Company Of Adventures - Merchant Prince Part 16

"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 s.e.xual 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 embarra.s.sed 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 s.e.xual liaisons under the polar moon may have tallied with specific moments and local circ.u.mstances, 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.x.*

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 ch.o.r.es 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 a.s.similated 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 relations.h.i.+ps 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 cla.s.sed as 'natives', but the distinction to be applied as between these and half-breeds and other women whose blood-relations.h.i.+p to 'natives' is more remote still, would appear to be a problem."

The young clerks served a five-year apprentices.h.i.+p and learned to speak Inukt.i.tut 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 s.h.i.+p-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 a.n.a.logy was heightened by the HBCs insistence on dressing up its Factors in blue blazers with Company crests st.i.tched 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 cl.u.s.ter of gold leaves; post Factors or managers (as they were called after 1930) sported the flag and the cl.u.s.ter 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 comrades.h.i.+p 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 Chess.h.i.+re, 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: "G.o.d was the Company-and the Company was G.o.d. 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 a.s.sured 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 acc.u.mulated pay.

An HBC Factor named Jimmy Bell was known as a character, even among the oddb.a.l.l.s 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 G.o.dd.a.m.ned dishes alone, Bell, and get the h.e.l.l 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 G.o.dsell, 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-fas.h.i.+oned way. "We lived in a sort of semi-feudal state," G.o.dsell 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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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-fas.h.i.+oned clothes v ringer and had bra.s.s 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 doc.u.ment 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 repet.i.tious 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 c.u.mberland 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 cla.s.sical 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 compa.s.sion, or at least as much compa.s.sion as was allowed within the limits of their headquarters-imposed credit lines and quant.i.ties 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 a.s.sistance 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 mola.s.ses 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 Inuita.s.sociation 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 a.s.sessment. "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.

COMPEt.i.tION.

"To open up a store against the Bay, that was heresy. f Vky, you were committing an act against G.o.d. It was G.o.d 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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.