Merchant Kings

by Stephen R. Bown

  Meanwhile, the financial situation of both companies was dire, particularly that of the North West Company. Bankruptcy loomed. The Hudson’s Bay Company was much better financed and could afford to forgo dividends. It also enjoyed the support of the political and financial elite of London, whereas the North West Company had no access to long-term capital and its partners depended on hefty annual dividends; it was less prepared to weather a prolonged commercial war. Under pressure from the British government, it agreed to merge with its archrival. On paper at least, the Hudson’s Bay Company amalgamated with the North West Company in the spring of 1821, while Simpson was still in the field. The new enterprise’s monopoly over Rupert’s Land was not only affirmed but extended all the way west to the Pacific Ocean, as the British government wanted a financially secure British company to counter American expansionism. This new entity would retain the name of the Hudson’s Bay Company, yet it was a complex intermingling of style and structure inherited from both parent enterprises. The rigid central control and financial backing of the Hudson’s Bay Company, in which all people were employees, was retained, as were the flamboyant, profit-driven partnerships of the North West Company. As hoped, stock in the new monopoly soared in value when news of the merger was released.

  Although he was a newcomer to North America, Simpson appeared to be the most capable of running one part of the new venture, not least because his lack of connection with any of the previous decades’ violence and reprisals made him a palatable choice to both sides. No doubt his influential patron on the governing board, Wedderburn, helped Simpson’s case. He was offered a position in charge of one of two new departments, or regional governorships, into which the new company would be divided. Of the two, the southern department was the more sedate and beavered out. It was in its mature phase of development, whereas the northern department held the greatest potential for expansion and increased profits. Simpson therefore was put in charge of the potentially lucrative northern department, where he could set about bringing profits to the business.

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  DURING THE SUMMER OF 1821 ALL THE SENIOR OFFIcers of the two companies voyaged in their canoes down the rivers of the interior to a great concourse at York Factory, a collection of several dozen wooden and stone buildings that formed the old Hudson’s Bay Company’s main depot on the shore of the bay. It was the first meeting of the new management team after the merger, or at least the first meeting that would not involve guns and threats. The new governor of the northern department had invited them to attend and they could not refuse. As they neared the fort they spied bands of Cree and Iroquois camped around the small fortified community, soon to be joined by hundreds of Métis and voyageurs. The gathering had the air of a festival or celebration, and miraculously the tension evaporated and games and storytelling commenced. In the great hall Simpson presided over feasts of wild duck, Arctic char and venison, with conversation lubricated by overflowing glasses of sherry and port. Old hatreds were set aside, new alliances launched and a new identity forged. Charismatic when he needed to be, caustic when it suited him, self-serving nearly always, Simpson coaxed, smoothed and moulded a new corporate fraternity from the quarrelling clans. Then he set to work to make it profitable.

  At the time of their merger the two companies had numerous overlapping forts and far too many employees. There were ninety-seven North West Company forts and outposts and seventy-six belonging to the Hudson’s Bay Company. Many of these competing forts were within hailing distance of each other and hence unprofitable. Simpson threw himself into his job with zeal. He shut down redundant posts, either reassigning the employees or releasing them from the service if he felt they were lazy or intractable, and transported them out of his domain when necessary. The aged were also in his sights: “I consider it highly injurious to the general interest to have old worn out men in our councils, they are timid, indolent and helpless and would be of no manner of use in cases of difficulty, danger or emergency. Worn out Indian Traders are the most useless, helpless class of men I ever knew and the sooner the Company can get rid of them after their days of activity and labor are over the better.” He got rid of over a thousand “worn out” traders within his first few years at the helm.

  Renowned for his snap decisions, Simpson instinctively knew whom to keep, whom to promote and whom to pass over or demote, and he did so quickly and without tact. James Raffan writes that Simpson understood “that there were large-scale patterns of fur out, trade goods in, on which hbc commerce with local trappers was based, but that at each of the posts there were smaller patterns as well—unique circumstances and idiosyncratic politics involving the history and sentiments of the local Aboriginal people, the background and temperaments of the officers and men conducting the hbc’s business, and distinctive geographic and climatological issues that had to be understood.”

  Simpson was preoccupied with petty things like changing the men’s diets from meat to fish and cutting all “luxury” goods both from their diet and from their lives. He increased the standard size of transport canoes while simultaneously decreasing the number of men assigned to paddle them. He didn’t care if he was liked or hated. In his early years, Simpson poked around in every aspect of the company’s operations looking for ways to cut costs. In his opinion there were many overpaid and under-worked employees, an observation that did not change much over the years. Most of the oeconomy measures that he introduced to reduce expenses were borne disproportionately by the junior or less skilled workers in the lowest ranks. Those who were not compulsive workaholics, and those who questioned his authority, had their wages trimmed by as much as a quarter.

  Simpson had an intrusive and infuriating tendency to micro-manage everything: from the amount of tea a chief factor might consume to the proper deportment of subordinates, from how to conduct compulsory religious services to which utensils should be used at dinners (tin plates) and how tables should be set (no tablecloth or wine glasses). His preoccupation with the minutiae of his men’s domestic arrangements suggests an unhealthy need for control. He took this philosophy to heart, as evidenced by his general memorandum from March 1843 under the heading sauces: “I consider it quite unnecessary to indent for Sauces & Pickles on public account . . . I never use fish sauce in the country, and never saw anyone use it or pickles either.

  From the quantity of Mustard indented for, one would suppose it is now issued as an article of trade with the Indians!” The first step in making money, Simpson believed, was not wasting it on frivolous extravagances.

  Towards the native peoples he could be unscrupulous, referring to them as a “Savage race” and plying them with liquor to get what he wanted. “A little rum operates like a charm on the Indians,” he once wrote. “They cannot resist the temptation, and if the bait is properly managed, every skin may be had from them.” After the merger, he sought to “reconcile them to the new order of things . . . I am convinced that 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.” He later cut out liquor as a trade item in most regions, not because it was not profitable, but because he felt it made the natives lazy and unproductive.

  Under Simpson’s regime, trading posts were placed on important and well-used travel routes and evolved to become more substantial and permanent. Along with this new permanent infrastructure, Simpson created an equally substantial catalogue of the company’s human assets. He kept a detailed written record of his typically blunt assessments of his officers in his famous Character Book. He began these assessments during his first year in Rupert’s Land, before the two companies had united. He even related his opinions on Sir John Franklin’s ultimately doomed overland expedition of 1819: “[Franklin] Lacks the physical powers required for the labour of moderate Voyaging in this country,” he wrote. “He must have three meals per diem, Tea is indispensable, and with the utmost exertion, he cannot walk Eight miles in one day, s
o that it does not follow if those Gentlemen are unsuccessful that the difficulties are insurmountable.”

  The Character Book was a clandestine record of more than 150 senior people under Simpson’s command. He recorded no names, but used instead a number system to which only he held the key. He described the French-Scottish Dr. John McLoughlin, one of his most powerful lieutenants, as “such a figure as I should not like to meet on a dark night in one of the bye lanes in the neighbourhood of London . . . Dressed in clothes that had once been fashionable, but were now covered with a thousand patches of different colours, his beard would do honour to the chin of a Grizzly Bear, his face and hands evidently show that he had not lost much time at his toilette. He was loaded with Arms, and his own herculean dimensions formed a tout ensemble that would convey a good idea of the highwaymen of former days . . . [He was] ungovernable [with a] violent temper and turbulent disposition.”

  John Rowand, the legendary governor of Fort Edmonton, was apparently “of fiery disposition and as bold as a lion. An excellent Trader who has the peculiar talent of attracting the fiercest Indians to him while he rules them with a Rod of Iron.” Another trader was singled out as “a boasting, ignorant low fellow . . . a disgrace to the fur trade,” while yet another was “one of the worst and most dangerous men I ever was acquainted with. My presence alone keeps him sober, but when left to himself he will assuredly become a confirmed Drunkard.” Whereas one was “not quite of Sound Mind,” another was “a flippant, superficial, trifling creature who lies more frequently than he speaks the truth.” One suspects that Simpson’s assessments were not far from the mark and reveal the chaotic, turbulent and volatile crew he had to manage. Some were mere thugs, others brilliant traders and diplomats of questionable loyalty; they were a hard group of strong characters, and it took a man of Simpson’s temperament, charisma and vision to impose some order on this motley group. More than anything else the company could control, these traders were the backbone of the fur monopoly, the spine upon which it would either flounder or fly. Perhaps if Simpson had turned his mind to a dispassionate self-assessment, he might have been more charitable to his officers. More likely, he believed himself to be above the rules that governed other men; he was a man who set his own standards of behaviour and would be judged by different criteria.

  During his first few years on the frontier in the heart of his emerging fur empire, Simpson began the legendary travelling for which he would become famous, crossing the company’s vast territory by canoe while his voyageurs toiled to increase the pace and please their new master. Travelling eighteen hours a day in all kinds of weather was not uncommon. On his famous journey to the Pacific in 1824 , Simpson’s canoes were launched at Grand Portage, on the shores of Lake Superior. The entourage of voyageurs paddled furiously across the prairies, wound their way through the Rocky Mountains, were propelled down foaming canyon streams, clambered up steep, craggy inclines dragging their canoes and supplies behind them, followed winding mule-paths through mountain passes, and portaged over rattlesnake-infested, sage brush–covered hills on their way to the coast. Simpson and his crew crossed the continent in a mere eighty-four days, twenty days less than the previous record.

  Smelling the fresh Pacific air and seeing the whitecapped vista before him, Simpson knew he had finally arrived at the western boundary of his expansive commercial empire—an empire that rolled on from the Red River to the mouth of the Columbia, stretching from the barren beaches of Hudson Bay down to the northern boundary of Spanish California. The

  Hudson’s Bay Company was the largest business enterprise in North America, and the only non-native government in what is now western Canada and the American states of Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon. Fort Vancouver, with blue water rushing rapidly by and the familiar cone of Mt. Rainier in the distance, was built on the north side of the Columbia River by Simpson’s decree, in anticipation of a possible international boundary along the river, as Britain had proposed in 1818. Simpson, perhaps having a keener perception of world events, favoured moving the company’s central depot “North of this place, about Two or Three Degrees, at the mouth of Fraser’s River.” To him, the more northern river was the logical choice for the principal western depot because it undisputedly was first navigated by a British explorer and was situated north of the 49th parallel—the boundary requested by the Americans in 1818. If American political claims prevailed, as he suspected they would, the Fraser would still be in British territory. After this monumental expedition, Simpson strategized with his regional henchman McLoughlin on how to keep the Columbia District, as he termed the region west of the Rocky Mountains, free from the American trappers who were just beginning to enter the mountains as they pushed west. He then raced back east to the Red River territory and travelled north to York Factory, where he boarded a ship to London to report on his progress.

  Simpson had felt the heady flow of intoxicating power. The land was in transition, he sensed, and on the cusp of some major change, where success was readily available to the one bold enough to seize it. In London he might grub and toil to achieve moderate success, but never greatness, particularly given his bastard birth and humble origins; but in Rupert’s Land he might leapfrog all the lower and middle rungs of the social ladder and establish himself at the very top. Certainly there were disadvantages to this wilderness life—there was no social company appropriate to one of his rank, no entertainments and amusements of the sort to be found in London, and he would be far from the pulse of the empire and possibly permanently removed from it, should he have to return—but the compensating factors of freedom, power and pre-eminence were beguiling enough to make him forgo London and gamble his career on the wilderness fur empire. He would return to Montreal, the fur forts of the interior and the life of a virtual dictator. The company directors in London were much pleased by his efforts in North America, and they promoted him to be in charge of both the northern and southern departments. After 1826, Simpson was the undisputed master of an enormous commercial, and increasingly political, empire, with untold power over the people who lived there. His capacity to direct the minutiae of their lives was unparalleled, and he enjoyed lording it over others. He would later earn his unofficial title of “the Little Emperor,” the head honcho of the only general store for half a continent.

  The company’s domain was enormous, almost eight million square kilometres, equivalent to most of Europe and about one-twelfth of the earth’s surface, and by the mid-nineteenth century the company had grown so powerful that it dominated the lives of tens of thousands of natives as well as the lives of its employees. Simpson simply viewed indigenous peoples as he did anyone else in his realm: not as independent masters of their own destiny, but as somehow tied to the company as cogs in the wheels of its profit-generating machinery. During Simpson’s reign the First Nations increasingly fell under the company’s control, their lives shaped and patterned to improve the company’s trade efficiency. It was the beginning of the end of their autonomy.

  The company had posts as far away as Hawaii; its warehouses in London were the clearing house of most of the fur traded throughout Europe. But the governor, the deputy governor and the seven directors, or committeemen, who oversaw the company’s operations from their headquarters in London, never crossed the Atlantic to York Factory, let alone ventured inland to see the company’s immense territories. Like other directors of the great companies in the Age of Heroic Commerce, these men had little direct knowledge of what went on in their realm. They were essentially absentee landlords who never saw the lands they governed and profited from, leaving ruthless and charismatic men like Simpson to rule with an iron hand. So long as the profits remained steady, they were left alone, and the greater the profit the more their putative superiors looked away and the more powerful was their overlordship. Simpson kept profits high, an accomplishment that ensured his authority would be unchecked by the board of directors in London. Disgruntled employee John McLean wrote in Notes of a Twenty-Five Y
ears’ Service in the Hudson’s Bay Territory that “in no colony subject to the British Crown is there to be found an authority so despotic as is at this day exercised in the mercantile Colony of Rupert’s Land; an authority combining the despotism of military rule with the strict surveillance and mean parsimony of the avaricious trade. From Labrador to Nootka Sound the unchecked, uncontrolled will of a single individual gives law to the land . . . Clothed with a power so unlimited, it is not to be wondered at that a man who rose from a humble situation should in the end forget what he was and play the tyrant.”

  Simpson understood that to improve profits, he could either improve revenue or reduce expenses, or both. He could see well enough the end of the fur trade’s golden era before he had even ushered it into existence. Regions close to where forts had been erected had long been “beavered out”—the largest and easiest-to-obtain animals had already been trapped by the indigenous hunters. The region where the company made its greatest profits had been steadily moving west for decades, and would eventually run out altogether. Hence, since the mid-1820s, Simpson had his eye on the greatest unplundered beaver preserve yet remaining on the continent: the little-exploited territory west of the Rocky Mountains.

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  IN 1826, SIMPSON ESTABLISHED HIS HEADQUARTERS AT Lachine, near Montreal, where he ensconced himself firmly at the pinnacle of Montreal society and in the Anglo-Scottish business community. He used his home, whenever he was back that way, for lavish dinners and parties for the political and business elite—he was certainly not afraid to mix business and pleasure, and probably saw no distinction between the two, for these social forays were as much for his amusement as for securing and consolidating the company’s position. Here he could lobby against decisions that might negatively impact the fur trade, such as higher taxes and the colonial government’s desire for an increasingly interventionist role in the lives of the First Nations.