Company Of Adventures - Merchant Prince Part 2

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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.signed 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.

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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 a.s.signment as Governor of a.s.siniboia 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 circ.u.mstances 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 n.o.bility 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. a.s.signment 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 a.s.signment. He spent seven of his most unhappy and unproductive years in the area, trading princ.i.p.ally 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 cla.s.sics 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 a.s.sessment: "Your counting house department appeared to me, in a very slovenly condition, so much so that I could make very little of any doc.u.ment 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 a.s.sistants 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 s.h.i.+p 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 "d.a.m.n 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 ac.u.men was attracted by that mammoth, frigid Labrador peninsula for precisely the reason no sane man wanted to go there. For its lat.i.tude, 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 Pet.i.tsikapau (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 sh.o.r.e 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 s.h.i.+p, 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 sh.o.r.e 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 s.e.xtet 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 gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sengers-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 compet.i.tive 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 compet.i.tion 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 s.h.i.+pping office business. I now revert to this matter in the most friendly spirit with a view to putting you on your guard against a repet.i.tion 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 pa.s.sions." 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 embarra.s.sment, 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 a.s.sociates at will. The pressures that made him one of the most frigid, cla.s.s-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 Inst.i.tute 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, a.s.suming 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 ma.s.s 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 spa.r.s.ely populated region that produced valuable furs was a serious matter. . . . During the s.p.a.ce of six years, a 'proud' and 'independent' population of 276 persons had been reduced to about 166, with what hards.h.i.+p, 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 welldoc.u.mented 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 princ.i.p.als 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 a.s.sume 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 Middles.e.x 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 s.h.i.+p. 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 a.s.sembled 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 cuc.u.mbers, pumpkins, potatoes, and peas, ripening more fragile fruits and vegetables in a large greenhouse.

Charles Hallock, afterwards head of the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution in Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 lat.i.tudes." 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 s.h.i.+p, 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 fas.h.i.+on of the country, and wore a white linen s.h.i.+rt.... 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 s.h.i.+pping the