 65-66 Michener, Roland, 461, 463 Nagle, Edmund Barry, 282 Middleton, Gen. Frederick Nain, 2 3 3 Dobson, 93, 95Nanook ofthe Nortb (film), 287n, Mignault, Pierre, 535-i36 344 Mikkelborg, Capt. John, 320 Nanton, Sir Augustus, 216, 365, Millerand, Alexandre, 367 477 Milner, H.R., 426 Nascopie (ship), 294, 295-301, Mingan,27-28305-306,308,309-313,320, Minto, Lord, 196-197 404, 405, 407; design, Missionaries to the Arctic, 295-296; sinking, 311-313 233-234; effect on Inuit, 276 Naskapi Indians, 29, 35-38; Mohamed al-Fayed, 213n famine among, 37-38; Molson, Senator Hartland de photograph, 36 Montarville, 459 National anthem, Canadian, 86n Monnet,jean, 367 Natives. See Indians; Inuit; Montague, John, 281 Naskapi Indians Montreal, 23-24, 25, 43, 44, 48 Nault, Alexandre, 67 Moran, Lord, 430 Nault, Andre, 54 Moravians, 2 3 3 Nesbitt, A.W, 282 Morgan, Bart, 443n Nesbitt, Aird, 443 Morgan, J.P., 206, 215 Newlands, E.E, 397 Morgans. See Henry Morgan Nichols, P.A.C., 317 & CompanyNightingale, Irwin, 470 Morris, Alexander, 135, 152 Nixon, Henny, 296 Morris, Jan, 11, 183-184, 429 Nobbs, Peter, 472 Morton, Anne, 382 Nordon, Charles Louis, Morton, WL., 48, 117n, 155, 384-386,387 361-362 Nordon, Keith, 384 Mowat, Farley, 343 Norman, Montagu, 386-387 Moyles, R.G., 206 NormanWells, 220,325-326, Munn, Capt. Henry Toke, 252, 332 284nNonbcote (ship), 90, 91, 93-96 Munro, Darcy, 309 Northcote, Sir Stafford, Lord Murdoch, Rupert, 512, 516 Iddesteigh, 101, 103, 104, Murray, Sir Alexander, 387 105,157,370n 680 INDEX Northern Council, 71, 100, 127, Parsons, Flora May, 2 52 128-130Parsons, Ralph, 250-252, 257, Northern Pacific Railway, 109, 269,289,291,297,393,405 121,145 Pasteur, William, 224 Northern Trading Company, Paul, Norman, 542 282 Payne, John de B., 3 96 North Magnetic Pole, 297 Peacock, Sir Edward, 358, 359, North West (ship), 78, 87, 97 386,431,477,478 North West Company, 584 Pearson, Lester, 454 North West Company Inc., Peck, Rev. E.J., 237 545n Pedley, Rev. J.W., 22 3 North West Mounted Police, 6, Pelican (ship), 301 70,110,144n,164-165,244, Peterson, Alfred, 263 246 Peterson, Sir William, 22 5 North West Passage, 173, 308 Petroleum exploration, North West Rebellion of 1885, 220-222, 325; Canol 91,93-96,163-167 pipeline, 332; HBCs lease of Norway House, 70-7 1, 100, reserves to Marland, 190,271 375-377,586 Nourse, William, 30, 31 Phillips Petroleum, 5 10 Nutria, 81-82Pike, Warburton, 184 Pilkey, Clifford, 513 O'Brian, John, 470 Pitblado, Jim, 470, 474 0 Canada(song),86n Pitchblende, discovered at Great Occidental consortium, 5 10 Bear Lake, 324-325 Ogilvie, William, 152 Pitchforth, Hector, 283-284 Oil. See Petroleum exploration Pitfield, Michael, 454 Oil pipelines, 332 Pitseolak, Peter, 311, 313 Old -age pensions, for Inuit, 3 3 4Pohle, Maus, 513 Ontario Securities Commission, Poncins, Gontran de, 263 521n Pope, John Henry, 156 Orobetz, Christina, 524 Port Nelson, 329 Oshaweetok, 338-339 Poundmaker, 164, 165 Osler, Col. Hugh F, 414-415 Preston, WTR., 4, 12-13, 133, Outhouses, 274134,151,152,156,161,209 Ownership rule, 10 percent, Pryde, Duncan, 259-260, 455-456 264-265 Owram, Doug, 206 Pullen, Aj., 412n Purvis, Arthur, 400 Pacific Scandal, 140; Smith turns against government, 141-145 Railways, 49, 86-87, 91, 102, Palk, Bill, 402112-113,120-121,134-135, Palliser, John, 49 13 8, 139-140, 145; to North, Panama Canal, ;61 328-3 29. See also Canadian Parisien, Norbert, 66 Pacific Railway; Northern Parker, P.J., 379, 382, 388 Pacific Railway; St Paul, INDEX 681 Minneapolis and Manitoba Rio Vista (Joe Segal's house), Railway; St Paul & Pacific 475n Railway Robertson, Heather, 319 Ramsay, Peter, 242 Robson, Joseph, 584 Rankin Inlet, 3 3 2-3 3 3 Roderick, Don, 305 Ravenscrag (Hugh Allan's Rogers, Major A.B., 169 house), 139Ronald, lain, 470, 472, 482, 541, Ray, ArthurJ., 280, 447 543,544n,547,550n Red River, 49-59, 62-74 Rose, SirJohn, 104, 113, 121, Red River carts, 48-49, 50, 57, 122,123,139 172,177 Rose, Walter, 586 Red River Rebellion Ross, Alexander, 169-170 (1869-187 0), 6, 53-69, Ross, Horatio Hamilton, 90n 71-74Ross, Hugh MacKay, 316n, 330 Red River Transportation Ross, James, 50-51 Company, 89,147, 148 Ross, Norman, 3 3 8 Redsky, Annie, 231, 272 Ross, Roderick, 130 Reed, Arthur, 408 Rowley, Graham, 332 Reindeer, plans to breed, 319-321Roxy Petroleum Ltd., 537n Renison, R.J., 289 Royal Canadian Mounted Repulse Bay, 273-274 Police, 6, 257, 334, 335; Revelstoke, Lord, 168 relations with Inuit, 3 3 6n Revillon, jean, 290-291 Royal Commission on Newspa Revillon, Louis Victor, 284 pers (1980), 498, 515-516 Revillon Fr~res, 284-292 Royal Commission on Price Reynolds, R.A., 420 Spreads (1934), 364 Richardson, George Taylor, Royal Navy, 220-221 459-460,467,482,519-520, Royal Trust Company, 6, 107 521n,529Royal Victoria Hospital, Richardson, James Armstrong, Montreal, 6, 175 Jr, 435 Roy Thomson Hall, 506 Richardson, James Armstrong, Rupert, Prince, 548 Sr, 377 Rupert House, 331 Richardson Securities, 469n, Rupert's Land: purchase by 521nCanadian government, xv, 47, Richmond, Sir Henry Frederick, 51 379,386Russell, Capt. Aaron Raymond, Riel, Louis: North West Rebel- 85 lion (1885), 91, 96, 163-166, Russell, Charles, Lord Russell, 170-17 1; photos, 46, 7 7; Red 122 River uprising (1869-1870), Russell, Chesley, 263, 315-316 54,55,58-59,62,63,65, 66-67,68,72-77,141 S.G. Warburg & Company, 427, Riley, Conrad Stephen~on, 356, 511 377,415Sabellum Trading Company, Riley, Derek, 546 283-284 682 INDEX Sale, Charles Vincent, 323, 369, Simpsons Ltd., 477-487, 374,375,376,381-382,383; 529-530,553,573,575 challenged by Nordon, Simpsons-Sears Ltd., 479, 480, 384-386 481,482,484,531,536 Salmon, Walter, 529, 532 Sinclair, lan, 483 Sanhedrin, 409Sivanertok, Octave, 3 15, 3 3 2 Saunders, Charles, 207 Sivertz, Ben, 340, 346 Schultz, Drjohn Christian, Q, Skelton, O.D., 184 68,137,152Skinner, Sir Thomas, 215, 365 Scoresby, Capt. William, 242 Slaight, Brian, 514 Scott, Capt. Robert Falcon, t93, Smellie, Capt. Thomas Farrar, 301,565 296-298,310n,405,408 Scott, Thomas, 66-68, 69 Smith, C. Gordon, 434-435 Scully, Lynn, 534 Smith, Donald Alexander, Ist Seagram Distillers Ltd, 473, 585 Baron Strathcona and Mount Searle, Stewart Augustus, 3 5 5, Royal: achievements, 4-8; 414,435appearance, 14-15,44, 64, Sears, 417-418222-223; attacks on Brvdges, Sears, Roebuck & Company, 12 1-122, 12 3-124; Canada's 478, 479, 480-481, 485, 486, High Commissioner, 536 180-182,187-200,217-219, Secretan,J.H.E., 158-159 22 3-224; and CPR, 155-163, Segal, Joe, 47 3 -47 7, 482 n, 552165,168-170,172,174; Selkirk (ship), 88-89, 91, 92 death, 224-227; donates regi Seton, Ernest Thompson, 2 3 8 merit for Boer War, 195, Sexual relations between HBC 196-199; early life, 21-24; men and Inuit, 262-267 ethics, 9-11, 17, 19, 3 5, 107, Sharpe, Richard, .535 112,119,123,133-134, Shaughnessy, Sir Thomas, 189 144-145,153-154,180, Sheen, Ronald, 472 204-205; gains seat on HBC Shopping centres, suburban, board, 122-12 3; HBC gover 416-418,437-438,444,i86 nor, 124-127, 130-131, 176, Shop-Rite stores, 471, 542, 572 187,188,204-205,212-217, Short-wave radio transmitters, 223; HBCs first land com 330-331 missioner, 106, 110-113; Siebens Oil & Gas, 471-472, honours, 4; illustrations, 2, 473 20,23,45,171,178,184,201, Silver Heights (Smith's estate 209,218; imperialism, 11-12, outside Winnipeg), 106, 150, 186; invests in Winnipeg real 155,174,190estate, 119; involvement with Simpson, Frances, 25-26 oil exploration, 220-222; in Simpson, Sir George, xiv, 59, 7 1,Labrador, 7, 13, 14, 15, 105,107,195,240,328,584; 30-44; marriage, 17, 34-3 5, influence on Smith's career, 41, 181, 185; peerage, 22,26,27-30,32,33,37-18, 185-186,193-194,197-198; 40,41philanthropy, 6-7, 174-175, INDEX 683 193; political career, 6, Stord (ship), 2 8 5 133-154,161-162,174, Stork (ship), 301 179-180; presents proposals St Paul and Pacific Railway, 61, to M6tis, 63-65; President of 147-148 HBC Northern Department, St Paul, Minneapolis and 70-71,74,79-83,99-106; Manitoba Railway, 6, promotes immigration, 7, 148-151,152 42-43,205-206,209-210; Strathcona, Lord. See Smith, relations with traders, 17, 19, Donald Alexander 70-71,99-104,106-108, Strathconas Horse, 6, 195, 127, 130-13 1, 204-205; resi- 196-199 dences, 106, 174, 175, 176, Stuart, Barbara, 21 190-191; Scottishness, Stuart, John, 22 15-17; secretiveness, 12-13, Sturrock, D.G., 309 42; sees future ofWest, 7, Sunday Times (newspaper), 509, 42-43,61,70,101-102,155, 512,516 205, 207; sent by government Sutherland, Hughjohn, 66 to Red River, 60-63; wealth, 188-189,203-204,205-206; T. Eaton Company, 211-212 work habits, 15, 187-188, '566, Bishop Alexandre 189-190 Antonin, 49, 68, 74, 107 Smith, Isabella, Lady Strath- Tadoussac, 26 conal 17, 18, 3 1, 3 3 -3 5, 40,Tanner, Adrian, 342-343 41,181,185,224'Fax disadvantages suffered by Smith, Shirlee, 123, 46;n HBC, 448, 452 Smith, Sydney, 220 Taylor, Elizabeth, 247-248 Smith, Vivian Hugh, 216 Teeniotee, josh, 3 45 Snow, Clarence Eugene "flank", Telling, Edward, 480, 481, 486 493,494Tbe Reaver (magazine), 3 73, Snowmobiles, 344 400n Southam's, 515Tbe Times (newspaper), 509, 512, Spender, Stephen, 128 516 Spracklin, Ed, 3 15 Thomas, Clifton Moore, 373 SS Distributor (ship), 2 8 4 Thomson, David Kenneth Roy, Stannersjohn, 291 . 497,527,535,546-547,548, Steamboats, 83-97, 246-248 552, 556, 557-576; art col Steele, Col. Sam, 19(4 197, 198, lection, 562-564, 565-567; 199early life, 559-561; interest Stefansson, in painting, 561-562, 319-320,321567-568; personal philoso Stephen, Charles N., 331 phy, 564-565, 568, 569; Stephen, George, 13, 43, 45, 60, work for HBC, 569-576 145,148,149,150,173,174, Thomson, Dick, 505 175; and CPR, 155-156, 157, Thonisori, Irma, 558n 158,160,162,163,165,168 Thomson, Kenneth Roy, 2nd Stevenson, Alex, 291 Lord Thomson ofFlect, 487, 684 INDEX 491-527,537,542n,546, Tupper, Sir Charles, 61, 62, 120, 5 5 1; art collection, 493, 144-145,168,180,181, 524-525, 561; corporate 198-199 holdings, 491-492, 498-499; Turner, J.M.W, 563-564 on David, 562; early life, Turner, John, 456 508-509; philanthropy, 505, Turner, Murray, 404, 503 506; philosophy ofeditorial Turner Valley, 416 independence, 516-518; pho- Tyler, Sir Henry, 17 tos, 490, 494, 517, 554, 571; purchase ofHBC, 518-52 1, U.S. annexationists, and Red 529,539-540,578,587,i88; River, 58-59 residences, 499-500, 504 U-Paddle Canoe rental service, Thomson, Lynne, 521, 558n 340n Thomson, Marv [.on, 565 Thomson, Nor~i Marilyn (Ken Van der "Oelde, Father Frans, 2 3 6 Thomson's wife), 500, 504, Van Horne, William Cornelius, 507n,510,521,522 158-160,163,165,166,168, Thomson, Peter, 521, 558n 169,170,173,174 Thomson, Roy Herbert, I st Venables, George, 285, 286 Lord Thomson of Fleet, 499, Vera (ship), 283 500-503,506,507-508, Vernon, Pat, 470 509-511,520n,558,560--561 Victoria, Queen, 65, 194; Thomson Corporation, 499 Diamond jubilee (1897), Tigert, Don, 574-575 183-185 Tiller, Marvin, 342, 472, 542-543,545,574 Walker, Frank, 392, 396 Titania (ship), I I 6n Warburg, Siegmund, 428 Tokens, HBC, 342 Warren, Willis, 311, 3 13 Torno, Noah, 455 Waters, Capt. James, 310-311, Toronto Credits, 542 312 Tory, Jim, 483, 485, 586 Watson, William, 232 Tory, John, 493, 505, 516, 519, Watt, Charlie, 275 520,525-527,528,550,551, Watt, James, 331 554, 555, 558n; masterminds Waverley, Lord. See Anderson, HBC turnaround, 529-53 1, SirJohn, Lord Waverley 537-541,553-554 Webb, Capt. Adam Clark, 54 Towers, G raham, 43 5, 462 Weightman, George, 395, 418, Towers department stores, 552 444 Trader (ship), 304 Wellesley, Arthur, Duke of Trading chiefs, 50 Wellington, 560 Transportation in Canadian Werner, Len, 547 West, 48-49, 82, 102. See West, Canadian: isolation in also Canoes; Railways; Red 1869, 48-49; settlement of, River carts; Steamboats 98,108-110,202,204, Tuberculosis, effect on Inuit 205-2 10. See also North lifestyle expectations, 333 West Rebellion; Red River INDEX 685 Rebellion; Transportation in fVinnipeg Free Press, 318 Canadian West; Wheat Winny, Harold, 403 exports; Winnipeg Wireless telegraphy, 203, 279 Westmoreland, Earl of, 524 Wolseley, Col. Garnet, 71-72, Weston, Bernie, 276 73,79-80,166 Weston, Galen, 520 Wolstenholme, 250 Weston, Garfield, 520n Wood, Donald, 469-470, 472 Wet sales, 212Wood, Jj. "Woody", 235, Weyers, Bruno, 374 260-261,308n Whalebone corsets, 241 -242, 245 Wood, Peter, 353, 364, 417, 434, Whalers, 241-245 437,450,470,472,482 Wheat exports, 89, 12 5, 2 07, Woods, J. Elmer, 415-416, 42 8, 328-329 429-430 White, William, 227 Woodward's, 418 Whiting, Joan, 394, 439n Woolhouse, Keith, 514 Whitman, George, 313, 472, Wray, Gordon, 2 64, 2 66, 521-523,545n,570 276-277 Wholesale division of I IBC, 542 Wrigley, Joseph, 1271, 130, 167 Whyte, Sir William, 216, 3 65 Wrigl~y (ship), 247 vVild, Roland, 296, 298 Williamson, R.G., 333 Wilson, Alan, 11, 114, 120 Yandle, George, 263 Wilson, Barry, 5 3 3 York Factory, 82, 271-272; Wilson, Harold, 454 becomes a national historic Wilson, Thomas, 9 site, 445-447 Winnipeg, 45-50, 360 -363; Yorkton Securities, 533 commercial development, Young, Rev. George, 67 211; in 1887, 127; incorpora- Young, SirJohn, 63 tion, 106, 135, 137; land boom, 116-119, 120, 121-122, 208; new HBC Zeldin, Theodore, 569 store opens (1926), 374-375; Zellers Ltd., 474-477, 552, Strathcona revisits in 1909, i74-575 208-209 Zinovich, Jordan, 2 82