Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 724
There was still, of course, with each recurring war, the danger of French attack by sea. It was to meet this that the Company had built, at the Churchill post, Fort Prince of Wales, a great stone fortress at the mouth of the river, three hundred by three hundred feet, its walls thirty feet thick — and twenty years in the building. It was a veritable European castle among the Canadian rocks. Yet when La Pérouse’s warships ravaged the bay in 1782 Samuel Hearne, its Governor, could do nothing but surrender. La Pérouse demolished what he could of the great fort, and burnt York Factory. He took care when he sailed, to leave supplies of food for his fugitive enemies. Such was war between gentlemen.
Meantime the cession of Canada transferred to British traders the overland route from the St. Lawrence to the fur country. This meant trouble. There began a vigorous opposition of independent traders, determined and energetic men, caring nothing for the Company’s rights, their eyes on present profit, with no time to reckon in centuries. These presently joined together into the North-West Company. They traded out of Montreal, Beaver Hall their headquarters and their ‘wintering partners,’ on Lake Superior. In this new rivalry the two companies bid against one another for Indian trade, to the detriment of both. The older settled routes were broken, the trade disturbed. Fire-water outbid red blankets and kettles. The path of peace was abandoned for the ways of violence, and the North-West fur trade threatened for a time to degenerate into anarchy.
In these annals of rivalry and ill-will one brighter page is Alexander Mackenzie, “Voyages from Montreal,” 1801 illumined by the record of the voyages of Alexander Mackenzie which helped to give to Great Britain its future British Columbia. In the service of the North-West Company, Mackenzie ascended the valley of the Saskatchewan to the farthest reach of French exploration. He passed from the Saskatchewan to the Peace, and thence descended the river that bears his name. This was no barren ground, no land forlorn. From the Athabaska River and the Great Slave Lake forest and fertile soil run onward till the last stunted willows end only at the arctic coast. Here in the streams and marshes of the river delta the sea-tide that swamped Mackenzie’s tents, told him that he had reached the July, 1789 ocean. His next journey was more momentous still. From the Saskatchewan he again crossed to the Peace, and from its headwaters reached and descended the mountain streams that swelled into rivers to the Pacific. He reached its shores. One of the memorials of our history is his inscription on a sea-side rock: “Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada by land, 22nd July, 1793. Latitude 52° 20′ 48″ N.”
With this connects a strange by-path of history. Among those who read Mackenzie’s Voyages was Napoleon. It was Napoleon’s Unpublished Memoir of Mackenzie Family quoted in ‘Alexander Mackenzie,’ “Makers of Canada,” also Sir D. Barton, “Bernadotte and Napoleon,” 1921 dream of conquest to ‘get behind’ the English — from Ireland, from Egypt, from India. We have it from Bernadotte, when King of Sweden, that Napoleon had planned a ‘campaign of Canada,’ by an ascent of the Mississippi from the French colony of Louisiana and thence an inroad from the north-west. General Bernadotte was to be made Governor of Louisiana to carry out the plan. Information was needed. Smugglers brought over Mackenzie’s Voyages, which had been published in London in 1801. The book was translated into French, and one or two copies sumptuously bound. Napoleon had one still at St. Helena. The sale of Louisiana in 1803 forestalled the adventure.
FREDERICK H. VARLEY, A.R.C.A., VANCOUVER, B.C., 1941
“Thither he brought his Highland colonists . . . the journey was of a year, summer to summer. . .” — page 131
Midway into this struggle of the rival companies of the north-west, was thrust the new Red River Colony founded by Lord Selkirk. This was a young Scottish nobleman whose eager sympathies were enlisted for the unhappy Highlanders, now dispossessed by the ‘clearances.’ He had heard from Montreal Chester Martin, “Lord Selkirk’s Work in Canada,” 1916 traders of the fertility of the North-West, the rich alluvial soil laid down by its rivers during uncounted centuries. The Hudson’s Bay Company, nothing if not canny, had seen no reason to talk about this. Selkirk had already planted with some success a colony of about eight hundred Highlanders in Prince Edward Island. But the field was too small. He now (1811) bought from the Hudson’s Bay Company a vast tract of 116,000 square miles in the North-West. This practically covered all the basin of the Red River and its tributaries. It is only fair to those who sought to destroy the colony to question the right of one man, an absentee, by the mere power of money, to acquire such ownership, no matter how elevated his motives. Thither he brought his Highland colonists in successive shiploads, by way of the Hudson Bay, the Nelson River, Norway House and Lake Winnipeg. The journey was of a year, summer to summer, the settlers frozen in for one winter.
The colony never had a chance to prosper. Of necessity the huge grant of land, with full ownership and rights of rule, excited the jealousy and presently the open hostility of the North-Westers, already in the field. The attempt was first made to coax the settlers from their holdings. Then came open ill-treatment and violence. A North-West factor wrote to a fellow official of “commencing open warfare with the Red River Colony.” This 1816 ended in an attack and massacre of Governor Semple of the Hudson’s Bay Company and twenty-one of his men. Selkirk coming out in 1817 could get no redress. Influence was too strong. He himself raised a force of ex-soldiers, by virtue of his powers as a magistrate, to arrest the guilty. The only result was a warrant from Upper Canada for his own arrest. Selkirk went home to die of a broken heart. Injustice triumphed. The two rival companies were united and lived happy ever after. The Red River Colony survived as best it might, waiting for to-morrow.
The opening era of peaceful settlement in Upper Canada, as described above, was presently shattered by the Rebellion of 1837. Nor had it all been sunshine, nor mellow evening after the rain as at Guelph. There were great hardships. These were the days of pioneer settlement, and life was rough. Experience was already showing that the large grants of a thousand acres could not create a manorial society. They broke into the smaller holdings of independent farm families, each living for itself with but little outside commerce. These were the days of subsistence farming, of home-spun clothes and home-made furniture. Food was plentiful but comforts few and luxuries nowhere. Some of the simplest things, beneath thought with us to-day, were hard to get. Salt in the Talbot settlement was worth twelve dollars a bushel. Settlers ‘toted’ it on their backs through the bush. Yet Emily Weaver, “Counties of Ontario,” 1913 one must not hold too much by such gloomy and disillusioned pictures as that given in Mrs. Moodie’s Roughing it in the Bush. In the life of pioneer hardship there is at least the stimulus that goes with being on one’s own, the ‘magic of property,’ if only of a bush farm. To many people one hour of factory labour seems longer than the longest day on one’s own place.
But worse perhaps than hardship was the ill-adjustment that brought ‘bad times’ even in the wilderness, that peculiar starvation in the midst of plenty that is the ghost behind the scenes of the promised land. Lord Durham’s Report was to give a full Lord Durham’s Report, Methuen Edition, 1902 p-1 account of these hardships of Upper Canada, and the unhappy contrast with better luck across the border. “On the American side all is activity and bustle. . . . On the British side of the line, with the exception of a few favoured spots, all seems waste and desolate.”
On this hard ground ill weeds grew apace. Hardship helped to make the Rebellion of 1837. But more powerful perhaps were the angers that go with ‘class,’ the indignation of plain people against others claiming superiority. Such angers have followed our British history. John Ball, the Kentish rebel priest of 1381, called poverty to revolt with the slogan, “When Adam delved and Eva span, who was then the gentleman?” The world asks it still. And it was asked, and went unanswered, in the bush settlements of Upper Canada. Simcoe’s aristocracy was ill-cast. It had no crusade behind it. Aristocracy must begin as a thousand years old. Simcoe’s established church with its reserve of one-eighth of all the land as allotted, was worse still. Surveyed but not yet apportioned, not used, the church land blocked settlement.
When the Napoleonic Wars ended, Simcoe was long since gone, 1796: died 1806 but the system, good and bad, was still there. Appointments and offices and emoluments went overwhelmingly to a favoured class. The little capital at York hatched out an aristocracy, and inside it a group of office holders called a ‘family compact.’ The family relationship was really small. The term was probably at first a joke, meant to be amusing in its absurdity, comparing this little coterie to the great Bourbon Family Compact of France and Spain, then still within memory. The Bourbons forgotten, the joke stands all alone, misinterpreted as in earnest.
Was there much real grievance? The Assembly could not control the public funds; could not control the public lands. As the population grew apace, this seemed all the greater hardship. There were 77,000 people in Upper Canada just before the War of 1812; 150,000 in 1824 and at the outbreak of rebellion 400,000. “Censuses of Canada,” 1876 But even at that, there are limits to the principle of self-government, especially in a new country with a handful of settlers and boundless resources. Who could hand over half a million square miles, ten times all England, to 400,000 settlers and throw in a fleet and army to guard it? What they needed as yet was not different government but better government.
The quarrel as between Governor and Assembly went from bad to worse, its course too intricate to follow here. It culminated in the outbreak of 1837. The rebels mustered and drilled around the farms all through the summer of that year. There were plenty of old soldiers in those days to show them how. The malcontents argued on the platforms and in the end they found a leader to their heart in William Lyon Mackenzie, a Scot, arrived in 1820, editing the Colonial Advocate, as honest as daylight, and as uncompromising as the Westminster Catechism. With him were many who would go half way, to the edge of rebellion and back; and others, men of sterner mettle, like Samuel Lount and Peter Matthews, who would go the whole way, and ultimately went it. The American rebels, Washington, Franklin and the rest, thought they were staging a demonstration under arms; it turned into war and independence. Were the rebels of Upper Canada in 1837 staging a demonstration? Very likely many did not know.
The upshot was a straggling gathering up Yonge Street, its W. Kingsford, “History of Canada” 10 Vols., 1887-97 intention to seize Toronto. It hesitated, missed its moment and was lost. Armed force gathered against the rebels. The explosion proved a damp squib. The rebels dispersed and were hunted as fugitives. Lount and Matthews were executed at Toronto. The boys of Upper Canada College had a half-holiday to see the execution. Mackenzie escaped to the United States to live eleven years in the shadow and to return home forgiven — and forgotten.
Several books have been written to show that the Upper-Canadian rebellion was a storm in a tea cup. It was more probably a tea cup in a storm. The storm of radicalism that shook all Europe in the eighteen-thirties, and brought down a throne in France, these winds of the new gospel of individual rights swept also the woods and fields of Canada. The sense of injustice bites harder than hardship. Indeed most of what hardship there was came from nature, not man.
Nor was rebellion in Upper Canada a real rising of the people. F. P. Hett, “Georgina,” 1939 For every dozen rebels there were a dozen ‘Tories.’ As the rebels gathered above Toronto, the word went round the back settlements, Mrs. Traill, “The Backwoods of Canada” and half-pay officers, ex-soldiers of Wellington’s armies, took down their muskets and were off in pursuit of them. To these settlers their life might indeed be hard, but would be no softer with a mock republic in Toronto at the mercy of the United States.
Some of us now living can remember surviving ‘rebels’ of the Ontario countryside; old men, still ‘Grits’ unalterable, or ‘Tories’ immovable, the sinking fires of life banked over their earlier flame of the Radical ideal of reform or the Tory loyalty to order. These contrasted ideals, like twin circulating stars, have ever since held our political life within its orbit.
In French Canada the case was different. French it had remained. The census of 1844 showed for Lower Canada a population of 697,000 of whom 524,000 were French. But the English-speaking minority were mainly included in the 40,000 odd of the Eastern Townships, the 31,000 English-speaking people of Montreal (out of 65,000) and the 18,000 (including 7,000 Irish) of the 45,000 total of Quebec. Outside of these areas English was practically a foreign language.
The Eastern Townships had been opened to British settlement, after 1796, with the British land system. The district became and remained, till yesterday, the counterpart of Upper Canada, settled from the same class of people with the same culture. The village of Sutton, Ontario, born fast asleep in 1819, has its counterpart in the drowsiness of Sutton, Quebec, both drawing on the perennial slumber of Sutton in Hampshire. Apart from the Townships the province was French, its population increasing by cradlefuls.
Here, as in Upper Canada, the Assembly found itself unable ‘The Patriotes of ‘37,’ Alfred D. Decelles, in “Chronicles of Canada,” 1916 to control. Here, as in Upper Canada, only more so, were sinecure offices, often held by absentees, and profits and emoluments for the favoured. But every other discontent was here merged in the larger hostility of nationality. Those in control were British, those below were French. If Upper Canada was carried forward on the winds of European radicalism, so was Lower Canada swept by the new winds of nationalism that were remaking the Europe of the nineteenth century. Lord Durham’s phrase “two nations warring in the bosom of single state,” summarized the whole situation. The rest was nothing, or at least was all derivative from this. Hence when rebellion came, it struck harder. The stubborn fights along the Richelieu (St. Charles, St. Denis), the stubborn defence of St. Eustache were broken only by solid military force. When the Lower-Canadian rebellion flared out again, in inroads from the States next year, Sir John Colborne struck it ruthlessly down. The rebels left fifty dead on Nov. 9, 1838 the field at Odelltown.
When rebellion in Upper Canada had collapsed, the British Government sent out Lord Durham to find out what the rebellions were about. Durham was at once an impassioned liberal and an autocrat. He saved the rebels’ lives with a general amnesty for all and a special banishment for twenty-four of them. The action was disallowed and Durham called home. In place of it Sir John Colborne’s military court hanged twelve rebels at Montreal and sent three score of others to convict settlements in Australia. This changed rebellion to martyrdom. The French-Canadians called their lost comrades ‘the patriots,’ and the English later on discovered that they were.
But Durham’s importance in our history lies elsewhere. He presented to the Crown his famous Report, a state document Lord Durham’s “Report on Canada,” 1839 matchless in style, penetrating in its analysis but feeble in its conclusion. Durham was a typical aristocratic liberal, determined to administer the new liberal freedom as medicine is administered to schoolboys. His Report shows a marvellous insight into the past; for the future his vision was the direct gaze of a bat in the daylight. What was needed in Canada, he urged, was to obliterate French nationalism. This was to be done by submerging it under British freedom, like a kitten in a water barrel. Unite the province, he said, with a single government with one legislature, with free votes for all, and the French will be voted out of “their vain hopes of nationality.” Durham did not live to see his system in operation. Strangely enough his premature death was followed by that of Governor Sydenham (1841), Governor Bagot (1843), both in Canada, and of Governor Metcalfe, called home to earthly honours that came too late (1846).
But the system went into effect. The Act of Union of 1840 (in force, 1841), joined the two Canadas into the Province of J. L. Morrison, “British Supremacy and Canadian Self Government,” 1919 Canada with a single elected legislature, and with English its language of record. The united government began life in the new capital of Kingston where French nationality was to commence its vanishing act. In place of that the opposite happened. There began that peculiar balance of nationalities which has held the French and English together ever since by keeping them sufficiently apart. Durham’s very ‘freedom’ was made the means of survival. French members under Louis Hippolyte LaFontaine joined with the English under Robert Baldwin to outvote all classes of Tories and claim the government. Sir Charles Bagot considered that this ‘responsible government’ was implicit in the Act of Union. He thus put in control a group of men some of whom had been rebels or half way to it. The news shook Tory England. The aged Duke of Wellington was reported ‘thunderstruck.’ Old men often hear thunder in the evening.
Troubled years followed. Bagot held to the new freedom, but died. Metcalfe would have trampled it under, but died. There seemed a spell on Canada. Lord Elgin broke it. He was Durham’s son-in-law, there to fulfil his work. He recognized responsible government and set the seal on it by refusing to disallow the Rebellion’s Losses Bill of 1849. Tory Montreal mobbed him out of town, but his pelted carriage in its flight had passed a milestone of British history.
The principle of responsible government once conceded to Canada could not be withheld from the Maritime Provinces. Here, however, were no great grievances nor extreme hardships. Such difficulties as there were arose out of the ill-adjustment of economic life, the over-dominance of the timber trade that hindered agriculture and the lack of both credit and cash that hindered every kind of enterprise.
