CHAPTER VII.

Fight and flight.

The year 1815 was a year of world-wide disaster.  Napoleon’s Europe-shadowing wings had for years been over that continent and he like a ravenous bird had left marks of his ravages among the most prominent European nations.  The world had a breathing spell for a short time with Napoleon a virtual prisoner in Elba, but now in March of this year he broke from the perch where he had been tethered and all Europe was again in terror.  The nations were thunderstruck; the alarm was deepened by the appearance of Olber’s great comet, and in their superstition the ignorant were panic-stricken, while the more religious and informed saw in these terrible events the scenes pictured in the Apocalypse and maintained that the battle of Armageddon was at hand.  The epoch-marking battle of Waterloo in June of this year was sufficiently near the picture of blood painted in the Revelation to satisfy the credulous.

But in a remote corner of Rupert’s Land, where the number of the combatants was small and the conditions exceedingly primitive the comet was alarming enough.  The action of Governor Miles Macdonell in the beginning of 1814, in forbidding the export of food from Rupert’s Land and in interfering with the liberty of the traders, Indians and half-breeds, who had regarded themselves as outside of law, and as free as the wind of their wild prairies, produced an open and out-spoken dissent from every class.

The Nor’-Westers took time to consider the grave step of interrupting trade which Governor Miles Macdonell had taken.  Immediate action was impossible.  It was four hundred miles and more from the Colony to the great emporium of the fur trade on Lake Superior.  The annual gathering of the Nor’-Westers was held at Grand Portage, the terminus of a road nine miles long, built to avoid the rapids of the Pigeon River which flows into Lake Superior some thirty or forty miles southwest of where Fort William now stands.  This concourse was a notable affair.  From distant Athabasca, from the Saskatchewan, from the Red River and from Lake Winnipeg, the traders gathered in their gaily decked canoes, to meet the gentlemen from Montreal, who came to count the gains of the year, and lay out plans for the future.  Indians gathered outside of Grand Portage Fort.  The Highland Chieftains were now transformed into factors and traders, and for days they met in counsel together.  Their evenings were spent in the great dining room of the Fort in revelry.  Songs of the voyage were sung and as the excitement grew more intense the partners would take seats on the floor of the room and each armed with a sword or poker or pair of tongs unite in the paddle song of “A la Claire Fontaine,” and make merry till far on in the morning.  The days were laboriously given to business and accounts.  When the great MacTavish—­the head of the Nor’-Westers—­was there he was often opposed by the younger men, yet he ended the strife with his tyrannical will and silenced all opposition.