Footsteps in the Snow

by Carol Matas

  I vowed to write only short passages and see how I have blathered on.

  December 1816–July 1817

  December 8

  The weather is so bitterly cold it has become almost unbearable. The thermometer is registering at minus thirty-five degrees. When I go outside my nostrils stick together as I breathe, a most unpleasant sensation. James must be covered up and I have sewn him a hood that covers his face and ears, leaving only his eyes and mouth free, otherwise he would freeze his skin again. Robbie and his friends have built a snow fort and they meet there daily. The cold doesn’t seem to bother them.

  December 14

  White Loon is helping me make new rabbit mittens for everyone as Handsel Monday presents. She set out traps and we have been tending them with great success. An extra benefit is delicious rabbit stew.

  January 1, 1817

  Our theatrical was a triumph. Only a couple of pages left so I cannot give details, but Kate was magnificent. She is the queen of the settlers for the moment, and even when she is not immersed in this activity she appears to be a new person — not soft, but with a cutting sense of humour that does not hurt others, but is still sharp and keen.

  All the settlers celebrated together, but no one knows what the New Year will bring. I try not to be depressed by our prospects but it isn’t easy. Kate wants to do another theatrical about life in the Highlands. We start on it tomorrow. I am helping daily in the school that has been set up for the children.

  February 19

  I miss writing in these pages. I have only a few pages left and have been saving them for the day when we leave this land. Robbie has been very ill, but White Loon has nursed him back to health using Indian remedies. It seems she has managed to save both me and my brother, so I must note that Father made a good and wise choice. And I even think that, Mother, you are probably thankful that White Loon has protected your children so well.

  March 3

  A messenger has arrived with news so unexpected and so marvellous I have to try to stop my hand from trembling as I write. Lord Selkirk was in Montreal when he heard of our trials. He immediately hired a band of soldiers who had fought in the War of 1812. They proceeded directly to Fort William, where they took the North West Company fort from them in the dead of night. Lord Selkirk sent Miles Macdonell ahead with the soldiers. They captured Fort Daer in Pembina and then recaptured Fort Douglas! Father and many of the other men are to go back to The Forks before the ice breaks up so they can plant crops in the spring, and we are to join them in the summer when all will be made ready for us.

  Father was right not to give up hope. I did not realize how deeply my feelings went until I heard this news. I realize that I have fallen in love with this land.

  I hate to leave my new friends behind, Bends Fingers, Sings Well and Whose Face Shows Her Moods. But they say we will meet again and I look forward to seeing my other Indian friends in The Forks again. It seems that my fears about becoming like the savages has completely disappeared. Because they are not savages at all, but good people who have different ways than us. And who knows, soon I might have a little half-Indian brother or sister.

  Dear Mother, I pray that your vision for us will yet come true. We will live free in this new land.

  June 19

  We are back at The Forks!

  July 18

  Dear diary, dear Mother, this will be my last entry. But with what hope I leave your precious pages. Today Lord Selkirk met with us on Frog Plain, the site of our tragedy, and made us a gift of the land and wiped clean our debt. He is also giving us land for a school and a church. I saw Father shed a tear — in fact, there was not a dry eye to be seen.

  Lord Selkirk is to make a treaty with Chief Peguis and the Indian bands and both “chiefs” are very proud.

  It is a strange thing. I no longer care about being a fine lady. I believe that Mother was right. God is good, kind and loving. I wish for nothing but to be as good a woman as Mother and White Loon. And Father promises me that he will order me another diary from England as soon as possible.

  So farewell for now.

  Mother, give us your blessing.

  Epilogue

  Isobel and her family had high hopes when they returned to The Forks. And they did spend a lovely summer. The weather was fine and the crops flourished. As long as they could get their crop in they would be able to stay in their homes for the winter. But nature played them a nasty trick. An early frost decimated the crop and any grain that was saved had to be used for seed. They were forced to leave the colony and winter in Pembina at Fort Daer, where they encountered one of the worst winters on record.

  It didn’t get much easier. The next summer, grasshoppers descended on the Red River area, 3 inches deep in some places. And the next year, because of the eggs the grasshoppers left behind, there was another wave, which left only enough grass for hay. Isobel had to crawl on her hands and knees, along with the other settlers, just to salvage any seed they could for the next season. In fact, they ended up going south every winter for years to come.

  The settlers remained caught in the conflict between the two fur trading companies. The rivalry was the cause of sometimes vicious fighting between the two, although often the “battles” were fought not physically but financially. Each tried to set lower barter rates with the Indians to gain more business, a practice that actually cost them more money and gave them lower profits. The British government was pressing for there to be just one trading company, with the exclusive right to trade in furs throughout the west — all the way to the Pacific Ocean. With profits threatened and the government pressing for amalgamation, the two fur trading companies eventually merged into The Hudson’s Bay Company in 1821. For the Selkirk settlers the union was a positive turn of events. They had enough trouble battling nature.

  Isobel became very close to White Loon and to White Loon’s family. She had three siblings born over the next five years, and it took all her time and strength to help care for them and do the other work expected of the women: cooking, cleaning, sewing and tending the garden.

  When Isobel was eighteen and her brother James was twenty-one, he married Kate. They had a stormy marriage, but loved each other. Kate and Isobel grew closer over the years, and by the time they were in their twenties they were fast friends. Alice was broken-hearted, but not for long. She was wooed by another boy in the settlement and they married and were very happy, having twelve children.

  The family worked hard and the colonists became a tightly knit community. In 1825 their fortitude was tested again. Isobel was twenty-two by then. Both her brothers were married, as were all her friends, but she was too busy with the younger children to think about a beau. At least that is what she always said. That winter there was a terrible blizzard and the settlers were trapped in between The Forks and Pembina. Thirty-three settlers died that winter, including James’s newborn son. James and Kate later had three girls who survived, but they always mourned their lost son, William.

  By May 3, 1826, water levels were unusually high. By May 5, after days of cold and rainy weather, the Red River overflowed its banks. Hudson’s Bay Company officials helped the settlers move to higher ground at Stony Mountain and Bird’s Hill. Forty-seven houses were destroyed by the flood, including Isobel’s family’s house.

  But there is a saying that every cloud has a silver lining, and there certainly was one in this case. One of the young men who helped the settlers was a fellow who had just arrived from Scotland. The younger son of an earl, just as Lord Selkirk had been, he fell in love with Isobel on the spot and set about wooing her. Although she had long since ceased to care about being a lady, she saw in this young man many of her father’s qualities. Robert was caring, considerate, smart and very funny. And he was always there to help during the next difficult months after the settlers returned to find total and complete devastation. And to add to the settlers’ misery, because of all the rain, the mosquitoes were as bad as any Biblical plague. In all, 250 people, half the
settlement’s population, left after the flood, looking for a safer, less difficult place to live. All the hardy Selkirk Settlers stayed. And that fall Isobel married.

  Robert unexpectedly inherited money from his mother two years later. He built Isobel a grand home on the banks of the Red River. She had servants and all she had once dreamed of, but she no longer cared much about such things. She spent most of her time helping others, and began some of the earliest charities in the town that, by 1866, was called Winnipeg.

  Isobel and Robert had six healthy children — four boys and two girls. They lost the seventh in childbirth.

  Isobel died an old woman in the year 1883. About that same time the last remaining buffalo on the prairie was sighted, and the Cree hunting parties were starving to death. That way of life was forever over.

  Historical Note

  It was the battle of Culloden in 1746 that changed life on the Scottish Highlands forever. Bonnie Prince Charlie, grandson of King James II, tried to overthrow King George II of England, but failed. Prince Charlie, “King o’ the Highland Hearts,” had 30,000 clansmen at his side when he failed in this attempt. When it was over, a stroke of a pen in England banned all of the clans in Scotland. Life would never be the same.

  Before this catastrophe each man in each clan owned his own land and elected a chief as an overlord. They raised black, long-haired cattle and grew their own grain, which they ground at a common mill. When the clans were banned, property was taken away from the individuals and given to the chieftains. At first this made little difference, as the old chieftains honoured the old practices. But when a new generation of chieftains — who were educated in England — took control, life changed. Former property owners became nothing more than tenants who had to pay rent to the lords. These proud people would naturally be attracted to a life that promised them independence once again. In addition, many of the landlords, finding that they made more money letting sheep graze their land than having crofters farm it, began to turn the people off the land — a dark time in Scottish history later known as the Clearances.

  In 1670 Charles II of England, prompted by the western explorations of voyageurs such as Pierre-Esprit Radisson and Médard Chouart Des Groseilliers, had granted a charter to his cousin, Prince Rupert, and to the “Governor and Company of Adventurers Trading in Hudson’s Bay.” There already existed an established fur trade business in the New World, but it operated out of Montreal. The Hudson’s Bay Company would take the furs it had collected and ship them directly to Europe via Hudson Bay, bypassing the Montreal traders such as the North West Company.

  Though it may be difficult to imagine an entire company existing to trade in furs, one was needed to supply the huge appetite in Europe for the felt hats made from beaver fur. And this was not a passing fashion. The style of one’s beaver hat indicated social status, and over half a million beaver pelts were auctioned off in London during the Company’s most active years. Though much of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s original trading was from the shores of Hudson Bay itself, it was eventually forced to move farther inland to meet the challenge of the North West Company. Fur traders canoed, portaged and trekked through the 3 million square miles (almost 8 million square kilometres) of territory granted to the Company — all the lands of not only Hudson Bay, but the rivers that drained into it. Some of those rivers originated as far west as the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, creating a territory almost unimaginably vast.

  The fact that there were traders, factors and numerous posts belonging to the Hudson’s Bay Company created a sort of northern perimeter in the face of American colonizers who might otherwise have expanded farther northward. The trading posts often formed the centre of settlements built around them, and some of these key posts, such as Fort Garry (Winnipeg) and Fort Edmonton, eventually became some of Canada’s most important cities. In many ways, the history of the Hudson’s Bay Company is inseparable from the history of Canada.

  In 1810 Lord Selkirk proposed to the Company that it grant him land for a settlement within their territory. Selkirk was looking for a place to relocate the thousands of Scottish Highlanders being driven off their land by the Clearances. The Company obliged by granting him 116,000 square miles of Hudson Bay Company territory (300,000 square kilometres) — a massive tract of land that covered much of present-day southern Manitoba and some of North Dakota and Minnesota, as well as eastern Saskatchewan and even a small part of northern Ontario. The land grant, called Assiniboia, came with one stipulation: this colony would furnish the Hudson’s Bay Company with labourers.

  As soon as they heard of this deal, the rival North West Company of Montreal launched a negative press campaign against the colony. Scottish newspapers were full of horror stories about the dreadful conditions that would await the settlers upon their arrival in the new land. Nevertheless Lord Selkirk’s agents went to Ireland and Scotland to engage servants for the Company and general labourers for the colony. They found many willing to join. The settlers would be paid £20 a year by the Company and would receive 100 acres of land (about 40 hectares) free of charge, after they had helped build up a colony.

  Miles Macdonell was appointed the first Governor of the new colony. He travelled to York Factory on Hudson Bay in mid-July of 1811, with a party of labourers who were promised 20 acres of land for their work. They were to prepare for the actual settlers’ arrival the following year. On October 27, 1812, the first group of settlers arrived at Red River. They immediately had to travel south to Pembina, as this was where the buffalo went in the winter, and without other food supplies they needed buffalo meat in order to survive until they could plant crops in the spring.

  In the spring of 1813 the settlers returned to farm near Fort Douglas at the forks of the Red and Assiniboine rivers — The Forks, the site Macdonell had chosen for the new colony. They built log huts that fronted on the Red River. They planted crops, but by the fall of 1813 it was obvious that the colony was in trouble. The crops they had planted — winter and spring wheat, peas, hemp, English barley, rye, corn — all failed. The only crop that survived was the potatoes. The settlers were forced again to spend the winter in Pembina.

  A second group of settlers arrived in the new land in the fall of 1813. After typhoid broke out on their ship the captain was so anxious to get rid of his passengers that he dropped them on the banks of the Churchill River, even farther north than York Factory. It was already late in September so there was nothing to do but stay put. They had to build huts, but were so weak it took a long time to get them finished. The only supplies available were from York Factory, too far away, and officials there didn’t want to send any stores to the settlers. The men vowed that they would not be discouraged, however. The women, too, refused to give in to the weather and the lack of food, and somehow they survived. In April they walked all the way to York Factory, a trek of 150 miles (240 kilometres) that took them thirteen days. The men went ahead with sledges and cut a path for the women because there was still snow covering the ground.

  In late June of 1814 they arrived at The Forks. There Governor Miles Macdonell supervised the building of a fine Government House, which he called Fort Douglas after Thomas Douglas, Lord Selkirk. The settlers’ hopes were high, but they were caught between several conflicting interests. The Red River colony was on land that the Métis had long occupied, as well as being in the path of the Nor’Westers’ route to the west. Another sore point was scarcity of food: the settlers needed pemmican to survive — pemmican that the Nor’Westers also needed to carry on their long journeys into the interior. Relations between the two companies — already strained — grew increasingly tense during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

  In January of 1814 Miles Macdonell had issued the Pemmican Proclamation, declaring that the Nor’Westers could not take pemmican out of Assiniboia. Macdonell also seized the pemmican at Fort Gibraltar, the North West post close to Fort Douglas, and gave it to the settlers so they were able to winter at Fort Douglas instead of t
ravelling all the way to south Pembina. But the settlers did not realize that they had a fox amongst the chickens. A former army officer (and later a partner in the North West Company), Duncan Cameron would dress up in his military finest and invite the settlers for dinner. He would tell them that they were in danger from the Indians, but if they went to Upper Canada they would be given free land and free transport — even free food for a year. He even promised to pay the wages Lord Selkirk might owe them. Cameron was one of them, a Scot, so the settlers believed him.

  Miles Macdonell was arrested for taking the Nor’Westers’ pemmican. Shortly after, many settlers accepted Cameron’s offer to leave for Upper Canada. When they had left, the Nor’Westers burned their homes and the crops and drove off their animals. The few settlers who refused to leave were forced to flee to Jack River at the north end of Lake Winnipeg. It is then that the third group of settlers arrived, the group that Isobel’s story is about. They too were plagued with both flooding and harsh winters, yet many managed to survive.

  Thomas Douglas, Lord Selkirk, died in April of 1820, his fortunes much diminished. He had been involved in lengthy legal battles relating to his taking of Fort William from the North West Company in the spring of 1817, when he had travelled from Montreal to The Forks to help the settlers after receiving news of the battle of Seven Oaks.

  On May 4, 1836, Lord Selkirk’s heirs sold Assiniboia back to the Hudson’s Bay Company for £84,000 worth of Hudson’s Bay Company stock. A new fort, Upper Fort Garry, was built at The Forks at the site of the old Fort Gibraltar. And the city of Winnipeg has grown up around it.