The Last Crossing (42 page)

Lucy and I sit down beside the trail to await the arrival of the rest of our party. The path now lies plain before us, and all we have to do is set our wagon wheels in the ruts and be guided by them, as a locomotive is by rails, directly to Fort Edmonton.

Stirred by what I have seen, I remark to Lucy, “How fine it would be, my dear, if we could only live as those people do! A Métis man and woman, free of the constraints and prohibitions of civilized behaviour!”

Lucy turns a steady gaze upon me, brown eyes liquid, lustrous in the morning light. She studies me as Mr. Darwin must have studied his specimens, searching for the one clue that would be the key to understanding. I know she has remarked the unfortunate words I have employed – constraints, prohibitions, civilization; now she understands I think precisely in those terms. Leaning over, she brushes the corner of my mouth forgivingly with her lips. Nothing more is said. My essential self has been revealed.

In three days, the Carlton Trail brings us to the gates of Fort Edmonton. The chief factor heartily welcomes us and tenders a prodigal hospitality. Potts, Grunewald, and Barker are quartered in the barracks of the engages, and Ayto, perhaps on the strength of his florid waistcoat, is assigned a room in the gentlemen’s quarters. My brother and I, notables from the “Old Country,” are invited to take up residence in the factor’s immense log house, universally referred to as Rowand’s Folly. Distinctions of rank appear to be as nicely calculated here as they are in the Almanac de Gotha and I detect a certain hesitation on the factor’s part about where Lucy should be put. But being a white woman, she, too, is offered a room in Rowand’s Folly.

As I earlier assured Addington would be the case, the factor has no news of Simon. He was apologetic about this, and most considerate of my feelings as he performed what he obviously felt to be his duty, which was to make me see that I must not entertain false hopes, must face up to the fact that it is likely Simon’s fate shall forever remain a mystery. In truth, the factor told me nothing that I had not turned over in my mind many times. But the man’s forthrightness has finally brought me closer to admitting the very real possibility that no trace of Simon shall ever be found.

If I chose to now, I could send Father one succinct letter which would make everything in regard to Simon clear, and also make clear to Father that the mere exercise of his will is powerless to get him what he wants. But I cannot bring myself to take such a step because what Father yearns for, he desires more fervently than anything he has ever desired before. And that is to have Simon back.

No, I will not write to him of Simon yet. I will write instead one of those reports that satisfies Father’s thirst for facts. I do this as much for myself as him. I should go mad without some occupation, some distraction. As guests in the factor’s house, Lucy and I must observe the proprieties. There are no opportunities for discreet assignations in this teeming fort.

We share a little time each day, taking meals at the factor’s table, strolling about or conversing as I sketch. When Lucy chooses not to accompany me in my investigations of Fort Edmonton, she enjoys female company, chatters with the Indian wives of the Bay men who have the rudiments of English, and delights to amuse their children while the mothers perform domestic tasks. As much as I long for our former intimate relations, it is still a great pleasure to me to see her so happily engaged.

Meanwhile I have embarked on the task of learning all I can about the post and sketching the life of its inhabitants. I began by drawing the fort itself, which is imposingly located on a bend of the North Saskatchewan, surrounded on three sides by water, and perched some two-hundred-odd feet above the river. Methodically, I paced the dimensions of the fortifications and found they measure two hundred by three hundred feet. The palisades are strongly constructed of timbers sunk deeply in the earth like bridge pilings; they reach to a height of twenty feet. A gallery runs round all four walls and is patrolled by sentinels. At each corner of the fort, there is a bastion armed with six-pound cannon.

To assist me in my endeavours and answer any of my questions, the chief factor has put at my disposal an Orkneyman named McTavish. McTavish has told me that the Indians suspect double dealing in all matters of trade and if they believe they have been cheated are capable
of turning violent. He maintains that the Honourable Company has need of this stronghold to ensure the safety of its employees.

I do not doubt these precautions are justified. One morning from the sentinels’ gallery, I viewed a huge gathering of Cree and Assiniboine on the river benches below, vast herds of horses, children splashing in the shallows, hunters continually leaving camp and returning with game slung over their ponies’ withers, the smoke of countless cooking fires spreading a blue fog over the hollows. I counted two hundred lodges from my vantage point, but many more were obscured from sight. A constant procession of natives arrive at the fort to barter their goods for European manufactures. Robes and pelts pass in through the blockhouse wicket: cloth, powder, shot, steel traps, knives, axes, and beads pass out. A smithy is devoted to the manufacture and repair of countless metal articles, barrel hoops, nails, chains, locks, bolts, knives, hoes, and forks for the company’s garden. Vulcan’s forge is fed with coal dug from the banks of the North Saskatchewan.

Trees are felled in nearby woods and turned into planks at the sawpit for boat building. From dawn until last light, the fort resounds with the whine of saws and the ringing of hammers. McTavish says the demand for boats was once insatiable. Freight on the river was carried in York boats, ugly, cumbersome vessels propelled by sweeps and a square sail which can only be set if the wind blows favourably. I’m told that they travel downriver easily enough, but ascending it is such arduous work that they were frequently abandoned to rot on riverbanks once their cargo was offloaded. Consequently, the shipwrights, mostly men from the Scottish Isles, laboured like Sisyphus. No sooner was a craft completed than another needs be replaced.

At first I took the utmost satisfaction and pride in all this activity, viewed it as sterling testimony to British commerce and industry. But as the weeks here have passed I have come to wonder if this place bears less resemblance to Manchester than it does to some Roman outpost huddled forlornly on the periphery of the Empire, a polyglot and bastard village.

The gentlemen occupying positions of responsibility and authority see themselves as exemplars of everything British and are blissfully unaware that we visitors from the “Old Country” soon conclude the barbarians have had greater influence on the character and habits of their rulers than the rulers on those of their subjects. England may speak smugly of an Empire upon which the sun never sets, but what the sun sets upon here would surely wrinkle noses at home. I cannot hazard a guess what this place will become in a hundred years, but I am certain it will be a disappointment to London. Those in command sense the great company is in decline, but will never admit it. The factor, when he has had a glass or two of rum, will glumly grant that trade has fallen off of late, then rouse himself to lay the blame for it on the doorstep of American traders who indulge in the low, cheating, despicable practice of selling whisky to the Indians.

I’ve witnessed older employees of the company shake their heads and say that in John Rowand’s day matters would have been taken in hand, John Rowand would have put the fear of God into Americans and Indians both. They would have been made to sit up and mind their p’s and q’s. I think it safe to say that a fondness for all things past is a sure sign of creeping rot.

Yesterday, one of the blacksmiths, Angus McDonald, a hale and hearty septuagenarian, pointed a stubby finger at the Hudson’s Bay Company flag flying above Rowand’s Folly and inquired whether I knew what the initials on it, HBC, stood for. As I opened my mouth to make the obvious answer, he winked and said, “Here Before Christ, laddie. Here Before Christ.”

Old hands such as Angus McDonald seem to look back to the days of the tyrant John Rowand with inexplicable fondness. He has been dead these twenty years, but his name is still spoken with awe and reverence. Father would most certainly approve of John Rowand, a man after his own heart, as ruthless and cunning an entrepreneur as Henry Gaunt. Both were builders, both brooked no opposition.

It was Rowand who constructed the looming, three-storey structure of hand-hewn logs which is the chief factor’s residence and in which Lucy, Addington, and I are housed. This primitive palace is
known as Rowand’s Folly, and is famous throughout the North-West. When John Rowand came to build it, he demanded an unheard of extravagance in these parts: glass windows. So voyageurs endured hundreds of miles of back-breaking labour to ship him, by canoe and York boat, three hundred panes of glass. That alone would have made Rowand’s Folly the first wonder of Rupert’s Land, but he did not stop there. All around the second floor a gallery was run, an imposing stage from which his personal piper serenaded him with Rowand’s favourite Highland airs while the autocrat drank rum, schemed and plotted. The interior of the log house is as barbarically grandiose as the exterior. A huge banquet hall dominates the second floor, ceiling and walls covered in painted board, fantastic curlicues, and ornamental scrolls which, I am told, never fail to impress visiting native dignitaries with their gaudy splendour. What is true of the natives is also true of myself. If the doors of the banquet hall stand open, I cannot pass without first stopping to gape.

The final, crowning touch to Rowand’s Folly is an enormous ballroom which, some maintain, the factor used as a shooting gallery to perfect his pistol marksmanship during long winter days.

Stories about him abound. He took for his “country wife” an Indian girl who went looking for him after he failed to return to the fort from a buffalo hunt. Finding him defenceless on the prairie with a broken leg, she carried him to the fort, nursed him back to health. On her he sired four daughters and two sons. Of the sons, Chief Trader Mr. Jack, as he is commonly known, seems to be the apple which fell closest to the tree. He rose to command Fort Carlton, whether on the strength of his abilities or because he was Caesar’s son it is impossible to say. Remarkably, the second son, Alexander, attended Edinburgh University, and is now a distinguished surgeon who practises medicine in Quebec City.

Like Captain Bligh, John Rowand was a great flogger of men, but unlike Bligh, he never faced mutiny because his cowed underlings were too afraid to chance it. Old men at the fort speak proudly of having been beaten by Rowand or having witnessed one of his notorious rages. When a violent hailstorm smashed hundreds of his precious
windows, he is reported to have shaken his fists at the heavens, cursing, howling, threatening God Himself. One wag remarked to me if God had answered the challenge, he wouldn’t have known on whom to bet.

In the end, Rowand’s incorrigible temper did him in. One spring he accompanied the boats to Fort Carlton to visit his son, Mr. Jack. There, one of Rowand’s men quarrelled with one of his son’s engages and a fight broke out. Rowand ordered his man to stop but was ignored in the heat of battle. This insubordination drove the old man berserk, sent him rampaging up and down the wharf until suddenly he was struck down by apoplexy.

The question then arose what was to be done with the great factor’s body. The old man had always expressed a desire to be returned to the province of Quebec, the place of his birth, so that he could lie in repose beside his father. This obviously presented problems given the vast distances separating Rowand from his wish. It was decided the corpse must be reduced to a skeleton, and an old Indian was hired to boil Mr. Rowand down to his bones. Remuneration was promised – as much rum as the Indian could drink. Many swear that after the task was completed, Indian women used Rowand’s fat to make soap.

Rowand’s odyssey grew even stranger. His bones were stowed in a keg of rum to preserve them, shipped by boat to York Factory, and from there to London. The Hudson Bay Company wished to provide a fitting memorial service for the good and faithful servant who had earned them so much profit.

When Rowand was decanted in London, it was discovered the voyageurs had drunk the rum he was pickled in and replaced it with water. Not only had Rowand provided soap for the Indians, but he had given cheer to the French Canadians who transported him.

Once the company paid its respects in London, Rowand was shipped back to Canada for burial. Crossing the Atlantic twice before he was finally interred, surely his was one of the most interminable funeral processions ever recorded.

When we first arrived here, Addington basked in the attention of the chief factor and the gentlemen of the fort, drinking away the
nights in their company and losing a good deal of money playing cards. He so revelled in the limelight that all my attempts to press him into action were curtly rebuffed. Addington’s chief interest, aside from carousing, was pestering Potts to find a grizzly bear for him to slay with his longbow. But this did not prove possible, since Potts said all bears are shot on sight by the men of the fort to prevent attacks on horses and livestock. The shortage of grizzly bears in the vicinity has clearly contributed to my brother’s ill humour.

In the past week, Addington has become increasingly gloomy and withdrawn, sometimes not leaving his bed until midday. Often I saw him lounging up against the log wall of Rowand’s Folly, hands stuffed in the pockets of his trousers, sunk in a brown study. When we took supper at the chief factor’s table, my brother was bad company, sullen, and frequently rude. He drank too much and ate little, scarcely attended to the factor’s conversation.

Yesterday, however, I learned from Ayto that Addington has informed the chief factor that we will, in short order, depart for the whisky posts of the south. This was welcome news. Typically, my brother has made no mention of this to me, but as Lucy once suggested, Addington’s inconstancy has returned him to the mark. My anxiety is that if we do not move quickly, the onset of winter shall suspend steamer traffic on the Missouri and make our return to England impossible.