Disappointment River

by Brian Castner

  Samuel de Champlain returned seventy years later. In 1608, at the narrows of the St. Lawrence—a place known to the Algonquin as Kebec—his men felled two trees, lashed their trunks together into a cross, and set it in the ground to reclaim the land for Catholicism and France. Champlain traveled extensively upriver and discovered the village of Hochelaga abandoned. There, in 1611, before the founding of New Amsterdam or the landing of the Pilgrims, he established a trading post that would become Montreal.

  The French grew close to the Huron and Algonquin. In 1610, Champlain and the Huron traded wards, each sending a young man to live with the other. When Étienne Brûlé, the French youth, returned two years later, he dressed like a Huron and spoke like one too. The tribes asked for French help in their battles against the Iroquois to the south. Champlain said yes, and so began nearly a hundred years of continuous warfare.

  Champlain, and the governors after him, made local alliances out of necessity. King Louis XIV, the Sun King, was more interested in building Versailles than in conquering America. The French footprint remained small, and New France proved stubbornly difficult to monetize. In 1542, Cartier was mocked for bringing “diamonds” back to France that were nothing but quartz. A century later, Voltaire dismissed the whole area as “several acres of snow.” All that impenetrable icy forest eventually proved good for only one thing: not gold or land, but beaver fur.

  Europe was crazed by beaver fur, an epidemic on the order of the Dutch obsession with tulips, though far more practical and useful. Fibrous beaver hair was scraped from pelts and, after a soak in mercury, molded into felt hats. All manner of hats, women’s and men’s, top hats and military caps, fashionable stovepipes and the tricornered “continental” made famous by American revolutionaries. Once European and Russian stocks were all but exterminated, beaver furs became the most sought-after commodity extracted from North America.

  Montreal was the commercial hub, but the Huron and Algonquin delivered furs only sporadically. A venture to Montreal was risky, directly on the Iroquois warpath, though worth the trip, because iron pots and arrowheads were so superior to wood and bone. “In truth, my brother, the Beaver does everything to perfection. He makes us kettles, axes, swords, knives, and gives us drink and food without the trouble of cultivating the ground,” said one Indian in 1637, according to his French stenographer.

  But in their ongoing intertribal wars, the Iroquois were proving victorious. The Huron, the traditional traders along the Great Lakes, were nearly wiped out by 1650, and the Algonquin were forced to the north and west. Eventually, the French decided it was safer, and more effective, for white men to haul the furs and the Indians to stay in their lands to hunt. Some traders were officially licensed by the Crown, and some, including many forgotten French soldiers left to make their own way, were free agents and called themselves coureurs de bois, runners of the woods. All spent years at a time in the pays d’en haut, the upper country above Montreal, trading brandy and sewing awls for pelts. The mutually beneficial commerce was formalized in 1701, in the Great Peace. Montreal briefly doubled in size that summer, the leaders of so many Indian nations made the journey. To codify the pact, the French gave belts of wampum, and on a sheet of paper the chiefs drew pictures of sacred animals to sign their names, so that each nation honored the tradition of the other in a mutual display of respect.

  Always in search of furs, the French used the rivers to move west. “In the canoes of the savages one can go without restraint, and quickly, everywhere,” wrote Champlain in 1603. In this way, Montreal served as the launch point for expeditions that explored much of North America. But like their fellow Europeans, they were also caught up in a search for the Orient. In 1634, Jean Nicolet pushed inland as far as Lake Huron and took along a Chinese silk damask so he would be properly dressed for the royal court in Canton. Fifty years later, in 1682, the compulsive wanderer Robert de La Salle was sure he had found the river of the west, but instead he paddled the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. Even the rapids just south of Montreal—“The water here is so swift that it could not be more so…it is impossible to imagine one being able to go by boats through these falls,” Champlain wrote in 1603—were named Lachine, for China. Whether earnestly or tongue in cheek, many thought the path to the Orient lay just around the next curve of the river.

  The Jesuits and the coureurs de bois took the virtues and vices of European civilization into the far wilderness long before American colonists rebelled: across the Great Lakes, up to Lake Winnipeg, down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, up the Missouri, across the prairie, and to the Rocky Mountains. Hemmed in by the Appalachians, the Americans became sedentary farmers and turned their creative energies to protest. New France, in contrast, was full of highways. The St. Lawrence River was a mighty tree trunk, and its tributary rivers pushed like roots into the depth of the continent.

  By the mid-eighteenth century, only 50,000 white habitants called Quebec home, while the thirteen colonies hosted over 1.5 million citizens. Left largely to make their own way, the habitants married the locals and crafted their own culture, blending so completely that to New Englanders the French and Indians had become nearly synonymous. The French stayed Catholic but added Indian ways in deference to the hard land. When the British invaded in 1759, closing out the French and Indian War, Major General James Wolfe, the British commander, wrote a letter to his mother to say that the French soldiers were the least of his troubles. “People must be of the profession to understand the disadvantages and difficulties we labour under arising from the uncommon natural strength of the country.” To seize Quebec City, and thus New France, Wolfe’s army ultimately crossed the St. Lawrence River in small boats and scaled the cliffs below the city. As he predicted, the terrain proved more challenging to overcome than the French marines; the ensuing battle lasted only fifteen minutes, though Wolfe was mortally wounded. In Benjamin West’s famous 1770 painting, The Death of General Wolfe, the eponymous leader falls Christlike, attended by a retinue of officers. All are stationary and bowed in grief except two. Sir William Johnson—Warraghiyagey, One Who Does Much—sprints into the frame, a shock of industrious energy, dressed in the coat of an Englishman and the beaded breeches and moccasins of an Indian. Next to him, an Iroquois warrior looks on quizzically and wonders what is to come.

  Montreal was seized the next year, a formality. The British officially claimed the whole territory via treaty in 1763. When Quebec fell, the habitants shrugged. Paris had never treated them particularly well anyway. Similarly, the new British rulers found their new French citizens, often called Canadiens, easier to work with than their own colonists to the south.

  The long war had been bad for commerce, but slowly the fur trade resumed. English and Scottish and American merchants stepped into the shoes of the French bourgeois businessmen. They reopened the old routes, rediscovered the old posts rotting away in the pays d’en haut. There was money to be made, with only a few accommodations to the new reality required. British West Indian rum replaced French brandy, but otherwise the trade was back.

  * * *

  ————

  Alexander Mackenzie clerked for John Gregory for six years. Sitting at a tall wooden desk, keeping the books of the countinghouse, Mackenzie grew from a teenager into a confident man, tall and fit, a shock of wavy hair, cleft chin, bright eyes. “A constitution and frame of body equal to the most arduous undertakings,” he wrote in his journal, treating the matter as fact, not boast.

  Those years observing the fur trade left an overwhelming impression on Mackenzie. His interests now lay completely in “commercial views,” “mercantile pursuits,” and “perilous enterprise.” Fortunately, he thought himself “endowed by Nature with an inquisitive mind and enterprising spirit.”

  As a clerk, it was Mackenzie’s job to order “coarse woollen cloths of different kinds; milled blankets of different sizes; arms and ammunition; twist and carrot tobacco; Manchester goods; lines, and coarse sheetings; thread, lines, and twine; common h
ardware; cutlery and ironmongery of several descriptions; kettles of brass and copper, and sheet-iron; silk and cotton handkerchiefs; hats, shoes and hose; calicoes and printed cottons, etc etc etc.” All of these goods came from British manufacturers, and in exchange Mackenzie’s house shipped the furs of lynx, bear, wolverine, fox, fisher, raccoon, otter, wolf, muskrat, elk, marten, deer, mink, buffalo, and beaver. As many beaver as they could, more beaver skins than all the rest combined.

  The business was one of credit; to make any money, one had to be wealthy already and willing to risk the loss. A cartel was required, partnerships between interior traders and principals in Montreal. Mackenzie’s boss, Mr. Gregory, required a counterpart at the northern forts to handle the retail end of the trade, while he managed transfer of the pelts to London.

  The cycle of the fur business went like this: In October, Mackenzie ordered trade goods from England, twenty months before they were scheduled to be shipped inland from Montreal. Packed into their ninety-pound pièces, taken upriver two summers following, they were exchanged at the rendezvous in Grand Portage for furs that had been skinned the previous winter. Those furs arrived in Montreal in the fall and were then shipped to London, with payment returning the next spring. The whole process was interminably slow. Mackenzie calculated that Montreal merchants did not receive their profits until “forty-two months after the goods were ordered in Canada.” When he did the books for 1780, Mackenzie noted that the blankets and awls sold by the bourgeois had to be ordered in 1778, but Mr. Gregory would not receive final payment from London until 1782.

  Even more frustrating, many of those furs were actually bound for China. Mackenzie saw that if there were a way to send the furs directly from the interior to those Asian markets, skipping London entirely, they could cut payment time nearly in half.

  But no one had yet found such a northwest passage.

  Besides tallies of manufactured goods and furs, Mackenzie kept the pay records for the men who paddled the canoes to the rendezvous. “The Goers and Comers,” he called them, who made the circuit from Montreal to Grand Portage and back each summer. Most voyageurs were veterans of the French system who easily transitioned to new British masters. Their boats were known as canots de maître, or master canoes, and they were enormous. Thirty-six feet long, six foot at the beam, but weighing only six hundred pounds, a cedar skeleton sheeted with white birch bark. Fore and aft, the ends of the canoe curled up in large fiddleheads, to cut waves on the water and, when tipped upside down onshore, provide supports to create shelter at night. It was an Algonquin design, invented thousands of years before Mesopotamians discovered the wheel, gradually perfected since antiquity. Not only were canoes faster than European longboats with sailors at the oars, but the paddlers could see where they were going. On the best days, each canoe carried eight thousand pounds of goods over a hundred miles.

  In his accountant’s ledger, Mackenzie marked each voyageur’s home parish and pay based upon his position in the canoe: as a devant, the guide in the nose, a gouvernail, the steersman in the back, or milieux, the middlemen, who powered the boat through ceaseless toil. Each man was provided with one blanket, one white shirt, one pair of trousers, and a journey’s worth of pipe tobacco, plus a quart of beans and one pound of grease a day.

  Death by drowning or fall or strangulated hernia was common, and back wages or debts had to be settled with the widowed families. All of this was tallied as well.

  * * *

  ————

  In 1779, Mackenzie witnessed an unprecedented shipment of furs arrive from the rendezvous in Grand Portage. They had come via the American named Peter Pond and were like nothing anyone had ever seen. Enormous furs, and thick, luxurious, as could be produced only by beaver facing the harshest cold. Castor gras, the French called them: the furs of beaver at winter’s height. Pond had so many furs, the rumors went, that he couldn’t even ship them all. “Twice as many furs as his canoes could carry,” Mackenzie had heard. Pond had to stash some up north, to save for the next year’s run, so great was the bounty.

  Pond had secured the furs from a far-off place called Athabasca, “a country hitherto unknown but from Indian report,” wrote Mackenzie. Pond had led a brigade of canoes up the English River the summer before and, following the direction of his Cree partners, made the arduous portage into a new northern watershed. He and his voyageurs were the first white men to ever carry the route.

  Pond himself did not travel to Montreal with the furs, turning around at the rendezvous to return quickly to the north instead. But his partners were the talk of the town, as if conquering heroes. “You would be amazed,” Washington Irving wrote, quoting a Montreal resident of the time, “if you saw how lewd these peddlers are when they return; how they feast and game, and how prodigal they are, not only in their clothes, but upon their sweethearts. Such of them as are married have the wisdom to retire to their own houses; but the bachelors act just as an East Indiaman and pirates are wont to do; for they lavish, eat, drink, and play all away as long as the goods hold out.”

  Alexander Mackenzie learned that the farther north one went, the farther west, the greater the trials, the greater the furs, the greater the legend upon returning home.

  In 1783, to capitalize on Pond’s discoveries, several Montreal traders formed a new partnership to fund the construction of new forts in this far northern region. They called it the North West Company, and the main organizers were two English brothers, Benjamin and Joseph Frobisher, and Simon McTavish, the richest man in Montreal. But John Gregory, Mackenzie’s patron, was left out of the new venture, and his partner, James Finlay, decided to retire the same year. Suddenly on his own, Gregory formed a new house with a Mr. Normand MacLeod and named it, predictably, Gregory, MacLeod & Company.

  MacLeod was from the island of Skye, just south of Mackenzie’s birthplace of Stornoway. He had been an officer in the garrison at Fort Niagara following the French and Indian War, learned to trade furs under Sir William Johnson, and bought land near Detroit in 1774. Over the next decade, he traded furs there and at Fort Michilimackinac, on the upper Great Lakes. While the North West Company risked its investment in the north, Gregory, MacLeod & Company decided to exploit these well-established routes to the south.

  The American rebellion was concluding. Optimism abounded, and Gregory had an offer for Mackenzie, fully apprenticed and ready to strike out on his own. The firm would supply Mackenzie with “a small adventure of goods,” allowing him “to seek my fortune in Detroit.”

  Mackenzie did not need to be asked twice, and the decision was made easier by his orphanhood. After their losses in the Mohawk valley, John Johnson’s Royal Yorkers had retreated to Carleton Island, a flat slab of rock at the place where Lake Ontario meets the St. Lawrence. There they constructed a new garrison, Fort Haldimand, built ships in the natural harbor, and launched a few small raids against patriot villages, but to little effect. Corc Mackenzie, the tacksman, died not in battle but of scurvy in his sickbed. He was forty-nine years old.

  Before Alexander left for Detroit, he wrote to his childhood playmate, his cousin Roderic, to ask him to join him in the New World. After the death of his father and brother, Roderic was not only his closest male kin but also his confidant and confessor. Alexander suggested a clerkship for Roderic at Gregory, MacLeod & Company. The two young men could make their fortunes together.

  And so that summer of 1784, Roderic took a ship from Scotland to Montreal, and Alexander did the same to Detroit. Martial law still held on Lakes Erie and Ontario, the English having closed the waters to commercial traffic, so Alexander boarded one of His Majesty’s military vessels and sailed inland.

  — 6 —

  DETROIT, 1784

  Alexander Mackenzie, a twenty-two-year-old fur-buying agent carrying a small cache of trade goods on his first independent venture, held no illusions about the hinterlands of North America.

  “This trade was carried on in a very distant country,” he wrote of the endeavor, “out
of the reach of legal restraint, and where there was a free scope given to any ways or means of gaining advantage.”

  Ships bound for Detroit sailed from Montreal up the St. Lawrence River and into Lake Ontario. At that watery junction lie thousands of granite islands, including the one that housed the grave of Mackenzie’s father. Lake Ontario was Alexander’s first introduction to the freshwater seas of the continent, deep and gray. At the far western end they turned south for the Niagara River and the crumbling French castle that guarded its mouth.

  When Mackenzie passed Fort Niagara, the château still bore the scars from Sir William Johnson’s decisive seizure in 1759 and was ill-manned by a crew of British redcoat holdouts. As his ship plied upriver, the water turned a shocking emerald green, aerated by the falls ahead. Their destination was the Lower Landing, the start of the path around the great cataract of the Niagara.

  The portage was a mile and a half long, up and across a two-hundred-foot embankment to avoid the swirling water of the gorge. War or not, the portage somehow kept operating. For a time, it was run by a mixed-blood man named Chabert Joncaire, who owned a trading post and paid two hundred Seneca twenty cents each to carry pièces up the escarpment. But that French and Seneca system fell to Johnson’s Mohawk and was replaced by windlasses and farm labor, then a wide road cut by the English at the direction of Johnson. Oxcarts and horses, monopolized by the Stedman brothers, dragged the goods by the time Mackenzie arrived. At the Upper Landing, above the waterfall, were the wreckage of burned French ships, and two more small forts on the opposing banks of the river. The whole Niagara Frontier was still militarized from almost thirty years of war.