The Struggle For The Border

970

Hutchison
The struggle

58-01030

for the "border

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3 1148 00917 77B1

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THE

Struggle for the Border

UN/TED STA7ESAND CANADA I

THE

STRUGGLE FOR THE
BORDER

BY

BRUCE HUTCHISON

AUTHOR OF

The Incredible Canadian,
The Unknown Country, etc.

Maps drawn by JAMES MACDONALD

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.

TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON
1955

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO., INC.

55 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 3

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO., LID.

6 & 7 CLIFFORD STREET, LONDON W 1

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.

20 CRANFIELD ROAD, TORONTO 16

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

COPYRIGHT : 1955
BY BRUCE HUTCHISON

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE
THIS BOOK, OH ANY PORTION THEREOF, IN ANY FORM

PUBLISHED IN THE DOMINION OF CANADA BY
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO., TORONTO

FIRST EDITION

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER 55-8311

PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA

T. H. Best Printing Co., Limited, Toronto

TO

John Owen Wilson

**A FRIENDSHIP AS HAD MASTERED TIME*'

5801 Of II)

Contents

Introduction ix

1 The Odd Neighbors 1

2 The Rock 12

3 The Lost Blueprint 33

4 The Eagle 53

5 Letters from New York 67

6 A Soldier of Virginia 86

7 To Hubert's Farm . 104

8 The English Gentleman 120

9 Blunder at Philadelphia 136

10 The Yankee Horse Traders 152

11 Tragedy at New York 167

12 The Mad General 178

13 Beyond the Shining Mountains 189

14 Race to the Sea 208

15 The Black Canyon 219

16 The Man in Scarlet 229

17 Emperor and King 258

18 Creatures Large and Tiny 266

19 The Titan from New England 280

20 The Dictator and His Disciples 299

21 Days of Goodwill 314

22 Old Tomorrow 325

23 Back to Quebec 336

24 Wild Irishmen 351

vii

Viii CONTENTS

25 The Road to Ottawa 357

26 The Five-Ring Circus 366

27 The World's Lover 384

28 Defeat on the Potomac 390

29 Railway and Rebellion 405

30 Soft Voice, Big Stick 421

31 Taft's Orphan Child 440

32 The Higher Lunacy 452

33 Friends, Alive or Dead 461

34 Onward from Hyde Park 468

35 Days of Doubt 478
Index 491

Introduction

A INFLUENTIAL SCHOOL OF MODERN HISTORIANS SEEMS TO HOLD
that man's affairs are settled by ineluctable, impersonal, and
calculable forces to which various convenient labels are given.
That may be true. But human beings —uncertain, personal, and in-
calculable—also have something to do with the course of human
events or, if not, we had better leave the future to the Communists,
who have everything well arranged and taped up in advance.

This book has little to do with any theory of history but is con-
cerned almost solely with individual men and their private adven-
tures upon the North American earth, from John Smith, at James-
town, to Dwight Eisenhower, at Washington; from Champlain, at
Quebec, to St. Laurent, at Ottawa. If the book has any theory at all
it is that, from time to time, at certain fluid moments, men, large and
small, in wisdom, passion, or mere accident, made North America
what it is, hardly suspecting the issue of their lives.

The historic, constitutional, and economic relationship of the
two nations dividing between them most of North America has
long been noted and much discussed by historians. Their excellent
works on what might be called the rationale of the continent must
now fill a vast library. This book is not intended to be an addition to
that study, in such learned terms. It deals with people, many of
them quite irrational. The writer's modest purpose will be served,
therefore, if such a tale interests the reader in the past and future
affairs of America, which, he believes, are greatly misunderstood
and in urgent need of understanding.

The reader will see at once that, although this book is a joint
account of Americans and Canadians in war and peace, in the con-
test of exploration, diplomacy and commerce, it is written from a
Canadian standpoint, as must necessarily be so when the writer is a
Canadian. In any case, this approach is deliberate. The writer be-
lieves that the American standpoint on the affairs of America has
been amply set forth and that a Canadian viewpoint, often quite
different, may be of interest— not because it is more valid but be-
cause it may set things in better proportion; for assuredly more

ix

INTRODUCTION

proportion is needed in a subject so important to every North
American and too often distorted in our schools, by misguided
patriotism, on both sides of the border.

Some of the opinions herein expressed will not meet with the
approval of many readers and historians. For such opinions the
writer must accept full responsibility as a layman and not as a pro-
fessional historian. In a book covering so long a time and so wide an
area— more than three centuries and the whole straggle for America
—it is certain that, despite diligent effort, some items of history will
be presented in a fashion which professional historians will dis-
countenance or challenge. But I repeat, this is not a formal book of
history. It is an adventure story of men in action and careless of
what history would record.

The student concerned with abstract historical facts will find
them richly documented in countless better books than this, both
American and Canadian. While I have not attempted to compile a
bibliography out of many years of reading, a few books Invaluable
to the student deserve to be mentioned— the works of Parkman, to
begin with, covering America's early history; Edgar W. Mclnnis's
The Unguarded Frontier; Charles A. Beard's standard works on
American history; John Bartlet Brebner's North Atlantic Triangle
and other books on North American affairs; Arthur R. M. Lower's
Colony to- Nation and Donald Creighton's Dominion of the North,
the best modern Canadian histories; Professor Creighton's biog-
raphy of Sir John A. Macdonald and John W. Dafoe's biography of
Sir Clifford Sifton, for a study of Canadian politics; the Joint work
of F, W. Howay, W. N. Sage and H, F. Angus on British Columbia
and the United States; that superb saga of the prairies, Joseph
Kinsey Howard's Strange Empire and the essential records of west-
ern exploration by Bernard De Voto; George F. G. Stanley's study
of Canadian military history, Canada's Soldiers; a fascinating collec-
tion of Canadian quotations and phrases (which instantly illuminate
many obscure events of the past) by Robert M. Hamilton; and, of
course, the direct reports of such explorers as Champlain., Captain
James Cook, Alexander Mackenzie, Lewis and Clark, Simon Fraser,
George Simpson, and John McLoughlin,

I am indebted to the Parliamentary Library and Archives of
Ottawa; to the British Columbia Parliamentary Library at Victoria;
and most of all to Jean Ellis for her indefatigable work in organizing
the manuscript.

B.H.
Victoria, B.C.

THE

Struggle for the Border

1

The Odd Neighbors

[1535-1955]

FKOM THE CREST OF MOUNT ROYAL, THEN AFLAME IN THE
autumnal foliage of 1535, Jacques Cartier surveyed the St.
Lawrence and called it the Ready Way to Canada— "grand,
large, et spacieulx"— flowing from sources so remote that the Indians
"had never heard of anyone reaching the head of it."

White men would need 273 years more to discover the western
counterpart of the St. Lawrence and, with it, the chance to bisect
North America by a political boundary.

In the summer of 1808 Simon Fraser, a dour Scots-Canadian and
refugee from the American Revolution, descended an unknown
river by canoe, or sometimes on hands and knees along a spiderweb
of Indian ladders— "Our situation most precarious ... as the fail-
ure of the line or a false step might have hurled the whole of us into
Eternity, a desperate undertaking."

The discovery of the Fraser River, the sight of the Pacific Ocean,
and Britain's claim to the northern half of the continent left Fraser
heartbroken, in "great disappointment." He had missed his prize,
the Columbia, by three degrees of latitude. And three years earlier
Lewis and Clark had reached the Columbia's mouth, overland from
the Mississippi, to claim America's richer half for President Jeffer-
son's fledgling Republic.

Between the St. Lawrence and Fraser's new-found river lay the
continental land mass, a long portage only, as the first explorers
judged, on the sea passage to China. The strategic anatomy of this
misplaced and inconvenient island was not grasped for nearly two
centuries. But from the settlement of Jamestown, in 1607, and
Quebec a year later, who could doubt that the continent, at least all
of it north of Mexico, ultimately must be one and indivisible, the

2 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

property of the nation and race strong enough to seize it Or? if that
logic failed, America must be fractured, like Europe, into a congeries
of quarrelsome little states.

To reasonable men all the laws of geography, politics, power, eco-
nomics and common sense, the inexorable mandate of nature itself,
seemed to impel a continental union. The countless public and
private wars of America were fought to compel it. Though our
schoolbooks usually record the process in two separate compart-
ments, American and Canadian, the shifting line of those wars
sewed up the history of the continent in one piece.

Champlain's clumsy arquebus, aimed at some Iroquois chiefs,
defined the future route of north-south invasion and, with a first
murderous shot, announced that America belonged to France. This
was in the summer of 1609.

As late as autumn 1871, a pitiable mob of Fenians, thirty-nine in
all, made the last armed attempt to capture Canada for the United
States and ended in jail. Even in 1903 an American president was
waving his Big Stick on the Alaska boundary, threatening to use
force if necessary and speaking with "good-humored courtesy in
everything,"

How comes it, then, that America has been bisected, nature
defied, logic rejected, the normal course of human events wrenched
out of joint by an experiment without any parallel in the five thou-
sand years of man's recorded follies? What manner of man has
described and held an invisible, defenseless line running from the
eastern anchor of Carrier's river to the western anchor of Eraser's?
Whence the myth that the American and Canadian peoples have
been friends throughout most of their lives together when they were
implacable enemies until less than a century ago? Whence the sub-
myth that they are of identical character, instinct, and purpose
when, in fact, they have always been inherently different and are
becoming more unlike with every passing year?

Why, after perfecting the unique political arrangements of Amer-
ica, have these peoples failed so lamentably to perfect their eco-
nomic arrangements; have integrated their military resources but
refused to integrate their industrial resources; have erected an un-
exampled living standard by their technical skill and yet often
managed their common business to the point of lunacy?

Why have they, and the rest of the world, assumed that they
understood one another? And why is it that recent mistakes, mis-
fortunes, or accidents have threatened to complicate both political
and economic arrangements without for a moment threatening a
friendship forged for the most part in violence?

THE ODD NEIGHBORS

In short, what improbable combination of circumstances, what
fertile mother, what prolific womb could bear at once the American
Republic, the Canadian monarchy, and the only ideal or almost
ideal relationship between any two nations on earth?

They came from the same mother, the same womb, the same
dream. Both nations were conceived blindly in the American earth
and brought forth by the American Revolution.

To be sure, Washington, in the winter of Valley Forge, Jefferson,
appealing to the opinion of mankind from Philadelphia, their
opponent, Guy Carleton, then racing to the rescue of Quebec in the
disguise of a French-Canadian habitant, King George gibbering in
London and Dr. Johnson denouncing those disjointed "abortions of
folly" pleased to call themselves the United States of America-these
men, even the farthest-sighted of them, could not foresee the double
fruits of the Revolution. Many North Americans cannot fully com-
prehend them today.

Yet somehow the continent has overcome its primary continental
logic of union and achieved a unique logic of peaceful division.
Somehow the United States always managed in the early days to
fortify Canada while attempting to destroy it and, for reasons
hardly known to itself, has accepted the northern rim of Manifest
Destiny nailed down by a handful of Canadians. Somehow the
fragile, the invisible and impossible line has held through the
jungle of Maine and New Brunswick, along the St. Lawrence and
the Great Lakes, across the Pre-Cambrian badlands, the central
plains, the Rockies, and the coastal forest to the western sea without
a fort or hostile gun on its 3,986.8 miles.

It has not been held by an act of God or, until recently, even by
an act of friendship. It was held in the first place mainly by Cana-
dians' abhorrence of the American Revolution. The United States is
the affirmation of the revolutionary process; Canada the negation.
The second American state began, indeed, as a counterrevolution
against the Inalienable Rights of the Philadelphia Congress. This
mere negation could not hold the boundary forever. It is now held
by an unprecedented act of human intelligence.

But intelligence of itself has not been enough. The boundary of
the 49th Parallel, apparently anchored by contract, is really anchored
and can be securely anchored only in the conscience of the American
people and in the dumb will of the Canadian people to be them-
selves. No paper document and no military force could sustain such
an unlikely design; it is sustained by some 175,000,000 separate
human beings in the unconscious course of their daily lives. That is
the private miracle of America. No other continent has ever been
able to duplicate it.

4 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

Like all workable human institutions, the boundary is a paradox.
It was created by animosity on both sides but it lives by friendship.
It divides two distinct races, nationalities, and living ways but unites
them in one neighborhood, all the more durable because it permits
diversity. It separates two political entities but it carries back and
forth, in ceaseless motion, day and night, the largest freight of
goods, travelers, and ideas crossing any frontier in the world,

Action and reaction, trial and error, antithesis and synthesis,
hatred and affection have fixed the shape of America's geography,
politics, and inner mind. The boundary is like a mighty heart, in
systolic and diastolic pulse, nourishing one community of two parts,
separate but organically interdependent.

In modern times the heartbeat has been so steady and reliable
that the potent body of the continent is hardly aware of it. Though
the organism generated by long evolution seems outwardly tough
and muscular, inwardly it is as delicate as any human body. The
very intimacy of the American-Canadian friendship makes it brittle
and supersensitive— as the closest friends will ignore a stranger's
offenses but will be wounded by the smallest slight from one
another. Thus the border is marked by many secret scars, slowly
healed, and by a few recent scratches.

They are hardly surprising when many of the greatest North
Americans have resisted the continental division.

An unknown young Virginian officer rides into Fort Le Boeuf, on
December 11, 1753, and warns France out of the Ohio country. He
has asserted the unlimited power of England and the innate totality
of America. After his escape from drowning in the Allegheny River
—by a freak of weather which almost appears designed for larger
purposes— Washington will soon assert the power of another nation,
his own; but, like England, it still hopes to clutch the continent
entire.

As if to symbolize that vain hope, a frozen hand reaches through
the drifted snow of a Quebec street, on New Year's morning, 1778.
It is the hand of another American soldier, Richard Montgomery,
dead of Canadian bullets. His reach for the broken dream of a con-
tinental republic has exceeded his grasp, or any man's.

Wiser men than Montgomery and his companion, Benedict
Arnold, can never bring themselves to abandon the dream. It is
articulated by Benjamin Franklin, laboring with pen and printing
press in a Montreal cellar and, shortly afterwards, with shrewd horse
trader's haggling and bland innocence, in the salons of Paris. Jeffer-
son likewise refuses to reconcile himself to the inevitable and un-
natural. He proclaims again, in 1812, the wholeness and indivisi-
bility of America— without providing the means to enforce it. At

THE ODD NEIGHBOBS

Queenston Heights a shattered American army and a dead British
general find the answer to this curious equation. Even so, the Re-
public will not accept the answer, since it affronts nature and the
scheme of things. Has not Henry Clay laid down the dictum that
the United States should "take the whole continent and ask no
favors" for "I wish never to see peace till we do"? Does not the
United States, indeed, hold a "mortgage" on every inch of Canadian
soil, solemnly filed by Senator Zachariah Chandler, in 1871, to
satisfy the Alabama Claims? And even in 1911 is not the Honorable
Champ Clark, Speaker of the House of Representatives, affirming
that he expects "to see the day when the American flag will float
over every square foot of the British North American possessions,
clear to the North Pole"?

Those thinkers regard the contrary notion— that America must be
sundered by a scrawl of ink on a fictitious map-as a heresy, an aber-
ration from the human norm, a repeal of reason, an insult to self-
evident truth, not to be borne by rational men.

Nor were they obliged to bear it, at least in the past century.
Grant's Grand Army of the Republic could have taken Canada in
an easy march, as an afterthought to the Civil War, and Canadians
listened anxiously for the tramp of that third and final invasion. At
any time since then the conquest of Canada would have been a
fairly simple military operation.

Why was the order not given? Because, some Canadians like to
think, the United States never actually wanted the barren wastes of
Canada.

No doubt there is a good deal in this theory. It explains the atti-
tude of some Americans in the past and the present. It does not
begin to explain the policy of their nation. The United States let
Canada alone, after two botched and futile invasions, mainly because
a third would confront the power of the British Empire and because
the Empire was eager to appease the old enemy at Canada's expense.
From the latter decades of the nineteenth century, however, the
United States was strong enough to take Canada, so strong, indeed,
that it had already nibbled off, by diplomatic pressure, the fringes
of Canadian territory considered vital to its eminent domain, But
to assume that it saw nothing beyond that line worth taking is to
ignore the clear record of the boundary.

Since the days when Franklin affably proposed the cession of
Canada as a legitimate dividend on the Revolution and Britain
almost agreed, since Lewis and Clark sought a river leading to the
rich northern peltries and President Polk propounded a simple prop-
osition called Fifty-four Forty or Fight-since the beginning of the

6 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

straggle for America the United States suspected and coveted the
treasure beside it. Newly revealed, the treasure is more desirable
today than never, one of the great and shining temptations of the
world.

It has not been seized, in the fashion of other continents, because
the United States has long since abandoned the thought of such a
crime. The betrayal of a friendly neighbor would betray the United
States itself and everything it has stood for in its own mind and in
•die opinion of mankind, would destroy the world's faith in the
American people, their faith in themselves. Canada has been and is
the ultimate test of the American conscience— to which a French-
Canadian prime minister has lately given public testimony, oddly
enough in the capital of India.

What is the simple meaning of these quite incredible events? It is
that both nations of America have accepted, as no nations in their
circumstances have accepted before, a sensible limitation of national
sovereignty.

An agreement of that sort was easy, of course, in the case of the
Canadians, since the overwhelming preponderance of power lay
with their neighbors. It was not easy in the case of the Americans
for precisely the same reason. Nevertheless, the Republic acted as
no great power has ever acted, by concluding that it would gain
more in the end by the limitation than by the expansion of national
power. This conclusion is surely the sovereign lesson which North
America now offers a world tortured and bedeviled by the old fetish
of sovereignty.

The Republic took a long time to learn the lesson for itself. It
probably would not have been learned at all if half the continent
had not been inhabited by a stubborn northern breed not rational
enough—or perhaps too rational— to admit the obvious continental
facts; by such men as John A. Macdonald, for example.

Summoned to his door, half awake, this apprentice lawyer of
questionable habits and bibulous look was offered his first brief in
1838— the defense of a gallant Pole and a band of American patriots
who had fortified themselves in a stone windmill beside the St
Lawrence to liberate Canada from its British oppressors. Macdonald
could not save his clients from the hangman's rope at Kingston, but
he had begun slowly but surely that day to build a Canadian nation
by toil, political cunning, private tragedy, alcohol, genius, and a
deep distrust of the United States.

Or consider, in this unlikely conjunction of continental forces, the
case of Macdonald's most notable victim, Louis Kiel. A half -breed, a
prophet of divine mission and, some said, a madman, Kiel briefly

THE ODD NEIGHBOES

bestrode the prairies with a wooden crucifix in his hand while Mani-
fest Destiny invited him to hand the West over to the Republic.
Kiel's madness could not comprehend any better than Macdonald's
sanity the logic of the continent. He was still a Canadian, convicted
of treason, when Macdonald's government hanged him (and itself)
from a gallows at a town named Pile o? Bones.

Or again, what kind of logic could produce that other Canadian
rebel, William Lyon Mackenzie, who fled from the comic battle of
Montgomery's Tavern, disguised as an old crone, sought refuge in
the United States, almost involved it in a war with Britain, and
ended his days as a member of Parliament and loyal subject of the
Queen? What incalculable destiny could make the rebel's grandson,
Mackenzie King, prime minister of Canada and intimate of Franklin
Roosevelt, even though King suspected his friend of secretly covet-
ing the Canadian state?

What unimaginable chance could sprout, in the field of an
Ontario bush farmer, Duncan Fife, the only kind of wheat able to
survive on the western plains and thereby populate and hold them
for Canada?

Let the modern historian, who sees order and rhythm in history,
explain the case of Doc Keithley, John Rose, Sandy MacDonald,
and George Weaver. These four men, hungry and beaten, were
ready to abandon their search for gold in the British Columbia
mountains. Their last pan of gravel filled their packs with nuggets
and launched the Cariboo rush of the sixties. Canada's empty Pacific
littoral suddenly found itself with people enough to resist the north-
ward expansion of Oregon. It also found a man born plain Smith,
who changed his name to Amor de Cosmos, the Lover of the World,
and persuaded his countrymen, by a narrow margin, to vote against
union with the Republic. Then, at the critical moment, the United
States provided William Cornelius Van Home to push a Canadian
railway to the Pacific for the sole purpose of preserving his adopted
from his native land.

Accidental men of this breed fitted into no pattern until they built
a pattern of their own. They knew nothing but a fierce appetite for
the Canadian earth. In the darkness of an empty wilderness they
had no light but an inner flame, hidden under an arctic silence.
Their homemade equipment was sufficient for their wants.

Given the two quarrelsome breeds on either side of the border,
the wonder is not that they fought so long but that they halted their
struggle short of final conquest. On both sides the advances and
retreats, the broken truces, the blunders, deceptions, and crimes
were beyond reckoning. So were the heroism, agony, patience, labor,

8 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

and ingenuity. These peoples threatened continental war because a
worthless little ship had been burned and sent flaming over Niagara
Falls, and again because an aged pig had been stolen and eaten on a
Pacific island. They were so long haunted by the specter of renewed
conflict that even a man as sensible as Macdonald, the first Canadian
prime minister, was suggesting, on April 9, 1867, that India attack
San Francisco to divert the United States when it attacked Canada.
The shot fired at Fort Sumter, said Macdonald's colleague, Thomas
D'Arcy McGee, warned Canadians "to sleep no more except on their
arms."

All those alarms have passed. Soldiers of the United States and
Canada are living together in the Canadian arctic to protect a split
continent. They sleep on arms that can never be aimed inwards on
America. Cartier's river, where Indians and whites fought since un-
remembered time, is being tamed today by the joint dams and
canals of its dual owners; Fraser's river nourishes its salmon
hordes under the regulations of an international authority; every
drop of water crossing the boundary is controlled by amicable
contract.

The great change— little more than half a century old and hardly
to be judged decisive until the past two decades— has followed a
long and fitful fever. Madness and sanity, greed and generosity,
quarrel and reconciliation, sin and forgiveness, loss and gain have
welled along the border of America in tidal flow. They have left
behind, in firm sedimentary layers, the continent we now inhabit,
the only continent surely at peace and divided by agreement.

If human affairs show no parallel to the 49th Parallel of latitude,
certainly the feat of human intelligence thus bounded is by no
means complete. Nor is the journey, begun by Champlam at Quebec
and John Smith at Jamestown, yet safely finished. On the contrary,
it is only well started. And its future is far more dangerous than its
past.

More dangerous because it must survive in a world on hair trigger;
more complex because the power balance of the continent is being
steadily revised. The affairs of America were never simple and
seldom what they seemed to be in the rhetoric of politicians, in the
neat arithmetic of the economic determinists, or in the school history
books, written for the most part with malice on both sides. These
affairs have grown overnight in intricacy, in subtlety, and in need of
greater knowledge. They have been changed by the impact of a
world revolution.

The revolution is vast and amorphous beyond human understand-
ing. The past, the present, and, in essentials anyway, the joint future

THE ODD NEIGHBOKS 9

of the two American nations can be understood if we put our minds
to it.

That we have hardly begun to do. In the eyes of most Canadians
the United States, for all its devices of information, remains a
caricature compounded of Broadway, Hollywood, and the dark un-
derside of Washington politics. To most Americans the people of
Canada are pioneers on a lonely northern frontier, suburban resi-
dents just outside the walls of the Republic, or exiled Englishmen,
and in any case good, honest folk, reliable in the pinch, safely to be
taken for granted, and indistinguishable from their neighbors, except
for their tricks of accent or silence.

The two-sided caricature contains enough truth to make it mis-
chievous. Americans are usually not angry but deeply hurt when
Canadians misunderstand and criticize them. Canadians, being even
more sensitive under a placid exterior, cannot bear to be taken for
granted. So, in an age of mechanical communication the real lifestuff
of both peoples fails to come through the radio waves, the television
boxes, the speeches, and the printed word.

How many Americans have yet distinguished the hard facts of
the border from among the genial myths?

The fact that two peoples, so alike in their outer habits, differ
fundamentally because their historic experience is different

The Americans spiritually whole after cutting their ties in Europe;
the Canadians refusing to cut those ties and thus spiritually split
by the contrary tugs of their origins overseas and their attachment
to their own land.

The Americans confident in their own unequaled power; the Ca-
nadians balanced uncomfortably on a transatlantic tightrope of
memory, sentiment and interest, forever conscious of their mortal
peril if their two friends, the United States and Britain, fall to
quarreling.

The Americans devoted to their written doctrines, fixed principles,
self-evident truths, ironclad Constitution, and government by laws,
not men; the Canadians skeptical of all theory, deliberately prag-
matic and inconsistent in great concerns, compelled to live, hugger-
mugger, by compromise in a society of two races, yet grimly at-
tached to their curious institutions, their folkways and their queen,
who happens to live in London.

The Americans lively, humorous, articulate, excited, certain of
man's essential equality, and truly democratic; the Canadians super-
ficially stolid, apparently humorless, silent, unruffled, yet full of a
hot inner pride, always aware of man's inequality, and convinced
that democracy has its limitations.

10 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

Two peoples, in fact, who have been exposed to the same Amer-
ican environment but see it through divergent angles of refraction.

How many Americans have considered a more obvious and meas-
urable fact: If civilization lasts, the United States must live, half a
century hence, beside a nation of something like fifty million people,
more powerful than any nation now in Europe?

Or the fact that, even now, the United States could not fight a
foreign war without Canadian supplies; that Canada buys more
American goods than any other nation and far more than it sells
to the United States where industry, comically enough, is afraid of
Canadian competition.

The fact—far more important than the hard Canadian dollar,
and all Canada's minerals, oil, forests, farms, and other natural re-
sources combined— that a new nationality, race, and human creature
have emerged at last north of the border; that the secret watershed
of Canadian history has been crossed only in the present generation
and the nation finally proved viable.

Above all, the fact that no foreign people on earth has so inti-
mately, persistently, and inevitably affected the course of American
history as a few million Canadians who only wished to be let alone.

On the other hand, how many Canadians have grasped the fact
that they have built their nation mainly by the consent and co-
operation of the United States, despite its occasional gestures to the
contrary; that Canada not only began as the child of the American
Revolution but is viable today only under American protection; and
that if Canada cannot contract out of American power and American
mistakes, yet no nation of its size and strength has ever received
such generous treatment from a giant on its undefended flank?

Not many Canadians or Americans have grasped those facts of
the past, understood the urgent problems of the present, or foreseen
the greater problems of the future. A single event of recent times-
unimportant, preposterous, but highly revealing— briefly lighted the
gulf of cordial misunderstanding which marks the border more
clearly than any map.

The United States Senate proposed to transfer its spy investiga-
tion, complete with television cameras and partisan politics, to
Ottawa. The statesmen of Washington were amazed because the
Canadian government refused to permit this obvious affront to its
sovereignty. A few days later the Canadian people showed them-
selves equally ignorant of their neighbors. Lester Pearson, Canadian
foreign minister, had been smeared by some obscure American pub-
lications, as soft on communism. Probably not one American reader
in a thousand had heard of this poisonous nonsense, But the Cana-

THE ODD NEIGHBOKS 11

dian press blazoned it in hysterical headlines and the Canadian
nation writhed in a fury of national outrage. That American sen-
ators could so misconstrue the feelings of Canada, that Canadians
could so quickly suspect the good sense of the United States, was
surely a disturbing thing.

Such absurd incidents, and many more significant, though less
noted, have long roots. They come out of an endless adventure, a
combination of men, geography, natural forces, and sheer accident—
the unbelievable story of the 49th Parallel. It is a story at first dom-
inated by outsiders but essentially the story of two distinct peoples
striving to subdue the American environment in their own separate
fashions. Though the Bourbons, Pompadours, Richelieus, Mazarins
and Napoleons of France, the Tudors, Stuarts, Georges and Norths
of England, and all the other innumerable bunglers of Europe at-
tempted to print the Old World's image on the New, the American
nations quickly took their own from the earth around them.

When Frontenac gloatingly reported his massacres of New Eng-
land settlers, when La Salle announced a new empire awaiting
France on the Mississippi, and the La V&rendrye brothers mistak-
enly registered their first sight of the Rockies, they wrote in French.
When Mackenzie recorded the white man's first crossing of the con-
tinent, when Simpson noted the secrets of the fur trade in his private
code, when the Founding Fathers devised the American Constitu-
tion, when McLoughlin signed the effective surrender of Oregon
and Webster the boundary settlement of Maine, they wrote in Eng-
lish. All of them were thinking, unconsciously, in a language of new
meanings. Their minds had taken on an American dimension. They
might regard themselves as transplanted Frenchmen or Englishmen,
but they had been transformed by the continental environment, by
the wilderness and far places, by the spectacle of river, lake, prairie
and mountain, by the very air, the fierce sun? the cruel winter, the
loneliness of their land— and not least by their struggle to unify or
divide it.

The Rock

[1608-1635]

IN HIS FORTRESS OF ST. LOUIS THE GREAT MAN OF NORTH AMERICA
lay dying. It was Christmas Day, 1635.
Samuel de Champlain could see from his dank chamber the
rock of Quebec, the frozen glare of the St. Lawrence, the huddle of
shacks beside it. If he knew that the river held the inner secrets of
the continent, all the hopes of the French race in this land, perhaps
even the ultimate hope of a passage to Asia, if he had held the
river for France and the Faith after a life of ceaseless battle, suffer-
ing and betrayal, yet he must die without guessing the issue of his
work.

It was larger than he supposed—hardly less than the shape of
civilization in America. With a few musket balls he had launched,
singlehanded, two centuries of struggle for America's possession,
begun its division in two states, and discovered an idea which alone
could enforce that division.

Neither Champlain nor any successor could put a name to the
decisive idea but by the tests of war and peace it would suffice—
the idea of Canada.

The French at home would never grasp it and, in consequence,
must lose their grasp on America forever. The English to the south
must learn it by long experience and much bloodshed, would hardly
understand it for three centuries yet. And least of all could the
English suspect that they themselves were building the northern
nation which they were determined to destroy. Understood or not,
Champlain's discovery could never be suppressed, purchased, or
escaped.

On that Christmas Day the dying man, forgotten in his icy prison,

12

THE HOCK 13

surveyed all the human contents of the nation conceived only in
this single mind.

Fewer than three hundred Frenchmen clung to the rock and
claimed, with no shadow of power to uphold it, title to all the un-
known lands from here to Asia. Such a comical claim could impress
only the clerks of Paris, with their amorphous, ever-changing maps.
Perhaps, in his spare moments, the tired and rouged Cardinal re-
membered Champlain, his servant, but Richelieu had larger affairs
than Canada to consider these days. He was making France mis-
tress of the world.

The seven thousand English heretics thriving beside the Atlantic
coast doubtless had never heard of the man in Quebec. Or if they
knew France's continental ambition, their mere presence denied it,
England, not France, obviously must possess America, by the force
of numbers, by superior virtue, and of course by God's will. Why,
it was said that the Royal Governor of Virginia traveled in a coach-
and-four when Quebec had just imported its first ox. That lonely
animal toiled across the farm of Louis Hubert, the only farm
in all Canada. It was clearing a battlefield for Wolfe and Mont-
calm.

The two embryonic forces already grappling in the first distant
encounters of Indian ambush, raid, and fur barter were not only
one-sided: they were totally misjudged. Champlain supposed that
he had fought for France, the Faith, and Canada against England
and the Protestant Reformation. Actually his adversary was, or
would soon become, a new state, a new race, and a new system.
The English imagined that they were fighting France and popery.
They confronted in fact the beginnings of another new state, race,
and system which, for better or for worse, they would never con-
quer or seduce.

A few hundred men in Quebec and a few thousands in the Eng-
lish colonies must unite the continent by arms or divide it in peace.
Champlain's arquebus and cold stroke of murder had established
the first rough line of cleavage. But where would the final line run?

Along the river certainly, for it was the natural bisection of the
continent as far west as white man had penetrated. Could the
French hope to hold even the river line? It seemed unlikely and,
to anyone less inspired than Champlain, less calculating than Riche-
lieu, impossible.

Only six years earlier England had taken Quebec and, without
firing a shot, could have clutched all the lands from the Spanish
colonies of Florida to the North Pole. To secure his queen's dowry
the English King had given Canada back to France at a future cost

14 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

beyond reckoning. Another king less idiotic would hardly make that
mistake a second time.

The tiny French settlements on the Atlantic coast, called Acadia,
had been twice seized and gutted by the English. They now lay
defenseless beside their thrusting New England neighbors.

Half a century ago Francis Drake had looted his way northward
along the Pacific coast, heavy with the Spanish gold of South
America, in search of the Strait of Anian, supposed to cut America
in two. He had been turned back by the "frozen nimphes, the thicke
mists and most stinking fogges." Twenty years later a Greek seaman
called Juan de Fuca said he had sailed from California through a
passage leading to the Atlantic or the arctic and located on the
47th degree of latitude— a bold lie but there was a speck of truth
in it. De Fuca's imagination had hit by accident on solid geograph-
ical fact. A strategic channel did penetrate the western coastline
and someday might prove defensible.

The Pacific remained outside the practical politics of Champlain's
age. French settlers on the St. Lawrence and English on the Atlan-
tic coast were concerned with the space between the coasts. What
lay there in the bourne of an undiscovered country where French-
men had left only an occasional moccasin print and Englishmen had
never ventured, a country ending apparently not far from China?
That was the primary American question. No man would answer it
for a long time yet. And when it was answered, what mind could
distinguish any tenable frontier to divide French from English
power? Not even the spacious mind of Champlain, the soaring mind
of Richelieu, or the tortured, hagridden minds of the New England
Puritans would ever hit upon the 49th Parallel.

To the French the whole interior down to Mexico, whatever its
size and shape, was part of the King's royal peltry. The English
did not see far ahead, knew nothing beyond the Atlantic shelf but
intended to take any land they needed and, as soon as convenient,
to dislodge the troublesome papists on their northern border.

The 49th Parallel thus had no virtue for either side and neither
had thought of it. A geographer in London or Paris who chanced
to put his finger on that line could not tell where it lay beyond
the river, through what unimaginable regions it traveled to the
western sea. If such a line were to be anything but a scratch of a
pen, man must make it so, for nature and geography disregarded
it. If nature, geography, and even common sense were to prevail,
there would be no frontier because there would be a single state.
Or if, defying those laws, man made two, then only a man-made
prodigy could hold the 49th Parallel as a boundary between them.

THE ROCK 15

A larger prodigy would be needed to make the parallel a guardian
of peace.

No man in America was wise enough to ponder either possibility.
All Americans— English, French, Spanish, and Indians—were ponder-
ing delusions sufficient to occupy them fully in the visible future.
But invisibly the continental prodigy was under way. Of which the
shacks on the St. Lawrence bank and the dying man in his fortress
were the symbols and first cause.

The civilized world was too distracted that Christmas to consider,
much less to comprehend, such things.

While Christians marked the festival of the Prince of Peace, the
Thirty Years' War rolled on, insensate and insatiable, spawning new
wars in the strangest places every day, for no cause that men could
remember, but all fought in the interests of religion. It rolled over
the crushed face of Europe and across the seas into savage lands
where the benefits of civilization had never been shared before. It
had ground the chief nations of the times into starvation and disease
on a scale to be duplicated only after three hundred more years
of progress.

The Age of Reason was dawning—an age of philosophers, states-
men and poets, of plunderers, assassins, pirates and royal harlots,
an age wherein ancient dynasties lurched toward block and ax, the
feudal underpinnings of the Middle Ages cracked silently one by
one, the Old World writhed in labor of bearing its offspring and
could not see the form of the thing it bore— least of all its twin chil-
dren of the New. In short, the kind of age which modern man
once more inhabits.

The inflexible velvet hand of Cardinal Richelieu held everything
in Charnplain's homeland of France, deftly manipulating king,
queen, nobles, armies, and treasury.

A handsome English sovereign had begun to lose a head over-
stuffed with Divine Right, and an obscure squire named Cromwell
with "swollen, reddish face," his linen "plain but not clean," brooded
on the Rights of Man and would brood on regicide.

First-class passengers on the rival ships of state could not be ex-
pected to observe lesser ships, mere cockleshells, bobbing on the
Atlantic— within them nameless men who, landing on the American
shore with all the racial memories and religious hates of the Old
World and a secret cargo more explosive than gunpowder, would
sing their psalms, cultivate their fields, slaughter the natives, hang
witches, devise a weird new notion called democracy, and hatch
they knew not what a marvel.

A world of heroism and horror little noted nor long remembered

16 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

the fortress on the black rock and its prisoner. Though he had
ignited a process more important and far more hopeful than all the
brawls of Europe, he must die alone beside his river.

Champlain's enemies were little noted either. But their cramped
farms among the swamps of the south and the stones of New Eng-
land contained a weapon too strong for the first Canadian and all
the power of Europe's mightiest state. The English had come
to stay while the French had come to trade. Therein, as perhaps he
surmised, lay Champlain's tragedy.

Another century must pass before the tragedy would reveal itself.
Meanwhile the life of Champlain had established one of the two
great facts of the future America. It had planted the life and fore-
cast the character of the Canadian people.

Champlain combined the energy, practicality, loneliness, tough
nerves, and inarticulate love of the Canadian earth that would
make Canada* He was in himself, despite his unmixed French
blood, the microcosm of the future Canadian race. He was also the
first man to feel the contrary pulls of geography, sucking Cana-
dians ever deeper into America, and of history, wrenching them
back to their sources in the old land. And he was the first to choose
between these opposites. The primary national decision had been
made when he turned from history to geography and chose to die
in Canada,

Of his true place in the North American scheme he could know
little and far too little is known of him. We cannot see even the
image of his face. All his portraits have vanished. His bones are
lost in the ruins of his town. His inner mind, his courage, patience
and stern religiosity, his streak of ruthlessness and, at times, the
gambler's cool calculation, all speak through his hard, factual and
humorless writings.

Nearing the end, he confessed his sins to his chaplain "with
sentiments of piety so lofty that he astonished us all/* There could
have been few to confess. His memories that day were of another
sort—boyhood at Brouage as a mariner's son; ten years of fighting
against his fellow countrymen in the mud of Brittany; the voyage
to the West Indies as the King's geographer, when he proposed a
canal across the Isthmus of Panama; the first sight of the St. Law-
rence in 1603, the island of Mount Royal, and the rapids of Lachine.
There, in that glimpse of a glorious unknown, he had found the
true purpose of his life.

Cartier had stood on Mount Royal nearly seventy years before.
The fishermen of France, England, and Spain had long fished the
Grand Banks, careless of the land beyond them. Raleigh had planted

THE ROCK 17

his Roanoke colony whose 108 inhabitants had disappeared, leaving
only an arrowhead pointing toward the west. The Spanish had
destroyed two great civilizations in Mexico and Peru to build a
third of their own. The French had failed in three attempts to settle
Canada.

All these failures could not discourage the young Champlain once
he had grasped the presence of the river as the vital artery of a
new continent— probably, as he hoped, a water passage to Asia.

The five succeeding years were a restless interruption in his
chosen work of exploration. The gallant de Monts' settlement on the
island of St. Croix, against the western shores of Fundy, where
frozen cider was served in chunks and nearly half the 250 settlers
died of scurvy; next year the building of Port Royal, solid and com-
fortable in the sheltered basin of Annapolis, with Champlain's gar-
den, his trout ponds and summerhouse; his Ordre de Bon Temps—
the ruler of the feast with "wand of office and the collar of the
Order worth more than four crowns"— curing scurvy and boredom
by banquets of moose, caribou, partridge, geese, and delicious
beaver tails; the first theatrical performance in America, "Theatre
of Neptune," contrived by the merry Lescarbot; a cruise down the
coast as far as Cape Cod; a skirmish with the Indians; the fateful
verdict on this land of Norumbega as useless for settlement; its loss
forever to the English— all these labors seemed wasted. Champlain
yearned only for the river.

De Monts lost his charter in 1607 and his settlers abandoned
Port Royal. The first English reached Jamestown the same year.
They had occupied the richer half of the Atlantic coast and faced
the vaster riches behind it.

Champlain forgot the English in the summer of 1608. He had
reached Quebec and seen the thrust of rock looming dark, naked,
and as it seemed, impregnable over the gate of America.

The businessmen of Paris regarded Quebec as a site to control
the river traffic and lure the Indians' wealth of furs into the coffers
of France. Champlain held it as a way point on the road to China.

His backer, the able Pontegrav6, had been granted one year's
royal monopoly of the fur trade. Champlain was expected to estab-
lish French control of the entire American peltry. Any larger ideas
in his mind were his affair. Paris knew nothing of Canada, cared
less and was interested solely in the hides of beaver to make felt
hats, especially the castor gras d'hiver, those rich, winter-trapped
pelts long worn and oiled to fashionable perfection by the sweat of
Indian bodies. For such skins merchants were ready to risk money
and the skins of better men.

18 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BOBDER

The Jealousies of rival fur traders followed Champlain to Quebec,
He soon discovered that they were planning his assassination. This
man of God could strike fast. He seized John Duvai leader of the
plot, who was "strangled and hung and his head was put on the
end of a pike . . . that he might serve as an example to those who
remained, leading them to deport themselves correctly in future/1

Champlain's Habitation, rising daily on the river shore, was a
lopsided, rambling, crazy structure, as his crude drawing shows.
There were three buildings, two stories high, with a gallery around
them, a moat and a palisade. The bare timber against the black
rock, the wink of light, and puff of smoke made less than a pin's
prick on the wilderness.

Imprisoned by winter, the twenty-eight inhabitants ate eels and
forest roots, and died slowly the hideous death of scurvy. Far away
at Jamestown the first Americans were starving also, John Smith's
matter-of-fact record notes: "So great was our famine that when a
Savage we slew and buried, the poorer sort took him up againe
and eat him/*

Champlain's spring census showed that "out of the twenty-right
first forming our company only eight remained and half of them
ailing/'

Their impatient leader still could not strike out on the open
road to China. He had already made the decision which thence-
forth must dominate the struggle of France and England in Amer-
ica. He would drive the Iroquois from the St. Lawrence, leaving
the friendly Algonquins and Hurons, north of the river, free to bring
the furs of the interior to Quebec. All his other plans were set aside
as he undertook a brief detour southward with his new allies against
their ancient enemy,

The first major war of America led him up the Richelieu to a
noble lake marked by his name. He had stumbled into the contin-
ental trench. Thenceforth it must carry the French southward and
then the English northward, in perpetual march of arrow, musket
and cannon, of pitched battles, sieges, advances and retreats, of
heresies, Inalienable Rights, Declaration of Independence, Manifest
Destiny, and God knew what else, all designed to engulf a people
who would never be engulfed.

Now came one of the seminal moments of North American his-
tory. The French and their Indians met the Iroquois at Crown
Point "advancing at a slow pace towards us, with a dignity and
assurance which greatly impressed me/' Champlain., and two other
Frenchmen, in plumed casques, breastplates and steel cuisses, lev-
eled their massive arquebuses. Each was loaded with four balls for

20 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

extra insurance. At twenty paces the white men fired. The leading
Iroquois fell, incredulous, to the ground and their companions fled
into the woods "whither I pursued them, killing still more of them/*
America had been introduced to Europe's civilization.

The man of God unconsciously had fired the first shots in the
contest of France and England for the continent. He had struck
deeper than he knew. He had struck without passion, without just
cause, by cold commercial calculation. To hold the fur trade in the
St. Lawrence, he had attacked the most powerful, intelligent, and
warlike Indian race in eastern America. Thus he had committed
New France to ceaseless war with the Iroquois nations, driven
them into the arms of the English and Dutch on the Atlantic coast
and assured a hostile alliance of Indian and white. That alliance,
like a bow slowly drawn, would finally recoil with fatal force.

A brief skirmish, one of the world's significant battles, had brought
private enterprise into the heart of America, based on combination
of beaver and Indian skins to make hats for the gentry of Paris.
Later it would make combinations even more curious,

If murder for the King, for God, and for profit was part of the
day's work, Champlain showed himself a merciful man within the
limits of duty. Watching his triumphant Indian friends as they
cooked an Iroquois alive, he ended the torture by a quick shot
through the prisoner's head. He was revolted by the Hurons* parting
present to his monarch, a fresh Iroquois head and a pair of severed
arms. The friendship of America could not offer more. Alliance be-
tween France and the northern tribes against the Iroquois, and hence
against the English, had been sealed, in the sacred Indian fashion,
by blood.

Champlain turned back to Quebec, having missed by a few miles
a southward-flowing river. This water was entered a few weeks
later by the Half Moon, bearing its doomed captain, Henry Hudson,
to claim the adjacent region for Holland. Inch by incK still invisible
to one another, the rival claimants to America were coming to-
gether.

Still the road to China beckoned, but four years must pass— years
of toil in Quebec, of waiting in the royal anterooms of Paris, of
intrigue, bickering, bankruptcy— before Champlain could ascend
his river.

He set out in May, 1613, with Nicolas Vignau, a coureur de bois
of dangerous imagination, who swore that he had seen the western
sea ten days' travel from Quebec, the wreckage of an English ship,
the scalps of its sailors, flayed by the Indians. Champlain's expedi-
tion was soon lost in trackless leagues of jungle near the headwaters

THE ROCK 21

of the Ottawa. Vignau confessed his lie and Champlain turned
back, unable to endure his deceiver "any longer in my presence,"

Two years later the desperate Hurons and Algonquins needed
help against the western Iroquois. Champlain started up the Ottawa
again, entered Lake Nipissing, descended the French River, and
beheld Lake Huron in Georgian Bay—a mighty vision but a cruel
disappointment. This was only Mer Douce, not the salty western
sea.

Champlain had begun to grasp the mainsprings of American
geography, but he could not pause to explore or ponder his dis-
covery now or even to see the full sweep of Lake Huron. The maples
were in autumn flame, the pumpkins of the Indian villages ripe
under the first frosts. There was no time to waste if the Iroquois
were to be taught another lesson. He turned south, with eleven
French musketeers and a large war party of Indians, crossed Lake
Ontario, and attacked the stronghold of the Onondagas.

All his careful planning on that disastrous October day quickly
went awry. To carry the thirty-foot palisades he had built a cavalier
of protected scaffolding, on which he stood to fire down on the de-
fenders while his allies burned the fort. The fort would not burn.
The allies would not fight.

After three hours the besiegers were in such confusion that
Champlain could not make himself heard above the din. Already
wounded in both legs and "seeing that shouting would only burst
my head/' he allowed himself to be carried out of the battle on
an Indian's back. The disorderly retreat northward was, he wrote,
a "gehenna" of pain under the first snow of winter. All for nothing.
The Iroquois' nest had been little damaged. They buzzed like
hornets and prepared to sting again.

Champlain spent the winter in the filthy lodges of his friends.
For fear of the Iroquois' revenge they would not let him go. It
was not until the next autumn that he could return to Quebec,
wondering if he would ever see the country of the lakes a second
time. "If ever there was one greatly disheartened it was myself. . . .
But realizing that I could not help the matter and that everything
depended upon the will of God, I comforted myself."

It was cold comfort. His explorations were finished. Until his
death he must spend half his time in twenty-five Atlantic crossings
to plead for his king's support, the other half ruling a hamlet of
threescore inhabitants and forever watching the Iroquois. Their
memories had always been long. Now they possessed the long
muskets of the Dutch and English.

Champlain's enemies were not a band of rootless nomads. They

22 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

were a people of high intelligence and had built the most success-
ful Indian society in eastern America.

The Long House of their five nations stretched from the Hudson
to Niagara in a close-knit polity. Their central council the forty-
eight Lords of the Confederacy, elected by all adult men and
women, met under the Tree of the Great Peace at Ononclaga. They
were bound together by their Great Immutable Law and by the
legend of Deganawidah and his disciple, Hiawatha, founders of
their far-flung state.

Long before the French or English, the Iroquois established a
working democracy. Their people were all born free and equal
Even prisoners of war, adopted into the Five Nations, were given
the full rights of citizenship. No aristocracy of birth was tolerated.
A leader must demonstrate his worth. A chief must be elected. The
chastity of women was sacred. The code of honor was violent and
merciless but it was strictly enforced.

These people were usually at war but they looked forward to
the day when all men would share in peace the hunting grounds
of America, governed by the democratic principles of Ononclaga.
The Iroquois utopia might appear to a civilized man like Champlain
as a childish dream. Yet civilized man, more than three centuries
later, could devise no better.

Probably some 12,000 to 15,000 Indians were leagued in the Five
Nations and the Sixth, the Tuscaroras, who joined the Confederacy
early in the eighteenth century. They lived mainly by the hunt but
they cultivated, around their villages, crops of corn, pumpkins,
beans, and other vegetables. A crude economic system of trade
among themselves and with other tribes supported them in their
own style of life. They regarded it as quite satisfactory until the
white man offered the larger benefits of guns, metal implements,
and liquor.

Thus organized, and inspired by their myths, the Iroquois were
able not only to resist Champlain's alliance with the more northern
Hurons and Algonquins, and later alliances much more powerful,
but to defend their lands against the English and assert their inde-
pendence for some hundred and fifty years of one-sided struggle.

Champlain's hold on Quebec, now challenged by the Iroquois,
was weaker than he supposed but it was France's only hold on
America. Without his stubborn faith the Canadian colony would
have quickly perished. It had made no mark on the American
earth save the twelve acres of farm hewed out of the woods on the
far side of the cliff by Hubert, the Parisian apothecary. Neverthe-
less, the first Quebec farm was a notable mark even if the French

THE ROCK 23

court had heard no rumor of it and the fur traders regarded all
cultivation as a crime against their business.

The furrow begun by Hebert and his nameless ox would reach
far, finally spanning the prairies and wriggling down to the Pacific
shore while the plowmen of Paris, in furrows now stretching across
the map of Europe, were sowing crops to be harvested at maturity
by Dr. Guillotin's ingenious reaper.

Heberfs farm, extended by more settlers of his tough breed,
might save France against the English. The fur trade must ruin it.
Already in these first days die fatal pattern was established. The
search for fur and quick profit drained the energies of the colony,
lured the most active young men into the woods, despite the King's
prohibitions, and made Canada a parasite, dependent upon France
even for its food.

At least Champlain's religious ambitions were prospering. One
Indian soul gathered to Christ, he had written, was of "more value
than the conquest of an empire/' Souls were gathered in ample
harvest by the gray-robed R6collets, to be followed by the black-
robed Jesuits, each carrying in his birchbark canoe the vestments,
altarcloths, and communion wines of the church, together with an
inner thirst for martyrdom, quickly quenched.

Jean de Brebeuf, the bearded giant who had turned from aristoc-
racy to God, the mild Jerome Lalemant, Isaac Jogues, and An-
toine Daniel were to die with more agony than their Master after
the Iroquois' refined tortures of red-hot irons, burning belts of pitch,
and baptism with boiling water. They perished gladly and all their
missions in the Huron country must soon be destroyed. But, like
Latimer at the Oxford stake, they had lighted a candle. It could
never be snuffed out by pagan Indian or Protestant English.

The distractions of fur, politics, war, and religion left Champlain
scant time for the satisfactions of private life. Long ago, at forty-
three, he had married a child wife of twelve years, H&ene Boul6,
only to find, when she reached Quebec, that she had secretly im-
bibed the poison of the Huguenots. Poor waif, she was soon rescued
for the Faith by her husband, flitted briefly through Canadian his-
tory, fled home to France, childless, to enter a convent, and was
seen no more. Champlain could do comfortably without her. He
had married Canada.

Hidden from his eyrie, a quiet shift in the military, economic,
and political gravity of America already was in process. The grand
continental strategy had taken its first crude shape in the awkward
hands of men who knew not what they did.

Champlain's counterpart, the unshakable John Smith, somehow

24 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

held his Jamestown colony together and unwittingly revealed a
primary fact in the division of the continent— its southern half had
far more agricultural soil and better growing weather than the
Canadian north. When John Rolfe married the kidnaped Poca-
hontas, thus cementing friendship with the Indians; when lie learned
to cure a native weed; when all Europe was smoking his product
in defiance of King James's futile "Counterblast to Tobacco"; and
when Raleigh "tooke a pipe before he went to the scaffold," thereby
making it fashionable everywhere, a booming new economic system
was built solidly on smoke. England could never be driven from
America after that except by its own sons,

English settlers crept north from Jamestown, year by year closer
to the French. In 1613 they struck their first blow— a feeble blow,
cowardly and illegal, but from then on, for 146 years, English and
French arms in America would seldom rest.

The original settlements of Acadia, on the Bay of Fundy, were
selected for this act of piracy. Jean de Biencourt, Seigneur de
Poutrincourt, indefatigable man, had returned to Port Royal after
its earlier abandonment, financed in his desperation by the Marquise
de Guercheville, a uniquely chaste inmate of the French court, who
had steadfastly refused the bed of a king, and by other noble ladies
less fastidious. Lacking virtue, they made up for it by a fine frenzy
of religion. All they asked of Poutrincourt was the chance to send
out the first Jesuits and save the savage souls of the jungle.

They secured from their young friend, King Louis, a grant of
all lands from Florida to the St. Lawrence. That was easy, for the
gallant French monarchs would never refuse anything, even a con-
tinent, to a pretty face. The Pope also agreed to this redivision of
America, which a predecessor had granted in its entirety to Spain.
So far as French occupation on the Atlantic was concerned there
seemed to be little enough to divide. Besides Port Royal two other
French settlements, mere hangouts for vagrant fur traders, stood
on the west shore of Fundy.

Somehow reports of these establishments reached Sir Thomas
Dale, the choleric Governor of Virginia, at Jamestown, and he was
outraged. England claimed the entire Atlantic littoral, north of the
Spanish lands, by virtue of John Cabof s voyages more than a cen-
tury before in the service of the thrifty King Henry VIL (Cabot had
been paid for a new empire by a pension of £20 a year and £10
in cash. )

To Governor Dale, therefore, England's title was clear and must
be enforced against the trespassers of Acadia, even if England and
France were at peace. He had at hand a satisfactory instrument.

THE ROCK 25

Samuel Argall, amateur gentleman and professional pirate, had
lately turned up at Jamestown in an unlicensed trading vessel to
begin a career of many exploits, including the abduction of Poca-
hontas. As Dale realized, here was the very man—fearless, cunning,
unscrupulous— to drive the French out of Acadia. The Governor's
faith was well placed.

Sailing up the New England shore "to fish for cod," Argall en-
countered some Indians whose bowings and scrapings must have
been learned from the ceremonious French. He easily spied out the
French settlements and seized them. Having picked the locks of
their strongboxes, he took the precaution of stealing the French
land titles to Acadia and then demanded that the French produce
them. No one could find them, since they were in ArgalFs pocket.
He thereupon denounced the settlers as illegal squatters and ene-
mies of England, set fifteen of them adrift in an open boat and
carried fourteen back to Jamestown.

There the outraged Governor proposed to hang the lot until
Argall, whose word occasionally was good, protested that he had
promised their safety on his honor. He finally admitted the theft
of the title deeds. The Governor relented but ordered him back to
Acadia to complete his congenial work.

Argall systematically burned the French settlements, first stealing
all property of value down to the locks on the Port Royal doors. A
handful of remaining Frenchmen, left in the woods, lived through
the winter on game and roots. For these and other knightly services
Argall was knighted by a grateful monarch.

France's hold on the Atlantic coast had been shaken. It could
not be broken. The Acadians crept out of the woods and rebuilt
their homes. Often attacked, eventually deported, they would
always return and could never be dislodged from their beloved
tidal acres. But if a pirate and his crew from tiny Jamestown could
wreck these colonies in a day or two of easy work, how could they
hope to survive larger English colonies, now sprouting a few miles
away, in New England? If Quebec itself was vulnerable, as a few
more years would show, Acadia looked like the Achilles heel of
New France. So it would remain.

Europe's various claims to America, north of the Spaniards, were
asserted so far by Jamestown, an outpost of Dutchmen at the
mouth of the Hudson, the desolated habitations of the French
around Fundy and Champlain's garrison on the St. Lawrence. In
1620, a curious cargo, on its way to Jamestown, was blown 900
miles out of its course upon the shores of Plymouth. America would
never be the same again.

26 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

The freight of the Mayflower included a hundred ardent men
and women, some contraband ideas unnoted by the King's customs
officers, and a "compact" signed in the dingy cabin. The passengers
had bound themselves together as a "civil body politic," Germs of
democracy, that most dangerous of diseases, had arrived in the
New World.

The English were established fifteen years later in New Hamp-
shire, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Connecticut. Things were
going badly in Canada under a French government reputedly the
ablest in Europe. They were going well in the English colonies
under a government stupid to the point of imminent suicide.

One man had begun to grasp the nature of the approaching
contest. To John Winthrop, in Boston, the New France on his north-
ern shoulder was an unclean den of popery. King Charles appar-
ently could not resist the seductions of Rome in England. His wife
had her private Catholic chapel regardless of all the laws of the
realm to the contrary. Winthrop's New England would repel the
Pope's spreading power and perhaps someday exterminate it.

The struggle for America was to be not only military, economic
and political, but religious—the Reformation ranged against Cathol-
icism. Europe's exhausting wars of religion had spanned the Atlantic
but most of their fire had been blown out in the passage. The New
World was to be spared the worst follies of the Old.

It was plain by now, however, that the English colonies, quickly
outnumbering the French, were entirely different in kind.

As early as the founding of Port Royal the long reach of French
feudalism had paralyzed New France. English feudalism, on the eve
of its destruction in civil war, never managed, for all its royal edicts,
governors' warrants, regulations and Navigation Acts, to control
the free men who poured into New England and Virginia to build
a new society as they pleased.

The French of the St. Lawrence would never know even the
theory of self-government nor desire it. In 1619, when Champlain's
word was law in Quebec and only echoed the word of his king, the
first elected colonial assembly met in Virginia. The principle of
self-government had been planted-a beginning fatal to the English
throne which tolerated it. In the same year the first Negro slaves
were imported to tend the tobacco fields. The irony of the coin-
cidence was not appreciated, nor its future price guessed. That
price, as finally paid, would touch and threaten the 49th Parallel.

The two rivals in the American contest differed also in their
daily lives.

Canadians, except for Hubert, were still engaged almost solely in

THE ROCK 27

the fur trade, roaming the wilds with the Indians, begetting a new
race of half-breeds and depleting the colony's strength.

The practical-minded English built their houses, plowed then-
fields, and seldom ventured beyond them.

The Canadians were the great wilderness people of America, the
English the stay-at-homes.

Two religions, two political systems, and two separate varieties
of creature were now in conflict.

Seen by the retrospective eyes of history, the result of such a
race between hare and tortoise could never be in doubt. There was
another factor, calculable only in retrospect— the English were not
only land but water animals. Their sea power, which already had
driven Spain from the North Atlantic in Elizabeth's time, could lay
Canada in hopeless siege. None of these results was foreseen in
the seventeenth century. Neither side understood the strengths and
weaknesses of the other.

The stern Protestant eyes of New England saw the French as the
agents of Rome, the greedy monopolists of the fur trade, the con-
niving friends of the Indians, who constantly raided the English
colonies. Canada saw the English as rivals in trade and empire, but
not yet serious rivals, since Canadians could travel so much farther
and faster, knew the country better, and were far more experienced
in jungle war. The English thought of their neighbors, if they
thought of them at all, as outlandish heretics, too far away to
matter.

Canadian misjudgment of the English was to be one of the chief
causes of New France's ruin. There was much more to the English
than the French supposed— so much, indeed, of dissent, conflict,
soul-searching, doctrinal quarrel, and perversity, yet so much also
of thrift, stubbornness, and sheer endurance that no foreigner could
hope to understand them.

The English thought for themselves— that was their trouble and
their strength. The Canadians left their thinking mostly to a distant
government, whose mind was on other things more interesting than
the snow and squalor of Canada.

Life in New England presented to the logical French mind of
Paris a spectacle or certain failure. The inhabitants had fled from
England, as they said, to escape religious persecution; but they had
no sooner escaped than they set up their own local inquisitions,
compelled everyone to work and to worship in the established
fashion, willy-nilly, refused the franchise to all dissenters and per-
sons judged godless, exiled the pious Roger Williams and Anne
Hutchinson in the woods of Rhode Island, cut off offenders* ears,

28 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BOBDEK

hanged witches, harangued one another in endless sermons to turn
a healthy Catholic stomach, decreed in Plymouth that "there should
be no gameing or reveling in ye streets" and in Connecticut ordered
death for any boy over sixteen who would not obey his mother.
How could such a preposterous society endure?

Notions of government in the English colonies were equally
bizarre, Winthrop had called democracy "the meanest and worst of
all forms of government." John Cotton, the spiritual mentor of
Boston, held that "democracy I do not conceive that ever God
did ordeyne as a fit government either for church or common-
wealth," The ideal of Samuel Stone, another eminent cleric, was
"a speaking Aristocracy in the face of a silent Democracy." Yet the
original heresy of Protestantism was breeding a subheresy of politics
proclaimed by Thomas Hooker: "The foundation of authority is
laid in the free consent of the people."

There, to a Frenchman, was the first preachment of anarchy. In
the growing schism of the New England theocracy these quarrel-
some, litigious, noisy, and demented colonies surely could never be
united.

Besides their heresies they also nourished a sleek and repulsive
hypocrisy. They equated their profits with the glory of God. They
exploited one another and made indentured white labor a kind of
limited slavery. They defrauded their king by systematic smuggling
—all as part of God's work— while they wrestled in public with their
consciences and their devils.

If they had any sense of humor or enjoyment of life, the foreigner
could not discern it. They preached sexual purity, encouraged bun-
dling, made sex an economic policy by taxing bachelors to compel
them to breed legally, and as in Groton, Massachusetts., were ap-
palled to learn that a third of the local congregation had bred
before marriage. When a ribald band of bachelors, in rebellion
against the Puritan code, settled at Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1627,
remained drunk all winter, lived with squaws and erected the final
horror of a Maypole next spring, Boston was scandalized and sup-
pressed them.

To such a mind as Richelieu's, brooding coldly behind painted
cheeks in Paris, the disordered thought, chaotic government, and
inevitable failure of the English colonies must have offered some
ray of cheer.

The Cardinal had mastered the affairs of France and most of
Europe. Now he found time to master Canada. This systematic
man was disgusted with the endless disputes of the successive fur
monopolies, the mergers, reorganizations, bankruptcies and frauds,

THE ROCK 29

the refusal to bring settlers to Quebec as the royal contracts pro-
vided. Champlain had complained that the fur traders cared for
nothing "so long as they got 40 per cent on their money," and ap-
parently Champlain was right. So Richelieu organized his own
company of One Hundred Associates, backed by the huge capital
of 300,000 livres.

Things seemed to be looking up in Canada. Champlain had begun
to build the first fort on the rock. The missionaries were garnering
an abundant crop of Indian souls. King James had granted the
region of Acadia to his friend, Sir William Alexander (calling it
Nova Scotia, with its own noble baronets who watched it comfort-
ably from home), but the few French survivors of ArgalTs raids
hung on, almost forgotten, and the expected Scots settlers failed to
appear. New France, still containing only some three hundred
white inhabitants, was at last taking shape.

It was the wrong shape, a shape which could not endure. As
Champlain suspected, as Richelieu could not see from Paris, Canada
was wholly dependent on fur and fur was the enemy of settlement.
The fur traders knew exactly what they were about. They refused
to bring settlers, for settlers would drive out the fur animals and
the trappers,

Equally dangerous to Champlain's dream of a new nation was
his quarrel with the Iroquois. He must keep them off the St. Law-
rence to protect his middlemen, the Hurons and Algonquins, He
dared not make a permanent peace with his enemies lest they be-
come the middlemen and take the furs to the Dutch and English.
The temporary peace patched up in 1624 was soon broken by his
Indian allies and the old war of sudden ambush began again.

Nevertheless, by 1628, Champlain's affairs were in good order,
for the moment anyway, and a great convoy of colonists and sup-
plies was on its way from France when a sudden shift in the
affairs of Europe ruined everything.

As if there were any lack of troubles at home, King Charles of
England embarked on war with France. Canada was the last thing
in that royal chowderhead but it had not escaped the attention of
the three sailor brothers Kirke— David, Thomas, and Lewis— gentle-
men of honor, part English, part French, and part pirate. These
adventurers, well equipped for such work, were chosen to open,
as a mere annex to the war in Europe, the second and what might
well prove the last round in the American struggle.

Bearing letters of marque from Charles and instructions "utterly
to drive away and root out the French settlements in Nova Scotia
and Canada," the Kirkes set sail in three ships. A few weeks later

SO THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

Lewis was training his guns on the fort and houses of Quebec,
He sent a messenger to Champlain suggesting a "courteous* sur-
render and promising "all kind of contentment both for your persons
and your property which, on the faith I have in Paradise, I will
preserve as I would my own." Kirke was always the English gentle-
man, in part anyway.

Champlain resolved on a bold bluff. He strained his Christian
conscience in the interests of his king and retorted with a brazen
lie. His fort, he said, was well stocked with food, was armed and
ready to fight. In truth it was starving, had sixteen soldiers and
fifty pounds of gunpowder to defend it, and would collapse at the
first broadside.

The lie succeeded. Kirke had heard of larger game and could
afford to leave Champlain safely on ice through the winter. He
sailed away without a shot and, rejoining his brothers, waited off
Gaspe. There he surprised Richelieu's helpless fleet of eighteen
merchantmen, bound with colonists and supplies for Quebec, and
captured them all after the first naval battle in North American
waters.

This gigantic booty— its loss disastrous to Richelieu's new com-
pany and lethal to the starving garrison of Quebec— satisfied the
Kirkes, for one season. They had other plans. First they formed,
with Alexander, the Anglo-Scotch Company to exploit all Acadia
and Canada, Then they set out again next spring to finish the job
at Quebec.

Champlain and his villagers were now living on eels, acorns, and
seeds gathered one by one from the earth of Hubert's farm* Quebec
was abandoned and helpless, Champlain forced to surrender at
Kirke's second demand. As the golden lilies of France fell from
the flagstaff of the fort and the flag of England replaced them,
amid beat of drums and boom of cannons from the English ships,
Champlain saw his work finished, Canada lost, the great dream
ended.

The surrender was conducted in the best of manners. Champlain
spent a pleasant interlude with the Kirkes, shooting birds along
the St. Lawrence, and then was taken courteously to London.

Meanwhile the son of Alexander had possessed his father's land
of Nova Scotia. He had occupied Port Royal but failed to take the
French fort on the southeast tip of the Acadian peninsula. The
indestructible La Tour still asserted the claims of France in this
region and, after queer adventures, martial and marital, would
end his days as a British subject.

THE ROCK 31

Champlain found in London that he had not calculated on the
stupidity of King Charles. It was indeed beyond man's calculation.

The war already was over. Charles had dismissed Parliament
and, unable to collect taxes, had suddenly remembered that the
French still owed him most of the dowry of his French wife,
Henrietta Maria. For this $140,000 in hand, which Kichelieu paid
gladly as a dirt-cheap bargain, England returned Quebec and
Acadia to France in the spring of 1633. Never had empire been
bartered away at such a price, More than a queen's dowry and
thousands of better men than Charles must be expended to buy
it back.

The issue of America could have been settled then and there at
no more cost of blood or treasure. No boundary across the continent
might ever have been drawn. The 49th Parallel would have dropped
out of history. Instead, France was given a new chance. Champlain
set sail from Dieppe as governor of Canada.

He must have wondered, as his ship moved from the harbor,
whether he would ever see his native land again. He would not
see it again. The pull of geography in the first Canadian had proved
too much for history. He was committed to Canada. History, still
too strong to be denied, would bring Canadian soldiers into this
very harbor of Dieppe 210 years later, almost to the day, in rescue
of France.

Two years only were left to Champlain, He needed them. Quebec
must be completely rebuilt, for it lay in ashes, the first work of
the English in these parts, where they would return three times.
By the end of the two years a new town had risen and the fur
route of the St. Lawrence had been regained. Champlain lived a
celibate life among Jesuits, now the real rulers of a Canadian
theocracy, and Catholic soldiers as pious as he. His fortress became
almost a monastery.

It was a comfortable life, as secure as any life could be within
easy reach of the Iroquois and not far from the colonies of England.
The New Englanders had seen Canada fall without a blow, only
to be frittered away by a foolish king. They did not want it par-
ticularly but they would never sleep sound in their defenseless
cabins while French papists and murderous Catholic Indians
roamed the woods.

The results of their fears and ambitions were mercifully hidden
from the lonely man in the fort. He had little to regret in his own
life. Still, the bitter taste of disappointment remained. His private
longing, sacrificed to the needs of his colony, had always been to

32 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

ascend the river, find the passage to China, and unlock the mystery
of the continent. Now it was too late.

He heard, near the end, some startling news about the country
he would never see, news at once sweet and tantalizing.

Jean Nicolet had pursued the route to China and reached Lake
Michigan. There he had been told by the local Indians that the
Winnebagos, beyond the lake, lived by "stinking waters/1 They
must surely be the western ocean. The Winnebagos, Nicolet con-
cluded, were probably Chinese. He therefore approached them in
a robe of Chinese silk, "all strewn with flowers and birds of many
colors/* brought with him for such an occasion. The Winnebagos,
alas, turned out to be only Indians.

They told Nicolet he was only three days* march from the Big
Water. He hurried back to Quebec in time to assure the dying
Governor that Asia would soon be reached. Champlain had no time
to learn the truth.

In the autumn of 1635 he was sixty-eight years old, his worn-out
body paralyzed. He foresaw the end and poured out, with ceaseless
tears, his confessions, his fears, and his hopes to the kindly Father
Lalemant. The first Canadian died peacefully on Christmas Day.

He was given, says Father Le Jeune, who delivered the funeral
oration, "a very honorable burial, the procession being formed of
the people, the soldiers, the captains and the churchmen. . . .
Thos.e whom he left behind have reason to be well satisfied with
him."

They buried him somewhere in the recesses of his rock, white
now under the snow, and in the fury of the succeeding years forgot
even this lodgment. They buried him scarce knowing what they
buried or suspecting the future dimensions of the nation and race
he had founded.

Far beyond his rock, beyond his farthest footsteps, in the unknown
land up to the leagues of solemn tundra, the buffalo grazed through
the snow. The Indians huddled over their smoky fires. Frozen
prairies prepared next spring's surge of grass. Dark forests awaited
the upward flow of sap. Minerals of men's use lay deep in the
rounded, glacial rocks and oil flowed under the foothills of the
mountains. The great rivers of America were moving, unseen, to
the western sea. And across this unimaginable void lay an imag-
inary parallel of latitude which no man had marked.

The Lost Blueprint

[1665-1672]

TOWARD THE END OF THE 1660'$ JEAN BAPTISTE COLBERT, FACTO-
turn to young King Louis XIV of France and the ablest filing
clerk in Europe, began to receive disturbing letters from
Canada where, for more than thirty years, weaker men had tried
to hold Charnplain's narrow beachhead.

As Colbert read these messages it is to be supposed that his
neat little face, the image of a neat little mind, was rumpled with
annoyance, his wide, intelligent eyes opened wider, his woman's
Irps were pursed in thought, and he scratched the flowing false
curls imitated from the "full-bottomed" wife of his monarch. Col-
bert, justly called the "man of marble/' was not easily disturbed.
But this latest news shook him.

In 1665 he had sent to Quebec his brightest young man, Jean
Talon, with strict instructions and a perfect blueprint of government.
Under Talon, as its intendant and real ruler, Canada was- to
be no longer a foreign mission but a province of France. It was to
be organized, regulated, and compressed in the St. Lawrence Val-
ley, Above all, it must cease wasting its money and manpower in
the pursuit of fur, exploration, and war.

Talon had understood his instructions when he left Paris, had
been thoroughly trained for his job as Canada's first bureaucrat,
had learned all Colbert's methods, and in face and mind was almost
the exact duplicate of his master. Moreover, he knew the King's
will and, so far, had never disobeyed it.

Yet here on paper, before Colbert's incredulous gaze, was the
evidence of Talon's sudden aberration. The coolheaded bureaucrat
clearly was suffering from euphoria, the same sort of infatuation
and lunacy that seemed to afflict everybody in Canada. Instead of

33

34 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

building a compact province on the river, he was proposing, quite
seriously, to capture New York! In the next line he announced that
"nothing can prevent us from carrying the name and arms of His
Majesty as far as Florida."

The filing-cabinet soul of Colbert was horrified. Hastily, on the
margin of Talon's letter, he scrawled the single word "Wait." Then,
on second thought, he seized his pen and wrote a more solemn
warning: "It is much better to restrict yourself to an extent of
territory which the colony itself will be able to maintain than to
embrace much land that eventually a part may have to be aban-
doned, with some consequent discredit to His Majesty's Crown."

That should have been sufficient to hold the Intendant and pre-
vent a new clash with the English, King Louis's temporary friends.
Colbert knew Talon, Unfortunately, with all the apparent facts
before him, he did not know Canada, nor the tricks it played with
the most sensible men.

To Colbert, Canada was a minor state in Louis's expanding realm.
How could he suspect, in the methodical world of Paris, that Can-
ada was in fact a state of mind? Already it was turning the mind
of Talon upside down. The wilderness, that age-old siren, had
seduced the respectable Intendant, changed him into an adventurer,
an empire builder, an amateur coureur de bois. In defiance of his
orders, he was preparing to push Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, to
the Pacific, to the arctic, if possible to China.

What of the English in Virginia and New England? Talon's en-
larged blueprint covered their case. They would be hived on their
narrow coastal shelf, east of the Appalachians. Dazzled by his
dream, drunk with continental distance, Talon could not wait, And
inevitably, with the best intentions, he had launched a process
which must end in war with the English and the ruin of New
France.

That end could not be foreseen by Colbert and Louis or they
might have crushed Talon at the beginning. They were not averse
to empire building, they were planning the subjugation of Europe,
but they were not ready yet to meet England in full collision.
Assuredly, though Louis had discovered Canada for himself, was
fascinated by its mystery, and intended to make it a subordinate
department of his government, he did not propose to let it spread
all over America at the cost of war and treasure when America,
after all, was of far less value than an inferior province in Europe.

So far all Louis's plans had worked satisfactorily in the com-
petent hands of Colbert. A bright new age had dawned, lit by the
rising effulgence of the handsome young Sun King, who was the

THE LOST BLUEPRINT 35

state entire. The Thirty Years' War had collapsed long since in
senseless exhaustion. Cromwell, the disturber of Divine Right, had
been buried and dug up for public exhibition and his Puritans
driven underground. The Counter Reformation was in full motion,
the Catholic Church apparently restored to something like its old
power, the cracked foundations of feudalism painted over with
royal gilt in the new fashion called rococo. The Christian world
had been given a breathing space, shorter than any man supposed.
The exhalation of its relief could be heard all the way across the
ocean.

Talon, therefore, must wait, in accordance with Colbert's time-
table.

So also could England, where a dark and sleek voluptuary, wiser
man and worse than his father of the same name, ruled on a single
principle— he would not begin his travels and exile again. The first
Charles had squandered his throne and head in fighting the people.
The energies of the second, remarkable for their promiscuity, were
conserved for the safer task of procreation, whence appeared, with
brief interruption, nine titled bastards from seven titled concubines,
but, alas, no heir. On the very day when Talon landed in Quebec
"pretty, witty" and illiterate Nell Gwyn had been given her first
role at Drury Lane where, as it was assumed in Paris, she alone
held the eye of a harmless sovereign.

Louis and Europe underrated Charles. Canada also had caught
that roving eye. Indolent as he always seemed, this king "who
never said a foolish thing nor ever did a wise one," nevertheless
was beginning to construct, in conspiracy with two of Canada's
cleverest rascals, a little-noted northern dam across Talon's plans,
while the English colonists were making ready to flow through the
southern dam of the Appalachians in irresistible torrent.

At the moment, however, Louis saw no reason to worry about
his new Canadian province. It seemed to have survived its time of
troubles since Champlain's death, thirty years ag6.

They had been worse times than any king in Europe or any
backwoodsman in America could imagine.

Champlain's strong hand had been removed for hardly a dozen
years when the Iroquois undertook to extinguish New France and
came within a scalplock of success. To capture the fur routes of
the west and carry its furs to the English and Dutch, they fell upon
Huronia, north of Lake Ontario, burned all the Jesuit missions,
murdered Fathers Daniel, Br6beuf, and Lalemant with obscene
and unspeakable torture, obliterated the Huron nation, left 8,000
of its people to starve, lunged westward to Lake Michigan, threw

36 THE STBUGGLE FOR THE BOBDKH

the whole tribal organization of eastern America into chaos, turned
south to wreck the powerful Susquehannas, and joined the English
colonies in a permanent alliance which laid down the future im-
perial strategy of the continent.

New France, with its 3,000 inhabitants, necessarily was the Iro-
quois' main objective, the western campaign incidental. For New
France was drawing from the western tribes the furs that the Iro-
quois needed to trade for English goods now essential to their
life—especially English rurn.

Quebec was too well fortified for frontal attack, but the outlying
settlements could be picked off one by one. The Iroquois* says a
Jesuit dispatch, "approach like foxes, attack like Itons and disappear
like birds/'

Montreal, founded on Cartier's river island of Hochelaga by the
pious Maisonneuve and forty-three priests, nuns, and settlers in
1642 "for a testimony," and called Ville Marie, the personal prop-
erty of the Virgin, lived in siege. The holy women often clutched
their crucifixes, knelt in prayer, and prepared to die as the men
fought the Iroquois from the palisades and watched them torture
their French captives.

To the west the fur route, umbilical cord of New France, had
been cut The colony was dying for lack of nourishment.

Even at Quebec the Iroquois appeared openly around the walls
and, insured by the French hostages in their villages, defied the guns
of St, Louis, Helplessly the garrison beheld them abduct eighty
Huron colonists from the Island of Orleans and heard the Huron
chief, Jacques Oachonk, chant Christian hymns while his torturers
scalped him, poured hot sand upon his skull, and twisted his liga-
ments with red-hot gun barrels.

It was a time of brief armistice, broken truce, bribery and
treachery on both sides; of solemn conferences in smoky bark lodges;
of feasts, orations, and costly presents; of prisoners and torture used
by Indian and white alike as instruments of barter and politics;
a time of religious ecstasy when nuns saw visions, demons, comets,
flying Iroquois canoes, and other portents in the night sky, when
priests recorded daily miracles and rejoiced over the burning bodies
of Iroquois braves at the torture stake because their pagan souls,
absolved by the church, would soon fly to Paradise.

It was a time also of heroism such as the world has seldom wit-
nessed. The Jesuits still entered the Iroquois villages and, without
complaint, accepted the martyrdom of fire. During a lull in the
war, while the Iroquois were occupied in the west and needed a
temporary accommodation with Quebec, fifty-three Frenchmen

THE LOST BLUEPRINT 37

even founded a hostage settlement among the Onondagas and
escaped, the night before their intended execution, by feeding their
hosts into unconsciousness.

The Iroquois' pretended friendship was brief. In 1660 they set
about the systematic destruction of Montreal and were thwarted
only by a marvel of human courage.

Learning that part of the enemy would descend on the town by
the old Ottawa River route, Dollard, Sieur des Ormeaux, and six-
teen other youths resolved to die in its defense. They received the
final sacraments of the church, paddled up the river, and took their
stand on the Long Sault with a handful of Algonquins and Hurons.

There 200 Iroquois besieged them in their flimsy wooden stock-
ade and were repelled for eight days. The main Iroquois attacking
force of 500, waiting on the Richelieu, was compelled to by-pass
Montreal and join the Homeric battle on the Ottawa. Though 700
attackers finally killed the last dozen Frenchmen, torturing four
who still breathed, the cost of this victory was too high. After their
losses the Iroquois abandoned their attack on Montreal and slunk
home in howling shame.

The Canadian Thermopylae was a miracle but the colony could
not live on miracles.

It had narrowly survived on the river. It had lost Acadia again
to the New Englanders.

A fleet assembled in Boston harbor in 1654 for an attack on the
Dutch post of Manhattan. At the last moment a ship from England
brought the news of Cromwell's peace with Holland. The thrifty
Boston townsfolk could not bear to waste a fleet, which was hard to
come by, and bethought them of the papists in Acadia, England and
France also were at peace but that small technicality could not
prevent Robert Sedgwick and his company from taking defense-
less Port Royal without serious resistance, and at the mouth of the
St. John they discovered a willing captive in Charles de La Tour.

This man of iron nerves had long conducted a private war with
Governor Charnisay of Port Royal and was frequently away from
home. Charnisay took advantage of his absence to attack his fort.
Madame La Tour defended it for two months until food ran out.
She surrendered on Charnisay's guarantee to spare the lives of her
little garrison. He hanged everybody before her eyes. She died of
horror.

Thus the first chapter of the La Tour epic. The second opened
with the opportune drowning of Charnisay. La Tour promptly ar-
ranged a cozy settlement of the old feud by marrying his enemy's
widow. Then, on the arrival of the New Englanders, he suddenly

38 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

recalled that he was a British subject with a Scottish title, one of
the late King James's baronets of Nova Scotia. The invaders, swal-
lowing his story, appointed him a proprietor to administer their
conquests.

The 250 French in Acadia, a breed as flexible as La Tour, paid
little heed to conquest or change of government, but two English
expeditions had proved that Canada's hold on the Atlantic littoral
was feeble and easily broken. Only an accident of an unthinkable
sort could prevent New England from pushing permanently north-
ward to the Gulf of St, Lawrence. That accident lay far ahead.

Talon reached Canada in 1665 to find it on the brink of ruin.
His blueprints would be needed. Much more reassuring to the
Canadians was the giant form of the Marquis de Tracy, who had
recently distinguished himself as a soldier in the West Indies and
whose face was sallow from its fevers. He brought a thousand well-
seasoned French troops, the veteran regiment of Carignan-Sali&res,
in their gray uniforms, wide black hats, and purple stockings. As
these experienced warriors landed at Quebec and their commander
knelt on the bare pavement to pray, the villagers felt safe for the
first time, protected by the only regular military force ever seen in
the New World.

The new Governor, Daniel R6my, Sieur de Courcelle, was too
impatient to wait for de Tracy and attempted a winter march on
snowshoes southward into the Iroquois country, reached the frontier
of the Dutch colonies, lost his way in the snow and retreated, his
army of six hundred hungry and half frozen.

In the autumn of 1666, after the priests had preached a holy
war against the heathen, de Tracy moved south. Crippled by gout
and carried on an Indian's back, he led the Carignan-Sali&res with
their Canadian and Indian guides up the Richelieu and Lake
Champlain trench— 1,300 men in 300 canoes. The Mohawks fled
before an army and navy of unimaginable size and from a safe
distance observed their burning villages. This terrible revenge
forced the whole Iroquois Confederacy, under a chief called the
Flemish bastard, to sue for peace. It was to last more or less for
eighteen years.

France had inflicted on its immediate enemy a wound desperate
but not mortal. De Tracy's three new forts on the Richelieu pushed
its power far south of the St. Lawrence to the outer rim of the
English colonies and the New Englanders, seeing their Indian allies
crushed, were terrified. Governor Nicolls of New York attempted
to rally the other colonies for a joint invasion of Canada. His plan
came to nothing.

THE LOST BLUEPRINT 39

The French had good reason to assume that the divided, scat-
tered, and penny-pinching English could never unite, perhaps
could be obliterated separately at leisure. Meanwhile Talon would
reorganize Canada on the Colbertian model.

This genial young man, with his wig of flowing curls, his rather
feminine face, wisps of upturned mustache and Cupid-bow mouth,
was to be the business executive of Canada. Government was re-
moved from the old fur companies and vested in the Sovereign
(later the Superior) Council, of which Governor Courcelle was the
titular head and military commander, Talon and Bishop Laval the
other two effective members. A dozen Canadians were appointed
from time to time to sit with the French triumvirate as a kind of
cabinet and supreme court. Talon was instructed to administer the
colony in all but military and religious affairs.

His clash with the Bishop began at once. Talon had secret orders
to curb the Jesuits. Laval could never accept the new imperial deci-
sion to make Canada a secular province of France. It must remain
a mission and its primary purpose the salvation of the Indians.
Talon, therefore, was his enemy and the enemy of God.

Of the two men the Bishop was the larger and the tougher. Fran-
gois de Laval-Montmorency, first of many Canadian churchmen who
would defend the Faith against the apparatus of the state, was the
perfect expression of the Counter Reformation. He represented the
Pope direct, with the full power of Rome behind him. He stood
above kings and earthly law. He was a scholar, aristocrat, and
tyrant to his finger tips, a wily politician and yet a mystic. He
knelt at prayer half the night in his freezing cathedral, slept in
blankets crawling with fleas, and was said to conduct other morti-
fications of the flesh too revolting for the common ear. His long,
horsy face, huge nose, drooping mustache, tiny goatee, and, above
all, his heavy-lidded, fanatic eyes were enough to daunt any
worldling.

They failed to daunt Talon but they gravely inconvenienced him.
Immediately the impact between the two established monopolies,
of religion and trade, one aimed at the Indian's soul, the other at
his furs, the two irreconcilable ideas of a holy Canada under Laval
and worldly prosperity under Talon, split the Sovereign Council
and kept official Quebec in a continual state of public quarrel and
private cabal, always bitter, sometimes comic. The village on the
rock was becoming a fair imitation of a European court.

Despite the Bishop, Talon proceeded to apply his blueprint. His
first problem was to increase the population. France, which could
spare 10,000 dead in a single European battle, could allow Canada

40 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

only 500 colonists a year. The fertile breed of Normandy quickly
multiplied, with the assistance of the state.

Colbert's instructions to "marry youths at eighteen or nineteen
years and girls at fourteen or fifteen" were supported by bonuses to
large families and taxes on bachelors. Ships from France brought
cargoes of assorted women, the "filles dit roi," willing to marry any-
one. The village youths lined up to watch them, in cold appraisal,
passion, or humor.

"The Vestal Virgins," one of the French soldiers wrote home,
"were heaped up in three different Apartments where the Bride-
grooms singled out their Brides just as a Butcher do's an Ewe from
amongst a Flock of Sheep. In the three Seraglios there were as
much variety and change of Diet as could satisfie the most whim-
sical Appetites; for here were some big, some little, some fair, some
brown, some fat and some meagre/*

Pitiable and helpless these girls must have seemed as they faced
their suitors, the rude hamlet of seventy houses, the dark rock and
beyond it emptiness and mystery; but gallant, too, and durable, the
sturdy foundation stock of Canada.

With such material, and with the support of the King, who was
entranced by his long-distance discovery of the New World, Talon
could begin to fashion a new French province. He set the colonists
to building houses, to work in field and kitchen, to smoke meat,
store grain, and weave cloth. He laid out a model farm of his own
to instruct them in agriculture. He built a brewery and protected
its products by high taxes on imported French wine. He opened a
shipyard, attempted an unsuccessful export trade in the West
Indies, investigated copper deposits around Lake Superior, and
even reported the discovery of coal deep in the rock below the
Governor's residence.

He was seen everywhere, this bustling and efficient young man-
ager, inspecting his little industries; peering into bake ovens; watch-
ing the women at their looms; offering himself as godfather to an
Indian baby; making sure that the immigrant girls were "free from
any natural blemish or anything personally repulsive"; fixing wages
and prices; fining profiteers; regulating the number of horses for
every farm; ordering all chimneys swept regularly and all dogs
locked up at 9:00 p.m.; enforcing Louis's personal edict against
profanity on pain of cutting out the offender's tongue; branding
one Paul Dupuy with a fleur-de-lis on his cheek because he had
whispered that the English were wise to execute King Charles; con-
triving pageants and frolics for the public; imagining, in his Col-
bertian illusion, that he could make the sprawling substance of
Canada self-contained, state regulated, and automatic from top to
bottom by the simple mercantile economics of his master.

THE LOST BLUEPRINT 41

All was going well for the indefatigable bureaucrat. The colony
took on its first look of permanence. Its population doubled, rising
to 6,000 in three years from immigration and copious birth rate.
The woodland along the river rang with the sound of axes and felt
the first bite of the plow. There had been one horse in all Canada.
Talon imported eighty and the same number of sheep. And what
a proud day when he could inform Colbert that he was now covered
from head to foot in Canadian-made cloth!

So far he had not heard the siren call of the West. He scrupu-
lously obeyed his instruction to concentrate his settlers on the St.
Lawrence in a tight and defensible community. He carved the land
into narrow farms stretching back from the single highway of the
river into the woods and granted it in seigneuries, on the feudal
model of France, to worthy citizens, retired officers and hangers-on
from Paris, who were elevated into a clumsy Canadian noblesse,

Actually feudalism and nobility were little more than names in
Canada. The local seigneur could parcel his land out to tenant
farmers, receive their oaths of fealty, together with their cens et
rentes and a gift of poultry on St. Martin's Day; he could never
make the tenant into a serf or himself into a nobleman.

"The nobility/' a later governor wrote with disgust, "is every-
thing which is most beggarly." Its members were often as poor as
their tenants, worked in the fields beside them or, bankrupt, fled
to the woods and the illegal fur trade. Revolution, slowly ferment-
ing in France, found no nourishment in Canada. The farms and
villages of the old land, the stone houses with massive chimneys
and low-hanging eaves, the churches with glistening steeples and
carved altars could be reproduced here, but not the hungry French
peasant or the rapacious French nobleman. The chemicals of ex-
plosion were lacking where any man impatient with authority could
easily escape it in the Great Beyond.

Something else, unplanned by Colbert and unsuspected by Talon,
was under way— the lineaments of a new race, the French Canadian,
had started to emerge. Neither royal authority, foreign invasion,
nor military conquest could ever suppress it.

As Governor Denonville noted a little later, "The Canadians are
tall, well-made and well set on their legs, robust, vigorous, and
accustomed in time of need to live on little. They have intelligence
and vivacity, but are wayward, light-minded and inclined to de-
bauchery."

Other observers from France continually remarked on the indus-
try of the peasants, their unequaled skill in woodcraft, travel and
war, their reckless bravery and their weakness for liquor. Around
the mock court of Quebec, however, the official set was idle, the

42 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

women were flirtatious, gaudily dressed, and too pretty for men's
good. They wore curls and low-necked gowns, forbidden by Laval,
and made themselves, said the Bishop, "the instruments and the
captives of the fiend." They even indulged in the devil's sport of
dancing, though he had denounced it and personally prescribed for
the Governor's daughter "modest and moderate dances with persons
of her own sex and only in the presence of her mother."

Despite the peasant's vice of alcohol and the light habits of
Quebec society, Canada must have been the most pious community
in the world. The doctrines of a single church were never ques-
tioned. Miracles occurred on all sides and were accepted as com-
monplace. The Jesuits, curbed by Talon, were still the strongest
power in the country and the Bishop its most formidable figure.
Priests and nuns lived in holiness and poverty. No one doubted
the sanity and everyone praised the virtue of Jeanne Le Ber, a
virgin of Montreal, who spent twenty years in a filthy cell, a hair-
shirt next to her skin, alone except for a swarm of angels.

Far to the southward, behind the barriers of mountain and forest,
the American wilderness was producing another breed, equally
distinct.

The English had brought with them to New England the in-
herited character of their island race but it was subtly changed by
an environment of unlimited space. A quick disintegration of an
all-powerful church and a universal belief already was producing
sectarian quarrels, rival panaceas, and the stubborn individualism
of the free citizen.

He was not a woodsman, fur trader, soldier, or friend of the
Indians. He was a farmer, a sailor, or a fisherman, he hated the
Indians and slew them like vermin when he could, he was con-
cerned only with his little plot of land, his fishing boat, or the
local government.

Even at this date he was developing dangerous notions about the
laws of a distant crown and parliament, which had started to hedge
his business around with regulations, Navigation Acts, and taxes, all
designed to make him a hewer of wood and drawer of water for
the industry of England. He had won some control over his own
local laws in elected assemblies, he was still loyal to the King, but
if the King's overriding laws did not suit him he broke them with-
out qualms of conscience and the jury of his peers increasingly re-
fused to convict him. The combustibles of revolution, unknown in
New France, would not be discerned until too late in New England.

Some men of learning had given the English colonies the seeds
of scholarship. Harvard University had been hopefully founded
with capital of £400 and an endowment of 260 books, the year

THE LOST BLUEPRINT 43

after Champlain's death. This first frail intellectual growth soon
withered in the frontier labors of survival, but ideas at least were
relatively free, the quarreling churches could not prevent secular
speculation, a few books circulated before Canada imported its
first printing press, and a rudimentary American literature of a
godly, dark, and irascible sort had appeared.

The Canadian's joy was in the companionship of family and
friends, in life more than in possessions, and for him life on this
earth was a fragment of eternity.

The English were generating a ruthless spirit of competition, a
ravenous appetite for material wealth, and would soon pronounce
them virtues ordained by God for His elect. In their towns a new
creature of granitic visage, the American businessman, thrust him-
self from among the populace and surveyed the earth which he
intended to inherit and manage for the common good. In the Vir-
ginian plantations the first Southern gentlemen were established on
a foundation of slave labor—among them a man named John Wash-
ington, at Bridges Creek, whose great-grandson would alter the life
of America more than all the kings, soldiers, politicians, and busi-
nessmen combined.

A penetrating French traveler thus sums tip the contradictory
characters of the two breeds: "In New England and the other
British colonies there reigns an opulence by which the people seem
not to know how to profit; while in New France poverty is hidden
under an air of ease which appears entirely natural. The English
colonist keeps as much and spends as little as possible; the French
colonist enjoys what he has got and often makes 'a display of what
he has not got."

Such were the peoples, antagonistic in their habits, instincts and
interests, who must collide in the struggle for America—the French
united by church and state, the individualistic and ingrowing Eng-
lish apparently unable to unite even for joint defense.

As the open conflict between them approached, Canada had all
the advantages of discipline, experience in jungle fighting, and the
leadership of able European generals. The English, with a popula-
tion of 260,000 against 13,000 Canadians at the end of the seven-
teenth century, had the advantage of numbers, twenty to one. They
also had behind them the power of Britain's navy. It would prove
decisive.

In this balance of continental forces perhaps only Laval saw the
mortal weakness of Canada, and he saw it dimly.

The fur trade he considered dangerous only because it was the
spawning bed of perdition. Its brandy debauched the Indians as
fast as the missionaries could convert them. It lured the most vigor-

44 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BOBBER

ous young Frenchmen into the woods to break the laws of govern-
ment and church, to live like savages and breed with them. Worst
of all, not content to debase themselves, the coureurs de hols had
become the heroes and real noblesse of the country, secretly admired
and envied by peasant and townsman. When they swarmed into
Quebec, Three Rivers, and Montreal for the annual fur fairs, and
a Bacchanalia of drink and fornication, they were "prodigal not
only in their cloaths but upon women/' They appeared naked,
greased and painted like Indians, or dressed themselves in the finest
silks and laces, carried the most costly swords, and, having squan-
dered their year's fur profits, "e'en sell their Embroidery, their Lace
and their Cloaths; this done, they are forc'd to go upon a new
Voyage for Subsistence."

While the fair lasted-a barbarous spectacle of buckskin, feathers,
bare flesh, Paris fashions, and the sober robes of priest and nun—
the prodigals from the pays en haut could not be controlled by
church or state. They danced, feasted, drank, gambled, and whored
as they pleased and laughed at the Bishop's injunctions. "We can-
not enjoy ourselves," wrote the great woodsman, Lahontan, "at
play or in visiting the Ladies but 'tis presently carried to the
Curate's ear, who takes publick notice of it in the Pulpit/" But after
these orgies the sobering voyageur would crawl to the priest for
absolution before facing the trail again.

If all Laval's mandements, his raging sermons, his orders of ex-
communication, or Talon's consignment of illegal fur traders to the
King's galleys, could not tame the white savage, that was fortunate
in the short run, though disastrous in the long, Had the traders
ceased to bring the furs to market, the colony would have lost its
essential source of income.

Talon had no intention of discouraging the fur business and no
means of eliminating the unlicensed bootlegger, but he mollified
the Bishop by forbidding the trade in brandy. It was quickly re-
placed by cheaper and stronger English rum, which threatened to
divert the thirsty Indian's furs to New England and his soul to
heresy. So the ingenious bureaucrat invented a comical compro-
mise—the Indians might sell their pelts for French brandy but were
forbidden to get drunk, on pain of the pillory and a Jane of two
beaver skins. These the state would be happy to receive.

No compromise could satisfy the Bishop or stop the brandy flow-
ing out of every fur post of the interior, Laval continued to quarrel
with drunkenness, licentiousness, and even protocol, insisting that
he must receive greater public deference on the street, a higher
seat at board than the Governor.

The fur trade was obviously the enemy of religion, its brandy

THE LOST BLUEPRINT 45

the poison of Indian life. Neither Laval nor Talon grasped the
larger process stemming from the same cause and now engulfing
the colony. Canada was committed totally to the fur trade, and the
fur trade drove the fur-bearing animals before it, dragged Canada
forever deeper into the West, sapped its strength, erased Colbert's
blueprints, and infallibly assured the victory of the English,

Laval saw this only as a threat to the church. Talon never saw it
at all. Dizzy with sudden dreams of empire, infected with the Ca-
nadian disease of distance, gloriously ill of sheer space, he saw only
a chance to carry the glory of France across the continent.

The thrifty Colbert, slill patiently planning his concentrated
French province on the St. Lawrence, was staggered at first by
Talon's euphoric dispatches and the probable bill of costs when
his hands were full and, his treasury empty under the appetite of
the King for palaces, pleasures, and wars. To his amazement Col-
bert soon realized that the fur trade had grown faster than agri-
culture, in denial of his orders. So he scribbled "Wait" on the margin
of Talon's latest letter.

It was no use. The policy of the fur trade and the infatuation of
Canadians with the wilderness, that magnet which no red-blooded
man could resist, quickly expunged Colbert's warning, Anyway, the
man of marble had begun to feel the tug of the magnet himself.
He, too, like the King, was soon dizzy from the western dream, at
second hand, for it was part of the larger dream of French power
throughout the world.

Talon hurried to Paris and explained his vaulting ambitions.
Both Colbert and Louis approved them, gave their local manager a
free hand, and planned their complementary conquest of Europe.

The theatrical pageant of the Sun King had begun. In both thea-
ters, European and American, it was to be brief and ruinous.

Even if there had been no larger European causes to produce it,
Talon's thrust westward, northward, and southward meant even-
tual war with England. It need not touch the English colonies at
first and was designed only to hold them within their coastal shelf,
but it collided immediately with their allies, the Iroquois, who,
though punished by de Tracy, still struggled as middlemen to
possess the western fur trade. Not long hence French expansion
would collide directly with the English, since population rose
steadily in the Atlantic reservoir and must spill through the moun-
tains. The original charters of Virginia, Massachusetts, and Con-
necticut had given them the lands to the Pacific. So far as they
were concerned, that writ overrode all Louis's titles. The English
planned to seize their own property, as yet undefined.

The Canadians, by the nature of their business and their own

46 THE STRUGGLE FOB THE BOBDEH

adventurous temperament, were far ahead in the western race.
Etieime BruM had reached the junction of Superior and Huron as
early as 1623, after the Iroquois had pulled out his beard and some
years before the Hurons murdered him. Within four decades other
Canadians were nearing the headwaters of the Mississippi and the
shores of Hudson Bay. No English colonist would cross the Appala-
chian dike until 1671 and no English post would be built on the
Great Lakes until 1722.

So moved the race of the hare and the tortoise. It could not move
long in peace.

In the 1660's the French began to push seriously through the
country of the Great Lakes. There they found the tragic human
wreckage of the Iroquois wars. The remains of the Hurons, Neutrals,
Ottawas, and Salteurs had been driven into refuge west of Lake
Michigan and south of Superior. Refugees, in conflict with natives
for survival, had upset the entire tribal balance, hunting grounds,
and economy of the interior.

As few of the fur-hunting Indians dared to run the gantlet of
the Iroquois, French traders increasingly traveled to the source of
supply with trade goods of brandy, guns, hatchets, kettles, beads,
and gaudy cloth. They carried home the furs by Chnmplain's
route from Georgian Bay down the Ottawa to bypass the Iroquois
and the falls of Niagara,

French birchbark canoes were enlarged to the length of six
fathoms and a cargo capacity of six tons, the cargo divided into
portable 90-pound bales. The tireless voyageurs paddled sixteen
hours a day, measuring their progress by regular pauses for a pipe
of tobacco. They lugged their bales and canoes over countless
portages, suffered the misery of mosquitoes and black flies, spread
the glory of their king (who personally made the largest kettles,
the best guns, the strongest brandy), and by skill, muscle, paddle,
birchbark, and sheer endurance devised a transportation system
which would finally take them through the Rockies to the Pacific.

Like a busy needle the canoe pierced the substance of a continent.
It stretched a thin thread of French power from Quebec to the
Lakes and far beyond them, with longer stitches every year.

Historians could explain, in comfortable, armchair retrospect, the
political and economic forces propelling this curious odyssey* They
meant nothing to the fur trader. He was seeking his own private
profit, often illegally, the carefree woodland life, and the mystery
of the unknown beyond the next river bend. So, careless of imperial
policy, of a remote king, the laws of the church, the regulations of
the state and the homebound heretics of New England, the coureur

THE LOST BLUEPRINT 47

de bois1 burst into the pays en liaut with swirl of paddle, sweat of
portage, crunch of snowshoe, smoke of Indian lodges, and the
casual consolation of some dark-skinned bedfellow.

By survival only of the fittest, such a life—lonely, hard, barbarous,
and usually short— produced a unique species. It was more Indian
in its instincts than white. It retained the white man's cunning but
it had absorbed the vices and virtues of the native, the secrecy,
callousness, cruelty, and dumb, stoic courage. It imitated the native's
cunning and used the arts of civilization to deceive him—as when
Nicholas Perrot, in the Michigan country, subdued a hostile tribe
by the magic of fire from flint and steel, calmly announcing, "I am
the dawn/* and then, by superior magic, lit a cup of water after first
mixing it with inflammable brandy.

Nothing could halt the march of this species, nothing could pre-
vent the resulting revolution and chaos of the Indian's culture,
nothing could save New France from its self -ordained fate. Ignorant
of these things, the coureur de bois left his bones unburied, un-
hallowed, and unmarked beside his endless trail, his name un-
recorded, his work soon forgotten by the empires, kings, merchants,
and millionaires who battened on it.

A few of these jungle creatures are remembered vaguely for ex-
ploits superhuman and almost unbelievable— not least the merry
partnership of Groseilliers and Radisson.

To their fellows M^dard Chouart, Sieur des Groseilliers, and his
brother-in-law, Pierre Esprit Radisson, were merely a pair of woods-
men, undistinguished except for their courage, their avarice, and
their disregard of the King's rules— reckless rogues but perhaps use-
ful to the government at Quebec when, in four successive years, at
the height of the Iroquois wars, no furs came down from the Lakes
country and New France obviously was dying. The partners, offi-
cially sponsored, set out from Montreal in 1654 to negotiate with
the western tribes a resumption of trade. This was a desperate mis-
sion but the ambassadors were well trained for it

Groseilliers had the gift of geography. Radisson had been cap-
tured by the Mohawks at the age of fifteen and had watched them
burn his companions. His odd French, translated into odder Eng-
lish, tells that story: "They burned a frenchwoman; they pulled out
her breasts and took a child out of her belly whch they broyled and
made the mother eat of it; so in short died . . . They bourned the
soales of my feet and leggs. A souldier run through my foot a
swoord red out of the fire and plucked several of my nails . . .
They cut off yor stones and the women play wth them."

Radisson escaped death by adoption into a Mohawk family. He
knew the jungle from boyhood. At times he hated it: "A strange

48 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

thing when victualls are wanting, worke whole nights and ckyes,
lye down on the bare ground and not allwayes that haps the breech
in the water, the feare in ye buttocks, to have the belly empty, the
weariness in the bones and drowsiness of ye body by the bad
weather that you are to suffer, having nothing to keep you from
such calamity." Occasionally this wanderer even thought of "the
chimney smoak" and home "when we can kiss our own wives or
kisse our neighbour's wife wth ease and delight.**

Such pangs were soon forgotten when the partners reached
Green Bay, on Lake Michigan. This was not unknown ground.
Nicolet had reached it twenty years before, and, striking south-
westward, almost reached the sources of the Mississippi. Groseilliers
at once suspected that these upper streams led by some unknown
river to Mexico. Radisson saw in the central plain of America, "so
beau tif nil and fruitful!," the home of a new nation: "What conquest
would that bee att litle or no cost, what laborinth of pleasure should
millions of people have, instead that millions complain of misery
& poverty!" Two rough coureurs de bois had given the world it's
first true vision of America's largest treasure.

Business came first. By threat, cajolery, and bribe Groseilliers
persuaded the Indians to take their furs to Montreal again. The
arrival of that cargo in 1656 ended the colony's immediate crisis
but the intrepid explorers received small thanks. Having saved New
France, they paid a tax of 25 per cent on their profits.

Three years later they went west again to explore the Indians'
report of a river leading to Hudson Bay. They paddled the length
of Lake Superior, discovered a new empire of fur, met Indians who
had never seen a white man, and "were Cesars, being nobody to
contradict us ... the Gods of the earth among these people."

Not for long. In the following winter they lived on dogs and
stewed tree bark, "our gutts became very straight . . , we mistook
ourselves very often, taking the living for the dead and ye dead
for the living." Next spring, guided by a strange nation called the
Crees, they moved north, how far they never knew, perhaps to the
rim of Hudson Bay. Whether they reached it or not, the ignorant
men conceived an inspiration which would bring England into the
north and transform the whole strategy of the American struggle.

Groseilliers knew little of the bay's location and size. He knew
only that Henry Hudson had entered it in 1610, had been turned
adrift in a boat by his mutinous crew, and perished with his young
son and eight sailors. The bay, therefore, must be navigable from
the Atlantic. Groseilliers's extraordinary sense of geography told
him that these waters must penetrate far southward, A ship, there-
fore, could take on a cargo of fur, direct from the world's richest

THE LOST BLUEPRINT 49

peltry, and carry it to France without the long journey, the cruel
portages, and the Iroquois ambush of the Montreal route. The
American economy would be revolutionized.

The partners returned to Montreal, their canoes heavy with pelts
(passing on the Ottawa the unburied bodies of Dollard and his
companions of the Long Sault), and vainly offered their plan to
the government. No one took it seriously. Governor Argenson was
interested only in the King's profits and his own. The discoverers of
the far West were rewarded for their labor with taxes and fines
for illegal trading, 24,000 livres in all, or 40 per cent of their selling
price. Of the grafting Governor, Radisson sourly records: "The
Bougre did grease his Chopps."

He had cheated the wrong men. Groseilliers and Radisson sailed
angrily for France to seek Louis's support in their mission to Hud-
son Bay. Dismissed as lunatics, they appeared in London shortly
after the second Charles had entered it as king, Charles, for all his
idleness, had more sense than Louis. He entertained the Canadians
as his personal guests at Oxford and Windsor, listened with growing
excitement to their tales, and interested his rich friends in their
plans.

In June, 1668, the Eaglet, bearing Radisson, and the Nonsuch,
with Groseilliers, sailed from Gravesend for the bay. The Eaglet
was turned back by storm but Groseilliers's ship reached the south-
eastern shore of James Bay. The flag of England was raised to claim
the whole tributary drainage basin, an indeterminate region stretch-
ing to the Rockies.

New France was now pinched in a continental nutcracker as yet
dimly seen. To the south stood the expanding English colonies; to
the north Charles's newly organized Governor and Company of
Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's Bay. The bureau-
crats of Montreal and Paris had overtaxed and then ignored two
humble coureurs de bois. They must pay the penalty in the coin
of empire.

So lay the new lines of American geography and imperial pres-
sure when Talon began to rebuild the Canadian colony. He soon
received heady news from the woodsmen who followed and ex-
tended the trail of Groseilliers and Radisson and from Jesuits who
had found in the West a limitless preserve of pagan souls ready
for salvation.

America expanded every day. New rivers, unseen but reliably
reported, were hastily drawn on the maps in Quebec and Paris.
The Jesuit explorers concluded that Hudson Bay opened into the
long-sought Northwest Passage. A magic word, "Mississippi," had
entered the American lexicon. Clearly the great central river,as yet

50 THE STRUGGLE FOE THE BOEDER

a rumor only, must run into the Vermilion Sea of California (which
was now recognized as an island), Chaniplain's western sea, the
mighty inland lake emptying into the Pacific, was only twenty days"
march from Lake Superior, and would turn into nothing more than
Lake Winnipeg.

All this, vague and contradictory as it was, quickly turned the
cool head of the Intendant Revising his maps, dashing off his let-
ters to Colbert, he prepared his seizure of the West. By the Missis-
sippi he could outflank the Spaniards on the Pacific and doubtless
snatch a share of Mexico's golden loot. From Hudson Bay the
Northwest Passage might lead France to the edge of China and the
Eastern spice islands.

Talon's wild surmise had no boundaries, but the trained bureau-
crat was not a man to satisfy himself with dreaming. The Missis-
sippi must be followed to its mouth, the English pushed out of the
bay, and France's title nailed down on everything in sight or
beyond it.

There was no time to waste, The English colonies had begun to
show a disturbing instinct of expansion, they had lately cbnquered
the Dutch colony of New Netherland on the Hudson, they were
pushing at their steady tortoise pace toward the St. Lawrence, they
held Acadia and presently might trickle through the Appalachians.
Anyway, outright war with England could not be far off. King
Louis had alarmed his European neighbors and they were coalesc-
ing against him.

So Talon, after poring over the latest maps, placed his finger on
Sault Ste. Marie where the foaming St. Mary's River joined Su-
perior and Huron. This point, as he rightly guessed, was the nexus
of the West and lay, as he wrongly informed Louis, only 3,750 miles
from 'Tartary, China and Japan,"

On June 4? 1671, by Talon's orders, the most formidable assembly
ever seen in the American hinterland convened at the Jesuit mission
of Ste, Marie to proclaim the future of the continent. Delegates of
seventeen western tribes, in ceremonial furs, feathers, buckskin or
nakedness, mixed with the black-robed figures of the church and
the silken representatives of the French King. The solemn Indian
signatures, drawn in shape of beaver, otter, sturgeon or deer, ac-
cepted without understanding the King's claim to the Great Lakes
and "all other Countries, rivers, lakes and tributaries contiguous
and adjacent there unto, as well discovered as to be discovered,
which are bounded on one side by the Northern and Western Seas
and on the other by the South Sea, including all its length and
breadth."

THE LOST BLUEPRINT 51

Louis thereby took possession of America, known and unknown.
Its ancient owners had given their full consent and transferred the
title deeds. The English were perpetually compressed on the At-
lantic, the Spaniards within an unmapped strip somewhere north
of Mexico. But the Indian givers in fact had surrendered nothing,
had merely enjoyed a day of ceremony and feasting. The English
and Spaniards had not signed the surrender and would pay no
more attention to it than did the signers.

Such was the gaudy -gesture of Sault Ste. Marie, the impressive
posture of a king who would never see America, the heroic gestic-
ulation of a heroic nation which lacked the power to enforce its
boast.

The echoes of that occasion, the clamor of French cheers and
Indian war whoops, the musket fire at the crossroads of the conti-
nent, did not reach New England. The farmer, fisherman, and
embryonic American businessman had never heard of Ste. Marie
and cared nothing for Louis, his church or his empire of paper.
Let the Indians paint their signatures, let the Jesuits raise their giant
cross with its royal fleur-de-lis beside the rushing river, let the
Sieur de St. Lusson, "Commissioner subdelegate of My Lord the
Intendant of New France," in plumed hat, curled wig and lace
ruffles, shout Louis's claims "in a louid voice, with public outcry,"
and raise a sod three times on sword point in symbol of this land's
royal ownership, let the feathered tribesmen exhale their approval
with "reverent hissing," let Father Allouez announce to this hushed
conventicle that Louis was "more terrible than thunder," that "the
earth trembles, the air and sea are set on fire by the discharge of
his cannon'-let France assert in empty word and strident flourish
a claim that only arms could make good. Within three months the
English would breach the Appalachian dam as they had already
breached the ice floes of the bay. They would pour into Louis's
empire, knowing no law but their own, heeding no signature of
Frenchman, no picture writing of Indian or writ of French king,
inscribing their own clumsy caveat with ax, plow, and musket.

Who among the colonies of New England, who in that French
audience beside the river of St. Mary could guess that its waters
would bound the two unborn nations of America?

Talon had staked the royal claim at the nerve center of the con-
tinent. Colbert had negotiated a return of Acadia to France. The
north, however, remained in English hands.

Talon moved to the bay during the summer of the Sault Ste.
Marie masquerade. His agents, Paul Denis, Sieur de Saint-Simon,
the hardy Jesuit Father Albanel, and a half dozen Frenchmen,

52 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

ascended the Saguenay out of the St. Lawrence, reached the Rupert
River, and by a route almost impossible to Indians reached James
Bay in the following June.

King Charles's men-of-all-work, Groseilliers and Radisson, were
still there to assert his rights and gather his furs. The French told
them in a courteous fashion that the title of King Louis was prior
and sovereign, After an exchange of compliments with the two
shifty partners, the French discreetly withdrew, leaving the legal
ownership of the north as doubtful as ever. Legal ownership mat-
tered little. The practical fact was that the English held the bay,
entered and left it as they pleased by ship, took its unequaled pelts
to England, and had broken the French fur monopoly forever,

Talon's gestures had extended his original blueprint west and
north he knew not how far, but it was far enough. There remained
the south and the Mississippi, that easy route to California. It must
be explored. He tried to hire a moody young explorer, Rene Rob-
ert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, now brooding at his seigneury of
La Chine, west of Montreal. La Salle was too busy with his own
private visions of the West to work for the Intendant Louis Jolliet,
a seasoned fur trader, and the sickly Jesuit, Father Jacques Mar-
quette, were appointed instead. La Salle's epic and tragedy had
been postponed.

Jolliet and Marquette prepared to embark on the great river and
complete the new blueprint. Its draughtsman, however, was worn
out by his labors, his quarrels with governor and bishop, his impos-
sible dream. Talon set sail for France in November, 1672, broken
and sick.

He looked back from his ship on a Quebec rebuilt to his pattern,
a colony now numbering 7,000 Christian souls, a spiderweb of fur
posts, missions, canoe routes, and portages stretched halfway across
America.

All Talon's work was stretched too thin, was likely to break at
the first blow and New France with it

Those facts were hidden from the Intendant, soon happily in-
stalled as First Valet of Louis's wardrobe. Hidden also from Louis.
The dazzling and dazzled Sun King found no more time for Canada,
a distant fragment of his imperial design, for he had just launched
his war with Holland and was preparing for the engorgement of
Europe.

There now waited in the royal anteroom an unemployed soldier-
impatient, arrogant, and poor. He must save Canada and Talon's
blueprint, as best he might, singlehanded. Louis de Buade, Comte
de Frontenac, asked no fairer chance.

The Eagle

[1672-1685]

THE ERRATIC TIDES OF THE THIRTY YEARS* WAR HAD LONG CAR-
ried back and forth across Europe in ceaseless motion a
morsel of living flotsam, unnoted and unsmkable. When at
last it was swept across the Atlantic and lodged in the most un-
likely place it remained a gritty and dangerous speck of friction
on the shifting boundary of America. For twenty-six years, with
one brief interval, Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac et Palluau,
of himself transformed that boundary, the life, tempo and power
balance of the continent, his tools being war, massacre, diplomacy,
bluff, stage acting, and genius.

His arrival in Canada as governor, on September 12, 1672, caused
no stir in the English colonies. Doubtless one of the last to hear
of him would be an illiterate young ship's carpenter, named William
Phips, twenty-sixth child of a poor Kennebec River woman. He was
now working as an apprentice in Boston, learning to read and
write in his spare time and planning to marry a well-born widow,
to whom he had recklessly promised "a fair brick house" and a
husband in command of a king's ship.

Both promises seemed unlikely to be redeemed. It was improb-
able that Phips and Frontenac— so much alike in ambition, arro-
gance and courage, so unlike in everything else, the New England
shipwright and the courtly French soldier— would confront each
other, as the agents of two imperial powers and the rival architects
of the ultimate frontier, at Quebec. Yet so, on this continent of the
impossible, it would turn out.

Frontenac was the older and larger man. At fifteen years of age
he had marched with the armies of France in the Low Countries,
son of a family as distinguished as it was poor. At twenty-six he

53

54 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

was a brigadier general, wearing with a swagger the scars of many
honorable wounds.

Two years later, with his customary violence, he fell in love with
Anne de La Grange-Trianon, than sixteen, a famous beauty at King
Louis's court, As her father objected to the match, the couple
eloped. The father was reconciled to the bridegroom. The bride
soon tired of him.

This was not surprising, for Frontenac proved a hard man to live
with, as America would find— vain, domineering, splenetic, "his
dress always of patterns invented by himself" and "paraded like a
child," while "all who wished to gain his good graces were obliged
to admire his horses, which were very indifferent," according to
that vivid diarist, Mademoiselle de Montpensier.

Small wonder, then, that the separation of bride and bridegroom
was swift and so bitter than when he later approached her at a
friend's house she fell into a fainting spell and a priest hurriedly
brought "holy water to exorcise her."

After fighting a forlorn hope against the Turks in Crete— the first
of many— Frontenac, in his fifty-third year, had nothing but a roll-
ing name, a reputation for bravery and bravura, a wife who refused
to live with him, a small income, and massive debts. The career of
the unemployed veteran and bankrupt, this hero of "excellent parts,
living much in society and completely ruined/* appeared to be at
an end.

Why Louis chose such a man to govern Canada is unknown.
The Due de Saint-Simon concluded that Frontenac "found it hard
to bear the imperious temper of his wife; and he was given the
government of Canada to deliver him from her and afford him
some means of living." More scandalous gossips held that Madame
de Montespan had shown her favor to him, that he had accidentally
dropped a love letter to her out of his pocket and the King, on
reading it, had packed a suspected rival off to the wilds in a fit of
jealousy.

So wagged the loose tongues of Paris as Frontenac set out for
Canada and his wife sat for her portrait as Minerva, with plumed
helmet, glistening shield, and striking display of bosom. She pres-
ently retired into genteel poverty as the companion of the lovely
Mademoiselle d'Outrelaise, the pair known as Les Divines, who
"demanded incense like goddesses, and it was lavished on them all
their lives. "

Though man and wife were to be forever parted, the tie between
Frontenac and his goddess somehow held to the end. She bore
him a son, killed early in war or duel. She promoted his interests

THE EAGLE

55

at court, where he was always in trouble. She remained his only
anchor in Europe, the custodian of his split nature's civilized half,
as Canada held the larger barbarous half.

Louis doubtless felt well rid of an uncomfortable hanger-on.
Frontenac, a seasoned soldier, could serve well enough against the
impotent English colonists and, as something of a savage himself,
should get on with the Indians. It was an age of such ignorant
adventurers, the age of the Three Musketeers, the original cloak-
and-dagger age in which, for example, the Due d'Epernon had
lately punched the Archbishop of Bordeaux in the belly, remarking,
without any sense of satire: "If it were not for the respect I bear
your office Yd stretch you out on the pavement.3* In such an age
Frontenac would do.

The face of the man who strode up the narrow streets of Quebec
in the brisk autumn weather is long forgotten. An imaginary mask
constructed by modern painters and sculptors-the flowing curls,
pointed mustaches, and Olympian scowl— is as good an integument
as any for a character which makes its own image in history. Against
the gray walls of the chateau and the black rock he strutted in his
laces, ribbons, and feathers like a gorgeous tropical bird straying
by mistake among the drab Canada geese. If the plumage seemed
that of the parrot, an eagle inhabited it.

Frontenac found his true mate in the virginal stuff of the Ca-
nadian wilderness. That second marriage was indissoluble. The
wilderness possessed him utterly, as he possessed it.

Quebec, he announced in his first letter to Louis, "could not be
better situated as the future capital of a great empire." Already he
had seen Talon's dream. "The colonies of foreign nations," he
wrote, "are trembling with fright. . . . The measure we have taken
to confine them within narrow limits ... do not permit them to
extend themselves, except at the peril of having war declared
against them as usurpers; and this, in fact, is what they seem
greatly to fear."

Some of the English may have held such fears. Not men like

Phips.

The dimensions of Canada fitted the stature of its governor.
Hedged in too long by the battlefields and salons of Europe, he
found the elbow room he needed. At once the tired soldier, past
middle age, the unsuccessful courtier, the ruined spendthrift, seemed
to renew his youth in a passionate love affair with a continent.

His first act was to carry through Talon's plan of exploration on
the Mississippi. In the summer of 1673 Louis Jolliet, a Canadian
churchman turned woodsman, and Jacques Marquette, an ascetic

56 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

and dying Jesuit, were crossing the portage south of Lake Michigan
and drifting with five votjageurs down the great central river.

It was easy going. The Indians stuffed the visitors with feasts of
buffalo and corn, The country around, with its lush vegetation and
teeming game, was the most fertile they had ever seen. Some seven
hundred miles from the river mouth, they turned back in fear of
capture by the Spaniards and convinced that the Mississippi led
not to California but to the Gulf of Mexico. The largest and most
dangerous of all Canada's adventures was beginning.

Jolliet hurried back to Quebec with the news but lost all his
papers in an overturned boat a few miles from home. The brave
Marquette died soon afterward and was buried on the east shore of
Lake Michigan. There his bones were soon disinterred by friendly
Indians, reverently washed and carried in a birchbark coffin for
reburial at the mission of St. Ignace.

While his explorers were descending the Mississippi, Frontenac
had remained restive in Quebec. This man knew only war and
would have it. But how? King Charles in London was the obliging
pensioner of King Louis in Paris. The Iroquois were quiet tem-
porarily under de Tracy's harsh lesson. Still, there was always the
chance of agreeable hazard upriver. Frontenac had gazed on the
St. Lawrence and, like all men before him, could not rest until he
had followed it to the westward.

He summoned the Iroquois to meet him, swept up the river in a
fleet of canoes and two painted barges, camped at Cataraqui near
the eastern end of Lake Ontario, and staged his first theatrical per-
formance. In his tent, as in a throne room, he received the old
enemies with a combination of firmness, friendliness, and rodomon-
tade which they instantly understood. Surrounded by his little
bodyguard (nearly all the soldiers in his colony) and dressed in
his finest court silks and gold lace, he delivered purple passages of
oratory on the power of his king, with promises of royal protection
for the Indians and strong hints of a more disagreeable alternative.
He made presents to the Indian women, dandled their babies on
his knee, and adopted eight Iroquois children as his own. This
purple passenger was the kind of man the Iroquois liked and
feared. The legend of the great Onontio, carried by the moccasin
telegraph, quickly penetrated the whole interior,

Frontenac, the soldier, did not rely on theatricals. His camp fol-
lowers quickly built a fort at Cataraqui, the present site of Kingston.
It was given Frontenac's name and placed under the seigneurial
control of La Salle, whose look of melancholy and brooding power
had impressed the Governor at their first meeting. Thus was formed

THE EAGLE 57

the strange and tragic partnership intended to profit both partners
in the fur trade and destined to produce wider results in the
politics of America and Europe.

The Iroquois had been flattered and cowed and the fur route
defended by the new fort, but at Quebec everything went wrong.

Ruling alone, without bishop or intendant to interfere, Fron-
tenac behaved like a king. He immediately re-created the antique
fiction of three estates of the realm: the Jesuit clergy; a noblesse of
military officers, together with a half dozen geniilshommes; the
commonality of merchants and citizens. This mockery of a states-
general, long suspended in France, met with all the pomp that the
creator could contrive, with solemn oaths of allegiance and many
rousing speeches. Louis was not impressed. As soon as he heard
of these arrangements he abolished them. There must be no organ-
ized assembly which might challenge the King's power. What could
have been the seed of popular government in Canada, with incal-
culable effects, was never allowed to sprout.

Frontenac received this first royal rebuke humbly. Others, more
serious, were not long delayed.

Like Talon, Frontenac hated the Jesuits as spies and meddlers,
By undermining him, they undermined the King's rule and even
had the audacity to preach against the legal brandy trade. Quebec
was split in two parties, the friends of the Governor and his ene-
mies. The opposition party, led by the Jesuits, was composed of
the established merchants and fur traders, who resented the new
rivals supported by Frontenac, for his own profit as his enemies
alleged.

Most of them he treated with contempt. Those who were worthy
of his chastisement soon felt it. The eagle's talons reached far,
fastening themselves first on the subgovernor of Montreal, an
officer named Perrot. That earnest fur grafter watered brandy
"with his own hands" for sale to the Indians and "bartered with
one of them his hat, sword, coat, ribbons, shoes and stockings, and
boasted that he had made thirty pistoles by the bargain, while the
Indian walked about town equipped as Governor." Frontenac
ordered Perrot locked up in Quebec. From his barred window the
prisoner could observe the body of one of his assistant grafters
swinging from a gibbet. Though the chastened Perrot was released
ten months later, as one of Colbert's personal friends, his example
was not forgotten.

Three years of feud and furious transatlantic correspondence
convinced Louis that Frontenac could not be trusted to govern
alone. The inflexible Bishop Laval, after an absence in France, was

58 THE STKUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

sent to Quebec with a new intendant, Jacques Duchesneau, to
watch the Governor. They only deepened the quarrel

The Bishop opposed Frontenac's policy of western expansion,
as he had opposed it in Talon's time, because the fur trade cor-
rupted the Indians. The Intendant opposed it because it cost too
much and sapped the agriculture of the colony.

Despite Colbert's patient admonitions, the government was riven
and could not be united. It argued with solemn comedy about
precedent in church services and public ceremony. It wrangled
for weeks without deciding who should preside over the Council,
all its business suspended. Frontenac banished three of Ms local
enemies to their country houses. He is said to have beaten Duches-
neau's young son and torn the sleeve from his jacket. The terrified
Intendant barricaded himself in his home. The Governor's only
useful work was the construction of a new chateau fit for his
rank.

This clash of individuals—the strutting Governor, the holy but
cast-iron Bishop, and the fussing, timid Intendant—represented
superficially the organic schism which had always divided Canada,
the contest between a compact colony, as conceived by Colbert,
and the imperial expansion launched by Talon.

The Intendant, interested in money, and the Bishop, concerned
only with Indian souls, seemed to overcome the Governor. As the
supporter of the fur trade, Frontenac was embarrassed by its rising
cost of transportation over ever-widening distances and by a sud-
den surplus of pelts when the fashions of Paris decreed a smaller
felt hat. Furs were burned prodigally to keep prices up, by an
economic theory still popular three hundred years later. Only 25
canoes, carrying three men each, were licensed to trade in the
interior. Under the Bishop's prodding, the sale of brandy was for-
bidden.

The leading citizens met in the "Brandy Parliament" of 1678 and
voted 15 to 5 against this prohibition, since it would turn the In-
dians* business to the English, to cheap West Indies rum, and to
the greater evil of heresy.

In any case, prohibition of furs and brandy was impossible. Only
seventy-five traders were licensed, yet poor Duchesneau estimated
the illegal coureurs de bois at more than five hundred. Nearly
everybody, from the Governor down, was doing business in furs,
directly or through secret agents, and often smuggling contraband
into New York. Besides, the English, having no regard for fair trade,
outbid the French, paid the Indians more in cheaply made goods,
offered a better kettle of copper and a coarse cloth, dyed red or

THE EAGLE 59

blue, which no Indian could resist and no French weaver could
imitate.

For six years Louis heard nothing from Quebec but Frontenac's
charge that Bishop, Jesuits, and Intendant were conspiring against
the King, the Bishop's countercharge that Frontenac's trade and
brandy ruined the King's Indian subjects, and the Intendant's whin-
ing insinuation that Frontenac was grafting in partnership with the
outlaw coureurs de bois.

Louis's patience ran out. In 1681 he abruptly dismissed the Gov-
ernor and the Intendant together. Frontenac returned to France in
disgrace. His last act was to record in the official register the fact
that his rank was higher than Duchesneau's— small comfort to the
ruined soldier, old and penniless, who must haunt the outskirts of
the court until he died.

Paris and Quebec seemed to be the center of events. Actually
they stood on the perimeter. The center had moved west to the
Lakes country and that fact of itself proclaimed the victory of
Frontenac's policy, now in full motion, even while its author mold-
ered on the fringes of society.

The recall of Frontenac came at the worst possible time for
Canada. The Iroquois had recovered from de Tracy's lesson and
already were attacking the Illinois and Miami nations, Canada's
friends, around Michigan. This minor campaign, starting in 1680,
was the true beginning of open continental war between England
and France, nine years later.

As usual, the antagonists operated through distant agents. The
English had the Iroquois to fight for them. France now rediscovered
its bland and treacherous tools, Radisson and Groseilliers. They had
tired of high life as Hudson's Bay Company employees in London,
had grown dissatisfied with King Charles's "gold Chaine and Med-
dal" and pensions of £100 a year. So they fled to Paris about the
time Frontenac reached it. Their treachery was overlooked because
Louis could use them.

In his service they sailed to Hudson Bay again and, by stealth
and diplomacy, seized the company's fort, its governor and furs.
This rich booty they carried to Quebec. Somewhere in the course of
their obscure expedition Groseilliers died. Radisson soon returned
to the English, who were glad to have him, regardless of his crimes.

He earned his pay by quietly recapturing for England the fort
he had lately captured for France, So long as there was money and
danger in it, he would gladly work for anyone and in his own
specialty he was an expert without peer. But after his unequaled life
which, with Groseilliers's leadership, had changed the face and

(3Q THE STRUGGLE FOB THE BOBDEB

prospects of America, his end was bitterness and anticlimax. He
died in England, with an English wife and children, destitute except
for his pension. .

The future of the bay, a far-off incident in the mam contest, must
await even more improbable adventures. France's energies were
concentrated in the heart of the continent.

On Frontenac's instructions his agents, La Salle, Daniel Grey-
solon, Sieur Dulhut, king of the coureurs de bois, Nicholas Parrot,
and other men of the same hardy breed, were making peace be-
tween the restless western tribes and, by blandishment, presents,
threats and sheer nerve, welding them into a confederacy, leagued
with Canada. Each of these men made his private epic but only
a fragment of their story was appropriated and distorted, in wildest
travesty, by the ineffable Father Hennepin, whom Dulhut had res-
cued singlehanded from the terrible Sioux. Hennepin repaid his
rescuer with a book of sensational lies. Europe received a carica-
ture of the West and its discoverers.

That was of passing interest The fact vital to Canada and
dangerous to the English colonies was that the new confederacy,
often wavering, somehow held. Canada controlled the West. ^

Its title was now expanded by an unequaled feat of imagination-
the imagination o£ Frontenac's young, moody and visionary friend,
La Salle. He was ready to descend the Mississippi, as he hoped,
to the western sea. A mad project, it appeared to his neighbors
near Montreal. They called his seigneury La Chine, mocking his
attempt to reach China.

He built a ship on Lake Erie, the first to ply the waters above
Niagara, took it to Lake Michigan and filled it with furs. It dis-
appeared on the return voyage without trace. Unaware of this
ruinous accident, La Salle built a line of posts in the Illinois coun-
try and then, with his one-armed aide, the indomitable Henry
Tonty, and a score of Canadians, reached the mouth of the Missis-
sippi without mishap on Thursday, April 9, 1682. A great day for
France, the beginning of La Salle's tragedy.

He knew at last that the Mississippi did not lead to the Pacific.
Once again the water passage to China, first sought by Cartier and
Champlain, had faded into the mapless blank of the West. But
La Salle had glimpsed the Great Valley of inner America and
immediately named it Louisiana in the King's honor. It included
all the unknown drainage basin of the Mississippi, If others did not
understand its value, La Salle, a man of Champlain's far-ranging
geographic instinct, recognized it as America's most precious treas-
ure. This inland kingdom, unlike Canada, could feed itself, com-

C A N A D A

jCake
^] Michigan

(fulf of

• ••• LASALLE'S &QUTB FROM FORT NIAGARA

TO THE MOUTH OF THE MISSISSIPPI 1679-168*

British territory ffff Spanish Uerritory

62 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

plement the fur-trading St. Lawrence colony, and give France a
truly continental empire, including in due time the Spanish territory
and its gold.

Moreover, the line of transportation and prospective settlement,
from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico, now in fact
and no longer in theory fulfilled the grand Canadian strategy by
bounding the English colonies on three sides. They were left with
no egress but the Atlantic.

La Salle was too able a geopolitician, however, not to see at
once that if the little-known Ohio could lead the French eastward
toward the English it could also lead the English into Louisiana.
He quickly formed his plan to forestall this danger. Louisiana must
be made a French colony separate from Canada, given strong gov-
ernment under his hand, and protected by a fort at the Mississippi
mouth, corresponding to Quebec on the St. Lawrence.

La Salle could reckon military strategy. He could not reckon the
stupidity and corruption of a new Canadian governor who was
soon plundering his posts in the Illinois country and driving him
to France for redress.

Louis was not always mistaken. He saw the young explorer's
worth. La Salle was made governor of all Louisiana and authorized
to found a colony at the mouth of his river. His northern posts were
restored to him and occupied by Tonty.

In 1684 La Salle sailed from France with four ships and 400 men
to begin his settlement. His luck had run out. He nearly died of
fever in the West Indies. His expedition was disrupted. Half sick
(some said half crazy), he sailed into the Gulf of Mexico with
only 180 companions and missed the outlet of the river. His muti-
nous company compelled him to land at Matagorda Bay in the hope
that an inlet there might be a western branch of the Mississippi.
That mistake was discovered too late. The last ship had sailed
for France. Only forty-five men remained, many sick, all hungry
and rebellious. One slim chance was left. La Salle must attempt
an overland march to Canada.

He had not far to go. In January, 1687, his men murdered him
and left his naked body to rot somewhere in the Texas bush. A few
survivors reached Canada. None remembered where a titan of his
century lay unburied and unshriven at the age of forty-four. But La
Salle had seen the vision of the American interior and given its
Great Valley to France. Could his successors hold it? The condition
of Canada seemed to present a clear and negative answer,

Joseph Antoine Lefebvre de La Barre, Frontenac's successor and,
like him, an old soldier, reached Canada in 1682 to find most of

THE EAGLE 63

Quebec in ashes. Beyond the ruins of its recent conflagration sparks
more dangerous smoldered in the Iroquois country.

The new Governor settled down comfortably enough and made
deals with a group of fur merchants— rivals of the Frontenac group—
for a cut in their profits. Thrifty man, he also petitioned the King
for a raise in pay.

The old enemy had been released from the threat of Onontio, but
was not quite ready to attack the French direct. Instead, urged on
by the English, the Iroquois evidently planned to repeat their old
western strategy against the Illinois and other French allies of the
Lakes country.

La Barre could not understand the continental forces now in
flow, the stealthy creep of a few Indians, the swift, silent movement
of a few white men who, in the emptiness of America, could grasp
or lose territories larger than European states. At least he knew
that the fur trade was in danger and, more alarming, that his own
profits were at stake; for he and his partners had lately placed large
quantities of trade goods at Michilimacldnac, between Michigan
and Huron, straight in the probable path of the Iroquois.

So, for imperial and personal reasons, he resolved to crush the
foe before it could march. This resolve taken, he bristled with
gasconade. Louis was assured that his army of 1,200 men would
defeat 2,600 Indians and that "I will perish at their head or destroy
your enemies."

He did neither. At Montreal he met a delegation of Iroquois
chiefs, urged them not to attack the licensed French trade canoes
"without permission," and indicated that they might advantageously
seize any others— meaning, of course, the canoes of his trade rivals
and Frontenac's friends. (This instruction the Iroquois soon fol-
lowed rather too literally by appropriating two canoes of the Gov-
ernor's own organization, which he had neglected to license. )

When he asked the Iroquois timidly why they intended to attack
the Illinois a chief replied, in fine contempt, "because they deserve
to die." La Barre endured this humilitation without a word and
even promised to punish La Salle for arming the King's Indian
allies. The trained noses of the Iroquois never failed to smell weak-
ness. They surged into the Illinois territory.

Since they were thus engaged in the West, Canada gained a
short reprieve. La Barre used it to expand his private trade and to
smuggle his furs into New York.

These peculations were disguised, and Louis deceived, by osten-
tatious preparations for a march against the Iroquois. Boats of war
were built on Lake Ontario and used to carry the Governor's furs.

64 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BOBBER

Fort Frontenac was made the entrepot of his business. In the spring
of 1683 he seized La Salle's new fort of St. Louis as the western
outpost of his private empire, only to have a raiding party of
Senecas and Cayugas steal his canoes, goods, and traders because
they were supposed to be the property of La Salle and fair game
under the Governor's recent instructions.

This was too much. Now that his own fortunes were in peril,
La Barre decided to make good his threats. Setting out from Quebec
for Lake Ontario, he informed Louis again that it would be a
pleasure to die for His Majesty. "I cannot refuse to your country
of Canada and your faithful subjects to throw myself, with unequal
force, against the foe."

He had quite overlooked the real target. It was not the Iroquois,
it was the English. While the English had their hands full at home
and no intention of risking war if it could be avoided, they had
long since learned how to use the Iroquois as their shock troops, at
a safe distance. And now England had an agent who knew his
business.

Thomas Dongan, the able new governor of New York, was an
Irishman and a Catholic. He had spent some years in France and
knew both its language and its mind. His instructions from London
were to provoke no trouble with Canada, He therefore attempted
to head off La Barre's attack on the Iroquois by homemade
diplomacy.

His first step was to end a series of border quarrels between the
Iroquois outposts and the struggling colonies of Maryland and Vir-
ginia. To that end a peace conference was called at Albany. The
offending Oneidas, Onondagas, and Cayugas promised to cease
their raids and thereupon buried their hatchets in a ceremonial
hole outside the council house. Lord Howard, of Virginia, and the
delegate from Maryland contributed hatchets of their own. The
hole was filled and peace signed.

These disagreements satisfactorily settled, Dongan's diplomacy
moved into wider territory. The fatuous La Barre had lately ad-
vised him of the intended Canadian campaign (thus alerting the
Iroquois to their danger) and had implored the English not to arm
the enemy. Dongan saw his chance.

In a letter to Quebec he asserted England's sovereignty over all
the Iroquois nations and its ownership of all land south of the
Great Lakes— asserted, in fact, England's right to half the continent
at least. It was a bold gambit so early in the game, obviously too
bold to be enforced at present, but presaging the shape of the final
contest and even fixing the rough location of the future boundary.

THE EAGLE 65

The Iroquois, as always, played the English and French off
against each other. Though promised 800 English troops by Don-
gan, they refused to accept him as anything closer than their
<rbrother," whereas the Governor of Canada was still their "father,"
albeit a poor substitute for the great Onontio, now languishing in
Paris.

Dongan had much to learn about the native mind. La Barre had
more. He led a powerful expedition of 130 regular soldiers, 700
Canadians, and 200 Indians up the St. Lawrence to Fort Frontenac
and half his men fell sick with fever. His nerve and health there-
upon collapsed. The intended attack was abandoned, the Iroquois
politely asked to make peace. Their chiefs appeared, led by Big
Mouth, a statesman of other large measurements.

La Barre demanded from his armchair— he was too sick to stand-
that the Iroquois cease their raids on his western allies and make
reparation for their crimes. Big Mouth listened in silence, his eyes
on his pipe. He had seen through the Frenchman and his lieutenants
had soon discovered the real state of the fever-ridden garrison.
After a long pause the chief arose and, pacing up and down before
the Governor's armchair, began a classic of Indian eloquence:

"Onontio, when you left Quebec you must have thought that the
heat of the sun had burned the forests that make our country in-
accessible to the French, or that the lake had overflowed them so
that we could not escape from our villages. You must have thought
so, Onontio; and curiosity to see such a fire or such a flood must
have brought you to this place. Now your eyes are opened; for I
and my warriors have come to tell you that the Senecas, Cayugas,
Onondagas, Oneidas and ^/lohawks are alive . . . Listen, Onontio.
I am not asleep. My eyes are open; and by the sun that gives me
light I see a great captain at the head of a band of soldiers who
talks like a man in a dream. He says that he has come to smoke the
pipe of peace with the Onondagas; but I see that he came to
knock them in the head, if so many Frenchmen were not too weak
to fight. I see Onontio raving in a camp of sick men, whose lives
the Great Spirit has saved by smiting them with disease/*

To confirm this noble insult, Big Mouth flatly refused to offer any
reparations for the Iroquois' western raids and announced that "we
have the right to go whithersoever we please, to take with us
whomever we please and buy and sell of whomever we please."

La Barre swallowed the insult, signed the peace of actual defeat,
and limped back to Quebec. He had earned nothing but the con-
tempt of the Iroquois and his own allies. French power in America,
built on Indian alliances, was near collapse.

66 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

The news soon reached Paris in angry dispatches from Intendant
de Meulles. Louis acted promptly. The next ship brought his last
letter to the Governor. La Barre was dismissed because "your years
do not permit you to support the fatigues inseparable from your
office."

The grafter who had once been a soldier returned to France, if
not a sadder and wiser, at least a richer man. He left Canada ex-
posed to an Iroquois invasion, its allies disillusioned and restive,
its real enemy, in New York, quietly planning, by diplomacy, for
war.

In La Barre's place Louis had appointed Jacques Rene" de Brisay,
Marquis de Denonville, an aristocrat, a soldier and a pious church-
man, brave enough but not big enough for the job. He passed an
Atlantic voyage "in prayer and the reading of holy books'* and
reached Quebec to find conditions worse than he had feared.

The Iroquois still warred on the western tribes. The betrayed
French allies seemed likely to join their remorseless enemy. Dongan
was even sending traders into the French peltry of the upper Lakes.
The English in Hudson Bay monopolized the northern furs. New
Englanders freely battened on the Acadian fisheries and frequently
raided the Canadian coast.

As Denonville at once advised Louis, Canada must assert itself,
teach the Iroquois a final lesson, master the West or lose everything
to the English.

Dongan was equally disturbed. For all their weakness, the Cana-
dians were entrenched in the Illinois country, with forts on the
Mississippi and a plan to settle at its mouth. Talon's strategy of
encirclement was well advanced, despite La Barre's disasters.

Both Denonville and Dongan, chafing in their capitals, were re-
strained by the orders of their kings. Neither the weak James, newly
crowned in London, nor the strong Louis in Paris was ready for
more than diplomatic skirmishes. Besides, they were friends and
united by a hatred of the people. In their North American repre-
sentatives they had found two ingenious diplomats, well able to
string out the skirmishes indefinitely, short of an open rupture.

Letters from New York

[1695-1698]

f |"^HE NEW CANADIAN GOVERNOR QUICKLY GRASPED THE CONTINEN-

I tal strategy. He knew that the English were the real enemy

JL and he intended to subdue the Iroquois as their only effective
fighting arm. But he was not ready to move. Nor was Dongan.
These two wily men began a cat-and-mouse game with a ludicrous
correspondence between Quebec and New York.

Dongan welcomed Denonville to America in the French lan-
guage. Denonville replied as "A man may do who wishes to dis-
simulate and does not feel strong enough to get angry." One series
of letters to Paris begged his king for troops; another, to New York,
tried to divert Dongan with pleasantries. "I should reproach myself
all my life," Denonville assured his enemy, "if I should fail to render
to you all the civility and attention due to a person of so great
rank and merit."

The correspondence suddenly turned astringent when Dongan
learned that Denonville proposed to build a fort at Niagara and
protect Lake Erie. Using blunt English now, and his own curious
spelling, Dongan confessed that "I cannot beleev that a person
that has your reputation in the world ... be so ill advized by
some interested persons in your Governt. to make disturbances be-
tween our Masters subjects in those parts of the world for a little
pelttree."

Denonville set aside his piety to assure Dongan, with a cynical
lie, that he had no intention of fortifying Niagara. He added that
Dongan's rum was turning the Indians "into demons and their
lodges into the counterparts of Hell," To which Dongan replied
tartly that "Certainly our Rum doth as little hurt as your Brandy,
and, in the opinion of Christians, is much more wholesome."

67

68 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

This fagade of ink and paper could not disguise events now mov-
ing fast in the old cockpit of the West. Dongan quietly pushed his
traders farther into the French peltry and planned a treaty of trade
and military alliance with Canada's Indian friends, whose confidence
La Barre had destroyed. Denonville hurriedly ordered the ubiqui-
tous Dulhut to fortify the Strait of Detroit, as a cork in the bottle
of the upper Lakes. By a sudden inspiration he urged Louis to end
the entire conflict by a simple method. Let France purchase the
New York colony, seat of all his troubles.

Louis was not interested. The Governor next reported that "I
have a mind to go straight to Albany, storm their fort and burn
everything." As he lacked the resources to storm anyone, he con-
tinued to write futile warnings to Dongan.

The New Yorker had also received warnings from London to be
careful. He could find no support in the other colonies. His letters
to Denonville, therefore, resumed their old obsequious tenor, with
the promise of punishment for any Iroquois who "doe amisse to
any of your Government."

The promise was accompanied by a gift of oranges, "hearing that
they are a rarity in your partes." That peace offering failed to im-
press Denonville. "Monsieur," he retorted rather acidly, "I thank
you for your oranges. It is a great pity that they are all rotten."

Their condition symbolized the whole correspondence and the
state of the frontier between two peoples.

Louis was not ready to strike at the English but he reinforced
Denonville and ordered him to attack the Iroquois. The first blow
fell elsewhere, in the one place where no Englishman expected it—
the most daring, imaginative, and successful blow yet struck in
America.

While France and England remained at peace, Denonville assem-
bled eighty experienced woodsmen at Montreal in the spring of
1686 and instructed them to drive the English out of Hudson Bay.
It was an assignment impossible for any ordinary soldiers to execute,
perhaps not beyond the skill of the great Charles Le Moyne's sons,
the blond giant, Iberville, his brothers, Sainte-H61ene and Mari-
court, three musketeers straight out of the pages of Dumas.

Under the leadership of Chevalier de Troyes, they pushed secretly
up the Ottawa, labored by land, river and lake across the northern
watershed, paddled to the bay on the early summer freshet, and
at night, without warning, fell upon the sleeping English in Fort
Hayes. The three brothers climbed the palisades. Their comrades
broke down the gate with a battering rain. The English were cap-
tured, bloodless, in their nightshirts.

LETTERS FROM NEW YORK 69

Fifteen English were asleep at Fort Rupert when the Canadians
burst the walls, dropped grenades down the chimneys, shot five of
the garrison, including a woman, and then, for good measure,
swarmed upon an English ship nearby to capture it after a brief
scuffle with the bewildered governor of the Hudson's Bay Com-
pany posts.

The English in their nearby fort of Albany were forewarned and
determined to defend themselves. Nothing could stop the ravenous
brothers. They blew up the palisades with captured English cannon.
The garrison quickly raised a white flag. Honorable surrender was
sealed in Spanish wine and toasts all round to Louis and James.
Iberville drank deep, never guessing that he would return here not
long hence for another, more deadly toast.

If eighty of these incredible Canadians could flit silently across
a trackless waste and capture three forts in a short summer's outing,
London must recalculate the logistics of America.

The calculation appeared ridiculously lop-sided, Only 10,000
Canadians had undertaken to challenge 200,000 English. The
odds were 20 to 1. Such calculations ignored the quality of the
10,000.

A Canadian could leap across half a continent almost before an
English farmer could drop his plow handles and load a musket.
And the Canadians controlled most of the Indians, the major mili-
tary force now engaged.

The warriors of Louis's totalitarian state operated by one central
plan, under one man's direction, and, given a leader like Frontenac,
moved like a single machine. The English, with their queer notions
of liberty, seldom took orders from anybody, could hardly unite
even within one colony, and needed another century of costly ex-
perience to achieve a general union. They would defend their
narrow ground on the Atlantic. They could not strike beyond it.

The French hare thus continued to run leagues ahead of the
English tortoise and seemed to increase its speed with every passing
year, from the Gulf of Mexico to the arctic. The tortoise would
learn in time. It possessed not only a hard shell but an extra dimen-
sion which the hare would never attain— the sea power of England.
Slowly, inexorably, and fatally the English Navy could bottle up
Canada and starve it.

The statesmen of England and France— to whom all America was
at most a side issue in the wars of Europe— may have understood
these calculations, somewhat vaguely. Anyway, Louis wanted peace
for the time being and he usually controlled James by bribery.
Denonville and Dongan, therefore, were ordered to maintain the

70 THE STRUGGLE FOB THE BORDER

highly practical friendship of their masters. At the same time Louis
ordered Dongan to delay no longer the attack on the Iroquois.

In the period of official neutrality the succession of wars for
America, to last three generations, had begun. The Le Moynes had
opened it merrily in Hudson Bay. Denonville proposed to continue
it south of Lake Ontario. Dongan sat powerless in New York, able
only to write ingratiating letters to his rival. The words doubtless
stuck in his irascible Irish throat.

Other personages more illustrious were caught in these complex
crosscurrents, already converging in tidal wave. James was rapidly
losing the last Stuart throne of England. A prince of Orange, cun-
ning, sickly and invincible, was preparing to cross the Channel, at
the invitation of a desperate English nation, and sign a curious
document called a Bill of Rights, which would be imitated else-
where. Louis was driving Europe into coalition against him. The
Sun King's reign had passed its noon.

Figures so famous and so fully occupied at the center of events
found scant time to waste on the barbarous warfare of their colonies.
A few unknown men, as usual, were settling for themselves the
future of America, by impossible marches, night raids, conspiracies
in Indian lodges, Jesuit sermons and scalping parties, by birchbark,
paddle and portage, by diplomatic correspondence, gifts of oranges,
and toasts in Spanish wine.

In the summer of 1687— unaware of La Salle's assassination and
the loss of Canada's hold on the Gulf of Mexico— Denonville was
ready at last to use sharper weapons. Still blandly assuring Dongan
that he had no plan of war, the Canadian Governor secretly mobi-
lized his 1,600 French regulars and the Canadian militia. This army
of 2,000 reached Fort Frontenac, where some half hundred Chris-
tian Iroquois, then being slowly tortured by the Indian allies of
New France, were treacherously seized and sent to serve as slaves
in Louis's galleys.

Now, to his infinite relief, Denonville was joined by 200 French
coureurs de bois and 400 Indians of the upper Lakes—proof that
Dulhut and the other Canadian agents had managed to hold their
tottering western confederacy.

The augmented expedition of 3,000, mightiest ever assembled in
America, moved through stifling heat— the commander in his shirt
sleeves— against the Senecas south of Lake Ontario and directly
into a murderous ambush. The brave old French General bran-
dished his sword, rallied his panic-stricken troops and charged.
Realizing that they had ambushed only the advance guard of a vast
army, the Senecas fled. The forty corpses left behind were quickly
mutilated by Denonville's Christian allies. He was forced to watch

LETTERS FROM NEW YORK 71

them, as he wrote in horror to Paris, "cut the dead bodies into
quarters like butcher's meat, to put into their kettles, and opened
most of them while still warm to drink the blood."

The enemy had disappeared after setting fire to their town.
Denonville's men systematically burned the stores of grain and cut
down the growing crops. The victors sickened on feasts of fresh
corn and pork but their work of destruction was soon complete and
the Iroquois nowhere to be found. The army moved back to Lake
Ontario. Denonville paused briefly to carry out his original plan,
about which he had lied to Dongan. A fort was built below Niagara
to bar the English from Lake Erie.

What had he accomplished in a campaign huge by American
experience? He had re-established Canada's lost credit with the
western tribes. He had punished the Iroquois and scared the Eng-
lish. It was a temporary gain. The Senecas rebuilt their villages and
borrowed food from their confederates. They had lost less than a
hundred dead. The remainder, as dangerous as ever and angrier,
patiently plotted their revenge. It was to be reaped manyfold two
years hence.

On hearing of the Iroquois' defeat, Dongan could contain himself
no longer. If James would not protect his Indian subjects, New York
must do it alone. The Iroquois chiefs were summoned to Albany
and told that they had suffered their just deserts for disobeying
Dongan's orders and doing business with the French. Hereafter
they must bring all their furs to the English, who would support
them.

Dongan accused Denonville of invading "the King my Master's
territorys in a hostill manner" and asserted the title of England over
the whole Iroquois region. The illegal French claims, he said, were
based on the travels of the Jesuits, and he added a final taunt;
"The King of China never goes anywhere without two Jesuits with
him. I wonder you make not the like pretence to that Kingdome.
. . . Your reason is that some rivers or rivolettes of this country
run out into the great river of Canada. O just God! What a new
f arr-fetched and unheard-of pretence is this for a title to a country.
The French King may have as good a pretence to all those Countrys
that drink claret and Brandy."

King James at last was plucking up his courage, too late to save
his crown but perhaps in time to save his colonies. He ordered
Dongan to fight the French if they attacked again. With this royal
support, Dongan demanded that Denonville return his Iroquois
prisoners and a few English traders still in his hands and demolish
the new fort at Niagara, English territory.

Denonville had weakened, on instructions from Louis, who

72 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

needed an accommodation with James. The Governor was also de-
pressed by the latest news from London. New York, New Jersey, and
New England had been placed under a single government, headed
by Sir Edmond Andros, and Dongan recalled, with honor and rank
of major general. Andros, as Denonville warned Louis, was "more
dangerous by his suppleness and smoothness than the other was by
violence." Also, Andros carried a commission which formally granted
him control of all land from the English colonies to the Pacific—
the boundaries unfixed but expandable at pleasure.

Andros was not the immediate enemy. Disease suddenly deso-
lated the garrisons at Niagara and Frontenac. The Iroquois began
to prowl again. West of Three Rivers the Canadian settlers dared
not venture outside their palisades. No crops were sown. Fur trade
ceased for two years. The bankrupt Intendant, de Meulles, was
paying his bills in playing cards, thriftily cut into quarters, signed
and officially called money.

After one Pyrrhic victory Canada was destitute. "We should suc-
cumb/' Denonville reported, "if our cause were not the cause of
God."

His nerves were shattered by diplomacy, calamity, and age. To
reduce his losses he obeyed Andres's command and razed Fort
Niagara.

The Iroquois understood this gesture of desperation. They pressed
their advantage and clamored for the return of their captured
brothers, some of them in Louis's galleys.

Denonville managed one last spasm of courage. He proposed a
double attack on the Iroquois by Lake Ontario and the old Riche-
lieu route, but Louis was too engaged in Europe for distant ad-
ventures. Denonville undertook to conciliate the Iroquois, Meeting
Big Mouth at Montreal, he offered to surrender the prisoners.

The oily Indian politician pretended to believe the Governor. He
and his lieutenants retired to their villages for consultation. Their
reply came on the night of August 4, 1689.

A blinding hailstorm hid 1,500 warriors as they surrounded the
sleeping village of La Chine, west of Montreal. They worked fast.
By morning the town had been burned to the ground, 200 inhabi-
tants butchered on the spot and a hundred carried off for refined
torture. Denonville's courage had ebbed out. He refused to pursue
the butchers. His soldiers from Montreal, outraged by his orders,
stood helpless and watched their friends being carved and eaten
on the far shore of the St. Lawrence.

Canada was prostrate before the most terrible disaster it had yet
known. Worse news followed. James had fled England. His suc-
cessor, William, had formally declared war on France. The Cana-

LETTERS FROM NEW YORK 73

dians, faced by the full power of England under a fighting king,
were left alone to their fate.

No, not quite alone. Denonville had been dismissed. And Fron-
tenac in his seventieth year— with Louis's blessing and little else—
was on his way to Quebec. He would never see France or his re-
luctant goddess again.

"I send you back to Canada where I am sure that you will serve
me as well as you did before, and I ask nothing more of you,"
Louis had told the old Count, their old quarrel conveniently over-
looked in the new crisis.

It was asking a lot, in present circumstances probably more than
any man could deliver. But there was no alternative to Frontenac.
He had been a failure as a governor. His violence of peacetime
might well be his virtue as a soldier in war. He had paid for his
failures by seven years of futility, idleness, and poverty. Such ex-
perience might have broken a weaker man. It only hardened Fron-
tenac. Vindicated and forgiven, he returned to Quebec on October
15, 1689, with all his old arrogance but neither troops, money, nor
years to spare.

Quebec welcomed him as its savior. Torchlight parades, fireworks,
and orations warmed his wild heart. As nowhere else he was home
again in the wild land that fitted his own nature.

The word soon spread for a thousand miles by the moccasin
telegraph— Onontio was back. The Canadians and Indians knew
what that meant. The New Englanders knew little of their deadly
opponent but presently would find out more.

Whether Frontenac's counterpart, in New England, the ambi-
tious Phips, had even heard of his future antagonist by now, the
record does not show. Frontenac had been idle. Phips had busily
elbowed his way upward in his little world, had discovered a
sunken Spanish galleon in the West Indies, quelled his mutinous
crew with his own fists, and taken £16,000 as his share of the
treasure. He had been knighted by his grateful king.

After such experience, and with the self-esteem built of courage,
frontier ingenuity, ignorance and luck, Phips might well be re-
garded as the only figure in America comparable to Onontio— the
newly rich product of New England business, the amateur gentle-
man, ranged against the French aristocrat of noble birth, now more
than half a savage. The collision between these two, each repre-
senting forces larger than he could comprehend, was not far off.

Frontenac had come to Quebec with a daring military plan in
his pocket, as devised by Denonville, and in the hold of his ship had
brought thirteen bedizened Indian prisoners. They formed part of
that plan.

74 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

A thousand French troops and 600 Canadians were to move
down the Lake Champlain route, capture Albany, and descend the
Hudson to New York, there meeting two French ships of war. The
invaders would burn the wooden town of 200 houses. English
Catholics were to be spared, if they swore allegiance to Louis.
Protestants would pay ransoms and their lands would be granted in
feudal tenure to the French troops while they were banished to
New England and Pennsylvania. Then the adjacent New England
settlements would be razed and others, more distant, compelled
to pay perpetual indemnities to France.

Some eighteen thousand English would thus be ruined and dis-
persed. The Iroquois would be at the mercy of the French. The
fur business would be confined to the St. Lawrence. France would
possess the whole interior. The English would occupy a reduced
strip on the Atlantic coast and, at a suitable moment, would be
finally conquered and attached to the French Empire. Denonville's
plan, executed by Frontenac, proposed nothing less than the end
of English power and civilization in America.

Conceivably, though it was at best improbable, such a project,
for all its risks, could succeed if Louis did his part. Louis was too
busy with the larger projects of his new war in Europe. The French
men-of-war did not reach Acadia until mid-September when it was
too late to attempt a Canadian march southward. The great plan,
which might have changed the entire history of the continent by
smashing the English or, more likely, exhausting Canada, was
never launched.

Frontenac contrived another plan, less formidable, equally brutal.

But it must wait for the present. He hurried to Montreal to find
the terrified Denonville living in a state of siege, the ashes of La
Chine as the Iroquois had left them, the farmers afraid to till their
fields, the fur trade suspended.

What was worse, Denonville had just sent a party of soldiers to
blow up Fort Frontenac, named for its founder and always his pet.
The angry Governor dispatched messengers to cancel this order
but it was too late. The fort already lay in smoking ruins. France
had cut its own lifeline to the West. The Iroquois, as if to celebrate
Onontio's arrival, launched a new series of raids on the outlying
settlements.

The soldier's mind could not be distracted by these disasters on
the perimeter of the war. He was aiming at the center, the English
colonies. Until he could strike them down the Iroquois somehow
must be pacified by diplomacy. Frontenac produced his thirteen
Iroquois prisoners, captured years before by Denonville and long
chained in Louis's galleys.

LETTERS FROM NEW YORK 75

These bewildered warriors had been transformed, by the magic
of politics, from slaves to noblemen and now appeared about the
Chateau St. Louis clad in the silks, laces, and plumes of the French
court as bait for their fellow countrymen. Three of them were dis-
patched immediately to Onondaga with Frontenac's paternal mes-
sage of forgiveness: "The great Onontio, whom you all know, has
come back again. He does not blame you for what you have done,
for he looks upon you as foolish children and blames only the
English, who are the cause of your folly and have made you forget
your obedience to a father who has always loved and never de-
ceived you." If the Iroquois would repent they could have the re-
maining prisoners and Onontio's old friendship.

This first gambit was a failure. At the very moment when the
great chief Cut Nose, Frontenac's messenger, was advising the
Iroquois to accept such generous terms "if you wish to live," a
courier arrived from the upper Lakes.

He bore startling news— nine tribes of the interior had signed a
treaty with the Iroquois and the English, announcing that "Onontio
is drunk ... we wash our hands of all his actions; neither we nor
you must defile ourselves by listening to him."

If that treaty held, the grand strategy of Canada, carefully
nourished through eighty years of diplomacy and war, was shat-
tered. The Iroquois council hesitated no longer. Frontenac's offer
was rejected. Messengers sped to New York and New England to
promise that "we will fight with Onontio . . . but tell us no lies."
Another messenger informed Frontenac at Quebec that it would be
time enough to talk of peace when all the prisoners had been sur-
rendered. The Iroquois had no intention of making peace anyway.
They were planning, with the western tribes and the English, to
exterminate the French.

Frontenac made a last attempt at conciliation, but the second
emissary to Onondaga was brutally beaten and sent as a prisoner
to New York after two of his guides had been burned.

Frontenac might yet rebuild the broken alliance in the West, He
sent an embassy to Michilimackinac assuring the Indians there that
"the English have deceived and devoured your children, but I am
a good father who loves you." The western tribes listened sullenly
to promises that they doubted. They were inveigled at the eleventh
hour by a ghastly trick,

French messengers had captured an Iroquois hunter on their
westward journey and now urged the Hurons and Ottawas to kill
him. This treachery should turn all the Iroquois nations against
their new friends. The life of a single captive was a small price to
pay in a bargain so vital. As the Hurons wavered, a Jesuit mission-

76 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

ary, highly practical in his Christianity, urged them in God's name
to "put the Iroquois into the kettle."

This chance of free amusement was too good to be lost. The pris-
oner was tied to a stake and systematic torture begun. It proved
disappointing. The Iroquois failed to show a warrior's fortitude
and the disgusted torturers scalped and shot him.

His life had saved Canada's position in the West for the time
being. The western tribes, realizing that their new allies would not
forgive their crime, and persuaded by Frontenac's threats, promises
and rich presents, decided not to ratify the pact with the Iroquois.
As Frontenac well knew, it could be revived without notice. He held
the West by a single scalp. It was pause enough for his immediate
purpose. Now he could drive a three-pronged fork into the sluggish
body of New England.

In the first snows of winter, 1690, war parties were assembled at
Montreal, Three Rivers, and Quebec to lunge southward on snow-
shoes. Their plan was unknown to the English and, if known, would
not have been believed. Only madmen, French, or Indians would
attempt it.

The Montreal party of a hundred French and a hundred Indians
was headed by the brothers Le Moyne—Iberville, Sainte~H41£ne,
and Bienville, a trio which had no rivals in the art of jungle war,
knew no rules, and was restrained by no scruples. Dragging their
provisions on sledges, wallowing in the soft snow of a sudden
thaw, half drowned in the flooded swamps, they toiled up the
Richelieu, reaehed the Hudson, abandoned the impossible project
of attacking Albany, and in the first days of February descended
instead on Schenectady, the last outpost of New York.

The village held only eight militiamen, under the brave but in-
competent Lieutenant Talmage. Its affairs were in confusion after
a revolution in New York against William of Orange. Its gates hung
wide open, guarded by two imitation sentinels of snow. Its Dutch
inhabitants were asleep, comfortable in the knowledge that Canada
lay far away. Here was a temptation to massacre. The brothers Le
Moyne accepted it.

Silently the French and Indians passed through the stockade and
with the signal of a war whoop battered down the doors of the
houses. Sixty inhabitants, men, women and children, were efficiently
butchered in half an hour but thirty Mohawk warriors were spared
to show Frontenac's friendship for the Iroquois. A few Dutch
escaped to Albany on horseback to raise a general alarm.

When the pious Le Moynes withdrew, their hands red with Protes-
tant blood, they counted only two Canadian dead. But New York
had been alerted. It appealed to New England for aid in a joint

LETTERS FROM NEW YORK 77

attack on Canada. The English colonies seemed likely to unite
for once.

Frontenac's second war party snowshoed from Three Rivers in
January under Frangois Hertel, a grim man who might do much
with only fifty Canadians and Indians. He had learned his business
as a boy, in the hands of the Iroquois. One of his fingers had been
burned off in the bowl of a pipe, a thumb amputated by a toma-
hawk. This news he had concealed from his aged mother in a letter
written on birchbark. Hertel was still fearless, religious, and ruthless
in his forty-eighth year, an army in himself. For good reason
Canada called him the Hero. The English would call him other
names.

Three months of misery brought Hertel and his little band to
New Hampshire and the unsuspecting village of Salmon Falls. It
was defenseless and, like Schenectady, bewildered by the recent
uprising in Boston, which had confined Governor Andros in jail
and turned the affairs of the colony into chaos. The frontier gar-
risons were in mutiny. The fierce Abenakis, with French support,
had long ravaged the borders, lately had captured sixteen small
forts and massacred the whole town of Dover. The eastern English,
bungling, quarreling, and apparently incapable pf war, were in
straits as bad as the western French.

Hertel therefore found Salmon Falls asleep and ready for his ax.
The half hundred skilled butchers tomahawked thirty of the in-
habitants in their beds, captured fifty-four women and children,
burned the town and surrounding farms, and retreated as quickly
as they had come. A party of English militiamen hurried from Ports-
mouth and caught up to the raiders at the swollen Wooster River.
Herlel held a narrow bridge, singlehanded, sword in hand like
the Roman Horatius, until his followers had crossed. Then the
French faded into the woods. Hertel paid ofi his Indian braves with
a gift of English prisoners, who were tortured too fast for adequate
amusement.

The Hero was not finished yet. He hastened northward and in
the spring joined Frontenac's third war party from Quebec at the
English Fort Loyal, on Casco Bay (Portland). The joint French
force, and recruitments of local Indians, numbered nearly five
hundred men against hardly a hundred amateur soldiers in the fort,
under Captain Sylvanus Davis.

The French undertook a systematic siege, on the European
model, by trenches burrowed to the palisades. After some desultory
cannonading, Davis surrendered, on the sworn promise of quarter
for all his people. As they marched out the Indians fell upon them,
killing many and carrying off the rest. The French commanders ex-

78 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

plained that the English had earned this punishment because they
were in rebellion against their lawful king, James.

Three offensives of sudden massacre, on a scale and over dis-
tances never known in America before, had succeeded beyond
Frontenac's highest hopes. The captured Captain Davis complained
to him in Quebec but he repeated, with a straight face, his lieu-
tenants' explanation that the victims of his chastisement were all
rebels, that no harm would have befallen them if they had not
supported the usurper, William of Orange.

The far-flung victories of snowshoe, tomahawk, and treachery
had changed Canada from a beleaguered and tottering garrison
into the scourge of the New World. It was all the work of a single
man. Nevertheless, Frontenac, entertaining Davis hospitably in
broken English, broken promises, and good French wine, had mis-
calculated the English. Among other things he had ignored or
probably had never heard of Phips. Now it was that redoubtable
Bostonian's turn.

In New York a congress of the English colonies— faint foreshadow
of larger congresses to come— met to concert an attack on Canada,
as originally proposed by the wiser Iroquois. Large plans were made
on paper— 700 men to descend on Montreal by the Richelieu under
Fitz-John Winthrop, of Connecticut, a fleet to capture Acadia.

While the Richelieu expedition floundered and wrangled, Phips
assembled a little armada of seven ships, 280 sailors, and 500 drafted
militiamen. On May 11, 1690, he reached Port Royal. It promptly
surrendered.

The going so far had been easy; also profitable to the thrifty
Phips. He rifled the fort, sparing the inhabitants when they took an
oath of loyalty to King William, and personally seized all the money
of the French commander, Meneval, besides "six silver spoons, six
silver forks, one silver cup in the shape of a gondola, a pair of
pistols, three new wigs, a grey vest, four pairs of silk garters, two
dozen shirts, six vests of dimity, four night caps with lace edgeings,"
plus the pots, pans, and kitchen linen. This booty and sixty-two
prisoners accompanied him to Boston.

Governor Bradstreet, an honest man, ordered Phips to restore
the stolen goods. Phips gave up MenevaFs money and some of the
worn-out clothing. The remainder of the loot he kept for himself,
to add to his treasure of the Spanish Main. A man of practical mind
who evidently could be trusted with larger undertakings, now
under way.

Holding not only Port Royal but the other French posts of La
H£ve and Chebucto, the English were again in possession of Acadia,
their old stamping ground, and ready for an attack on Quebec.

LETTERS FROM NEW YORK 79

Despite the confusions of the recent rebellion, despite its bankrupt
treasury and the refusal of help from England, Massachusetts
burned with martial fire, also with Puritan religion. The inhabi-
tants of Boston were called together for a day of repentance and
prayer before descending on the papist idolaters.

Since battles, even Puritan battles, were not always won by
prayer, and since the frugal townspeople failed to subscribe suffi-
cient funds, the colonial government, against all its principles,
finally supplied the sinews of war by borrowing. Thus thirty-two
little vessels were collected and the necessary crews conscripted.
Phips, their commander, weighed anchor on the ninth of August,
dangerously late in the fighting season.

As the fleet sailed confidently toward the St. Lawrence, the over-
land expedition was falling to pieces from dissension, dysentery, and
smallpox on the shores of Lake Champlain.

Frontenac knew nothing of these events. He was occupied in a
renewal of his old feuds. Louis could not interfere with the indis-
pensable defender of Canada, so the Governor defied the Jesuits,
the unhappy Intendant Champigny, and the entire council, which
was compelled to wait upon him humbly at his erratic pleasure.
He had saved Canada, wounded the English, cowed the western
tribes by his victories, re-established the broken fur trade, and
brought Canada its most prosperous times. Who dared to question
the changing moods of the indispensable man?

He was rude or genial by turns and at all times impossible to his
colleagues. No matter, he got things done. Through the winter and
spring he had rebuilt the fortifications of Quebec in case the Eng-
lish should appear but when their sails were sighted in the river
he was at Montreal to meet the first western fur cargoes, to promise
his Indian allies the conquest of the Iroquois and then, brandishing
a tomahawk and whooping like a madman, to join in their dance
and their feast of two oxen, six dogs, and a barrel of prunes cooked
together. These festivities were interrupted by the news of Quebec's
peril. Frontenac hurried back to his fortress.

In the sparkling autumnal air of mid-October Phips beheld the
fleur-de-lis above the Governor's cMteau, high on the rock. He ex-
pected the French flag to be hauled down in easy surrender. Que-
bec would yield like Port Royal.

An English messenger was landed in the lower town, was blind-
folded and conducted by a bewildering route to the cMteau amid
crowds cheering and laughing in a game of blind man's buff. He
found Frontenac ready for him. The reception had been arranged by
a master of stage direction in a scene of crude melodrama, the whole
preposterous little court assembled in its bravest finery, bewigged,

80 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

beribboned and powdered, the old eagle deceptive in parrot's
plumage.

A translator read Phips's letter aloud in French to Frontenac,
who listened with wooden face. The former ship's carpenter evi-
dently had burned much midnight oil in his cabin to compose a
literary masterpiece. Being anxious to avoid "all inhumane and un-
christian-like actions," Phips was prepared to accept the surrender
of Quebec, "together with ... all your persons and estates at my
dispose; upon the doing whereof, you may expect mercy from
me. . . . Your answer positive in an hour returned by your trumpet,
with the return of mine, is required upon the peril that will ensue."

To mark the time allowed, the messenger offered his watch to
Frontenac. The old man pleaded that his failing eyesight could not
read the hour. It was, said the obliging young envoy, just ten
o'clock. The Canadians had until eleven to reply with trumpet blast
of capitulation. Frontenac's officers burst into growls of indignation
but he remained silent The veteran actor was waiting for his cue.

When he spoke at last it was to deliver a rehearsed and theatrical
speech, insolent, a little too long and overdone but imperishable:
"Tell your general that I do not recognize King William ... a
usurper who has violated the most sacred laws of blood in attempt-
ing to dethrone his father-in-law, I know no King of England but
King James/'

He continued in this lofty vein for some moments until the
trembling messenger asked for an answer in writing. This, for
Frontenac, was the final cue line. He spat out his immortal phrase:
"No, I will answer your general only by the mouths of my cannon,
that he may learn that a man like me is not to be summoned after
this fashion. Let him do his best and I will do mine."

The New Englander, speechless with amazement, was blind-
folded and led back to his boat. Phips thereupon prepared to launch
a clumsy, amateurish plan of assault, apparently with little con-
fidence in it and aware that winter was at hand, his time running
out. He had delayed too long. Suddenly he heard a roll of drums
and a clamor of shouting on shore. It announced the arrival of 700
regulars and coureurs de bois from Montreal. "Ma foi, messieurs," a
French prisoner informed the English, "you have lost the game.
There is nothing for you now but to pack up and go home."

That sound advice was rejected. Phips wasted two days in coun-
cils of war, then landed 1,300 men on the Beauport shore, below
the town. A stubborn fight against the French sharpshooters carried
the New Englanders up to the St. Charles River, whence they were
to rush the walls of Quebec from the rear while Phips attacked
from the front.

LETTERS FROM NEW YORK 81

Too impetuous to wait, he began to cannonade the rock with
reckless waste of ammunition. Frontenac's voice, as promised, spoke
through his guns. The noisiest bombardment ever heard in America
made nothing but a few harmless dents in Quebec's stone walls but
the French fire heavily damaged the English ships and a lucky
shot broke Phips's flagstaff. The cross of St. George fluttered limply
into the river, floated toward the shore, was seized by some daring
Canadians in a canoe, and carried triumphantly to Frontenac as a
sure omen of victory.

Two days of futile bombardment brought Phips no nearer to
Quebec. Most of his powder was gone. His own ship was dismasted
and its pierced hull ready to sink. He drifted out of range on the
river current, leaving his troops on the St. Charles hungry, without
ammunition, and shivering in the first sudden spell of winter.

These brave men still advanced toward the town and drove in
Frontenac's skirmishers. One of the three brothers Le Moyne,
Sainte-Helene, fell dead from their bullets. But without Phips's
support the attack was hopeless. Frontenac could afford to husband
his men and shot. He soon saw the English painfully withdrawing,
embarking on boats, and returning to the battered fleet.

Phips called another council of war and a prayer meeting. It was
no use. The ferocious Canadian climate decided the issue. In a
storm which threatened to destroy him he withdrew to shelter be-
hind the Island of Orleans. There the telescopes of Quebec revealed
him plying his old trade of ship's carpenter. As soon as his vessels
were seaworthy he disappeared, lucky in his escape.

Yet for Frontenac, with all his confidence, it had been a close
thing. His overcrowded town, short of food, could not have endured
even a short siege, as its governor well knew while he watched the
English flag borne to the cathedral, with bonfires, cheers, the
Bishop's thanks for a miracle, and the pealing chant of the Te Deum.
If the new English had united, if the old English had given them
adequate, help, no guns or rhetoric could have saved Canada.

Phips had failed. An abler, or a luckier general, not yet born,
might retrieve the failure.

Frontenac wrote at once to Louis, urging an attack by sea on
New York and Boston to end the English menace forever. Louis was
still too busy in Europe.

During these events on the St. Lawrence the New England over-
land expedition had slunk home in quarrel, hunger, and smallpox.
To make at least a gesture of war, Captain John Schuyler raided the
French settlement of La Prairie, near the Richelieu mouth. Some
twenty -five farmers, caught in their fields, were killed or captured —
a worthless dividend in the bankruptcy of Boston's great plan.

82 THE STRUGGLE FOB THE BORDER

Puritan Massachusetts was crushed "under this awful frown of
God" and committed the unspeakable sin of the American business-
man. Its tattered troops were paid off in its first issue of paper
money.

The allies of the English had not remained idle. As a hungry
Canada awaited supplies from France in the spring, the Iroquois
struck again in bloody border raids, but they were tired of fighting
alone. Their appeals to New York at last rallied an expedition of
some three hundred men under Major Peter Schuyler. He struggled
down the Richelieu, attacked La Prairie with some damage and,
caught in a withering French ambush, boldly fought his way back
to Albany.

The English had failed on all fronts but Frontenac knew they
might come again. He implored Louis to send more troops for "we
are perishing by inches, the people are in the depths of poverty . . .
our troops and militia are wasting away."

The Iroquois still skulked upriver and blockaded the fur route
for two years. Farmers cowered in their forts. Fields were untilled
and soon devastated by a plague of caterpillars. At Verch&res, on
the St. Lawrence, below Montreal, a heroine of fourteen named
Madeleine compelled two soldiers, her two small brothers, and a
man of eighty, beleaguered in their blockhouse, to stand off a large
band of Iroquois for a week until rescue arrived. Reports that the
Bostonnais were sending 10,000 troops to Quebec set even the
royal council digging trenches and building palisades. A bounty of
twenty crowns was offered to the friendly Indians for white pris-
oners or their scalps, though Louis complained bitterly of the cost.
A victorious Canada was suffering from the organic weakness of an
overstretched colony, unable to support itself. The defeated English
lived comfortably enough on their farms and fisheries.

Canada might be prostrate. Its governor, in his middle seventies,
seemed to have reached only his prime. He strutted about his tiny
court. He feuded with the church. He encouraged his officers to
present pageants and even comedies, despite the horror and sermons
of Bishop Saint- Vallier. He insulted that unfortunate prelate pub-
licly in the streets. And he never ceased to plan the conquest of
the English.

The war against them had moved to Acadia. For a decade the
English privateers had raided the Canadian fisheries but could
never exploit Phips's capture of Fort Royal to occupy the country,
or even to hold that ancient post. A thousand Acadians, using the
barbarous Abenakis, continuously harassed the closer New England
settlements, to push the indeterminate boundary southward. The
English just as stubbornly pushed it north.

LETTERS FROM NEW YORK 83

Phips, appointed governor of Massachusetts for his doubtful ex-
ploits, and not quite the fool that Frontenac supposed, built a fort at
Pemaquid which so menaced Acadia that Frontenac sent two ships,
under the restless Iberville, to reduce it. They were beaten off but
nothing could stop Iberville for long. He returned from France
with a larger fleet, took Pemaquid and prepared to take Boston,
where Frontenac was to join him by marching overland. That plan,
like so many others, collapsed, because Louis's supporting ships
failed to arrive.

Ntit to waste a moment of his precious time, Iberville now de-
scended on the English fishing villages of Newfoundland and, in a
desperate snowshoe march along the coast, burned them all. Then,
in the crowning epic of a career surely without parallel, this red-
haired giant of sea and land sailed north to sweep down on the
English posts of Hudson Bay.

In the midsummer of 1694 his ship, the Pelican, wallowed through
the ice floes, its three consorts lost. Iberville nevertheless steered
for Fort Nelson, on the west coast of the bay. He was overtaken by
three English ships. Outnumbered and outgunned, he instantly at-
tacked and sank the Hampshire. Having exchanged a toast in wine
with his next victim, he aimed his guns at the Hudson's Bay. She
soon struck her flag. The Daring, despite her name, was chased off
and disappeared. A fair day's work even for Iberville.

The sailor now became a soldier again. His own sinking ship was
driven ashore. His crew faced starvation in the first autumn snow.
He undertook to carry Fort Nelson by land and survive on its
provisions. Fortunately at that critical moment the three lost French
ships turned up and the fort surrendered.

The northern jaw of the English nutcracker, in the bay, had been
broken; Iberville had left his trail, by land and water, from the
coast of Maine to the arctic and would shortly extend it to
Louisiana.

All this wake of destruction lay along the outer rim of the strug-
gle. At the center Frontenac's hold on the Lakes, the West, and the
Mississippi remained brittle under the menace of the Iroquois.
Happily they were sickening of the war, were depleted., like the
Canadians, by overexpansion and disgusted with their New York
allies who offered them words and rum, but no troops.

To gain time they sent ambassadors to their old father, Onontio.
He welcomed them with relief, with banquets in his cMteau and
costly presents, never for a moment deceived by their pretended
friendship.

Somehow the western tribes, lately wavering again, must be
rallied. The money-saving orders of Louis were defied and Fort

84 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

Frontenac rebuilt. Its founder was ready for his last stroke of war.
He led an army of 2,000 on the well-worn trail into the Iroquois
villages south of Lake Ontario. Too old to march, he was carried
over the portages by the Indians, sometimes in a canoe, sometimes
in an armchair. As before, the birds had flown, leaving their oft-
burned towns in ashes. Frontenac completed the ruin of the Iro-
quois fields.

The terrified royal council of New York debated a counterattack,
vainly sought the aid of the other colonies but solemnly resolved in
the end that "it will be very grievious to take the people from their
labor, and there is likewise no money to answer the charge thereof."

Frontenac was soon back in Quebec to dictate more of his lurid
dispatches. Louis was given a picture of brilliant Canadian victories,
with the discreet suggestion that he might allow his servant to
spend a few last years in the comfort of some honorable post in
France. The King's reply was the gift of the Military Order of St.
Louis and a bitter attack on his governor's extravagance. The whole
policy of fur trade and expansion was canceled, the original Col-
tertian theory of a compact, safe colony resurrected, and the out-
lying posts closed. All Frontenac's campaigns, Iberville's epic, the
heroism of the Canadian people, and the great dream of empire,
conceived by Champlain, were to be abandoned by a tired king
who, turning religious in his old age, now ruled from the bedroom
of Madame de Maintenon.

Louis's surrender had hardly been ordered before it was canceled
and the old process of expansion, fatal but irresistible, resumed. It
paused on the news that King William's War was over, the peace of
Ryswick signed in 1697 by statesmen who thought, with pen and
ink, to draw the boundaries of America.

On the whole, the subsequent settlement was a victory for
Canada. Frontenac had rescued it at the edge of the abyss. Acadia
and all the posts of Hudson Bay, except Albany, were again in Ca-
nadian possession. Though Frontenac would not live to hear the
news, Iberville would soon found a fort at Biloxi, on the Gulf of
Mexico, where La Salle had failed, and anchor the Mississippi line
against the westering English. The Iroquois, finally broken, sought
peace.

Frontenac's singlehanded work, more than enough for any man's
lifetime, a work seldom equaled in North American history, was
complete and his age was passing. Phips already had died in Lon-
don while answering charges against his mismanagement of Mas-
sachusetts. Louis, the Sun King, had entered an effulgent and de-
ceptive sunset.

No one knew better than Frontenac the futility of the pens at

LETTERS FROM NEW YORK 85

Ryswick but, like his king, he was too old to alter the map again.
The peace was celebrated at Quebec with a banquet to the English
envoys, a toast to Governor Bellornont, of New York, and the sighs
of a spent and dying man.

In the early winter of 1698, when the last ships had sailed for
France and the Governor was alone on his frozen rock, he had just
enough strength left to dictate a will The meager fortune of a man
long suspected of graft was bequeathed to his wife, with his heart
in a lead casket— the wife who, after half a century of separation,
remained his last link with civilization, his true love, his goddess.

He doubtless thought of her now, as he sat shakily before his
fire, of the France he would not see again, of the dead son, of
marches, voyages, campfires, councils, sieges, massacres, and vic-
tories. He must have thought also of the West and the unknown
country beyond his farthest footsteps. What lay there, behind the
receding glitter of the Canadian dream? Only more wilderness,
animals, and Indians? Or the road to China and a treasury of riches
inconceivable? He would never know the answer. But he knew
something beyond exploration.

He knew the feeling of this Canadian land. He knew the dis-
tance, toil, solitude, and planetary emptiness, the pungent woods,
the jut of glacial stone, the glint of hidden lakes, the crash of
rivers and breaking ice, the whisper of snow, the chuckle of water
against birchbark, the click of paddle, the smoke of Indian lodges,
the war cry of the Iroquois, and all the sounds, scents, colors, and
fierce weathers that together made the stuff of Canada. He had
become a part of all that he had met. He had made himself a
Canadian and saved a new breed, overlooked and incalculable in
the future of America. And he was ready to depart.

On November 28, in the full odor of sanctity and absolved by a
Recollet confessor, that wild spirit found the first peace it had ever
known.

Frontenac was buried, by his own instructions, not in the cathe-
dral but in the humble R6collet church. Canada had lost its de-
fender, the Indians a fellow savage, Louis his indispensable man.
The English had escaped but would never forget the scourge o£
America.

If the Iroquois were broken, the English divided and impotent,
how long could Onontio's work last? Not long. For nothing had
been settled by the pens of Ryswick. The future boundary, from
the burned Acadian fishing villages to the Great Lakes and beyond
them through the prairies to the western sea, lay fluid and un-
marked, awaiting the men who alone could fix or remove it.

6

A Soldier of Virginia

[1698-1755]

IN THE DUSK OF A WINTER EVENING THE CANADIAN GABRISON OF
Fort Le Boeuf beheld a horseman emerge from the forest south
of Lake Erie. The rider was young, tall, and exhausted. His
rain-soaked saddlebags contained a freight then invisible, not to be
measured for some time, not fully measured even at the present
day, but including among other things a world war, a revolution,
two nations and the boundary line between them.

When the weary traveler dismounted, he introduced himself to
the sentry as Major George Washington, adjutant general of Vir-
ginia's militia. He came on a simple errand— merely to warn Canada
out of the Ohio Valley.

The Virginian, a man of lean, muscular body and hard, square
face, was twenty-one years old. His century, the eighteenth, that
fertile mother of the modern world, had achieved her fifty-fourth
year, pregnant with Empire, Rebellion, Enlightenment, and many
other wonders new to mankind. Her larger children could be ob-
served in strange places and queer postures, all bent on the theft
of neighbors' lands, destruction of existing maps, enslavement of
distant peoples. Of which the two American nations— the first dis-
cernible but unproclaimed, the second unconceived and unsus-
pected by Washington or any living man— were to be the chief
and only permanent issue.

The first half of the eighteenth century already had undone in
America much of the work achieved by the second half of the
seventeenth.

Frontenac had saved Canada from the English colonies and the
Iroquois. Louis was not long in squandering those victories, as he
squandered the treasure and blood of France.

86

A SOLDIEE OF VIRGINIA 87

Within two years he observed the empire of Spain falling to
pieces as its emperor, Charles, lay dying, all too slowly. The pieces
somehow must be redistributed and put together again in a new
balance of power, a durable balance, a permanent recomposition
of the civilized world, as Louis thought, if he could seize all the
pieces for himself.

His treaties with England and Holland forbade such a comfort-
able arrangement, but trivial technicalities assuredly must not cloud
the expiring rays of the Sun King. Therefore, the temptation too
great to be resisted, Louis accepted the throne of Spain for his
grandson, the infant Bourbon duke, Philip of Anjou, and, bearing
that unfortunate child into the court of Versailles, announced to
his courtiers: "Messieurs, voici le roi d'Espagne."

Europe's answer was the War of the Spanish Succession, called
Queen Anne's War in America.

The coalition against Louis was led by England, and England
had found at last in John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, a soldier
of talent and ancestor of an even greater strategist to appear in a
greater crisis, 240 years later. Much of Europe felt the devastation
of Marlborough's marches, but only a small strip of America was
physically touched by Queen Anne's War.

Since the Iroquois remained neutral under Frontenac's recent
instruction, Canada could confine its campaigns to the east coast.
And since Louis could offer no help under Marlborough's pounding,
the Canadian Governor, Philippe de Bigaud, Marquis de Vaudreuil,
disguised his weakness by the traditional raids on the borders of
Maine, New Hampshire, and western Massachusetts.

They were not as serious as the wars of Frontenac but they lasted
for ten dreadful winters and they massacred uncounted settlements,
butchered the people of Haverhill and Deerfield (where Pierre
Gaultier de Varennes, Sieur de La Verendrye, one of the great
North Americans, participated, unmarked, in the butchery), and
came within twenty miles of a terrified Boston. In Newfoundland
the French from Placentia sacked the English fishing center of
St. John's.

Vainly New England attempted retaliation with an ambitious
plan to take Quebec and eliminate Canada forever. Its overland
army camped through the whole summer of 1709 at Lake Cham-
plain, awaiting a British fleet in the St. Lawrence. The fleet was
sent instead to Portugal. Two years later, when the colonial militia
waited in the same place, another fleet was wrecked in the Gulf of
St. Lawrence with loss of a thousand sailors and its remains stag-
gered home.

88 THE STBUGGLE FOR THE BOEDER

New England had to satisfy itself with its third easy capture of
Port Royal, a local victory but vital; for now Acadia was lost to
France forever. British power, established on the south of the gulf,
enfiladed the entrance to the St. Lawrence. More important, Britain
was now committed to the subjugation of Canada at a convenient
moment. The American war no longer was a skirmish between
colonies. It had become an essential part of the world struggle,
centered in Europe.

At the center Louis overreached himself. He was beginning to
lose his empire to England's new sea power. His armies depleted,
his treasury bare, the Revolution already lighted, like a slow time
bomb, he accepted at the peace conference of Utrecht, in 1713, large
losses in America to avoid larger in Europe.

The Iroquois were recognized as British subjects, Acadia and
Newfoundland permanently surrendered. Equally vital in the grand
strategy, the undefined territories of Hudson Bay became British.
Canada was hemmed in from the north. Its lifeline to the West was
under threat of the British Iroquois. It had been pushed off the
Atlantic mainland coast. Its front door was menaced from Acadia,
now called Nova Scotia.

Out of this first great defeat, the beginning of the end, Louis
had saved one fragment which, he thought, might save the rest.
Cape Breton Island, almost touching Nova Scotia on the north,
remained French. Here Louis projected the greatest fortress in
America to protect the St. Lawrence route, without which Canada
could not live.

The fortress of Louisbourg, rising like a mirage from the rocks
and mists of Cape Breton, even its stones brought from France ( and
some of them promptly sold to New England merchants in the
customary process of French graft), would be a hard nut for Eng-
land to crack, but the dominance of English sea power was now
established throughout the Atlantic; the age of English imperial
expansion had been launched; Utrecht was another short recess in
the ripening competition for the world.

If Canada was to survive as the protectorate of France, a land
power, it must survive where land power could operate, in the
West. It must develop Louisiana, hold the English east of the
Alleghenies, maintain the line between the two gulfs, and thrust
westward from the Great Lakes.

"Whoever rules the mouth of the Mississippi," La Salle had said,
"rules whatever peoples may live in an area of three million square
miles." This exaggeration was essentially true.

France built the flooded cypress shacks called New Orleans to

A SOLDIER OF VIRGINIA 89

defend the outlet of the great river. Its traders— such men as the
daring Etienne de Bourgmond— paddled up the Missouri beyond the
Platte, terrifying the Spaniards to the southwestward who, like
the French, had absurdly underestimated the width of America.
Louisiana, astride some of the richest real estate on the continent,
might have held the whole hinterland for France if Louis had colo-
nized it, but there, as in Canada, lack of population, coupled with
the usual corruption, assured a certain failure.

Advance from the Mississippi was soon barred by the terrible
nation of Foxes, west of Lake Michigan, who, in a war of forty
years, almost drove the French out of the central interior,

Neither Indians nor the treaties of Europe could long restrain a
man like Sieur de La Verendrye, last pf Champlain's breed. As a
boy of twelve in Three Rivers, he had joined the militia, watched
the massacre of Deerfield, fought against Marlborough at Malpla-
quet, and come home proudly with the scars of nine wounds. Igno-
rant of the larger events now convulsing Canada and the Thirteen
Colonies, he became commander of the most distant Canadian post
at Nipigon, north of Lake Superior. From there he proposed to
follow Champlain's dream and reach the Pacific.

It could not be far away. The mighty coureur de bois, Dulhut,
had reported that the Sioux spoke with a Chinese accent. Indians
at Verendrye's lonely fort excited him with their tales of the western
sea, where lived civilized men, bearded, only four feet tall, eyes
protruding beyond their noses. Long ago, in 1688, Jacques de Noyon
had crossed the watershed west of Lake Superior to discover the
continental route from Rainy Lake to the Lake of the Woods and
to reach almost the edge of the central plains. Just beyond that
farthest white man's trail, Verendrye thought, must lie the ocean
and China.

Though usually broke— money being "always a secondary con-
sideration with me"— he managed by his fur trade to finance a fort
on the Lake of the Woods in 1732. Two years later he sent his son,
Jean Baptiste, down the fierce white water of Winnipeg River to
Lake Winnipeg. Canada had emerged from the lakes, forests, and
Pre-Cambrian rocks upon the prairies. Only a flat horizon separated
Verendrye from the Pacific coast and its human prodigies. Skilled
Canadian fingers were probing inland to find a western border
against the English.

Verendrye had discovered almost a second America, but the
Comte de Maurepas, minister of marine at Paris, was too occupied
with conspiracy, flirtation, and his witty tongue to interest himself
in these irrelevancies. He refused money to his agent and offered

90 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

nothing but abuse. Obviously, said Maurepas, Verendrye was bat-
tening on furs or long before now lie would have completed the
easy fortnight's journey to the Pacific.

How could a Parisian courtier comprehend that the solitary
bankrupt of the West-ceaselessly marching from one Indian en-
campment to another, dancing and orating, like Frontenac, and
sometimes impressing his allies with "the wounds I got at Mal-
plaquet, which surprised them"— had hit upon the penultimate
secret of the continent, that only the secret of the Rockies remained?

Verendrye gambled everything on his dash to the sea., even the
life of his son. Jean Baptiste was sent on a war party to satisfy the
Monsonis, his risks well known, and was decapitated by the Sioux
on an island in the Lake of the Woods.

After chafing for seven years, Verendrye was ready in 1738 for a
march, estimated at 750 miles, to the Pacific. He must reach it now
or never. Over fifty years of age, he could not long face the long
trails and searing blizzards of the prairies.

With two of his sons and an Indian expedition of 300, he left the
Red River, paddled up the Assiniboine, and struck southwestward
to the Missouri. The Mandans who met him there, and carried him
on their shoulders triumphantly to their village, had light skins and
the hair of some was reddish. He suspected that they were the
half-white offspring of the coastal civilization, that the twisting
Missouri emptied into the Pacific, but too far south, in the Spanish
lands.

As all his trade goods had been stolen by the hospitable Mandanfi,
he retreated in ghastly winter trek to the Assiniboine. Next spring
he sent his son, Louis Joseph, westward again. This remarkable
youth, called the Chevalier, hit the Saskatchewan, where the Crees
informed him that the river rose in "very lofty mountains," hard by
a great lake, "the water of which was undrinkable." The Rockies
had been introduced, as a vague rumor only, into the white man's
geography. Close behind them lay the ocean.

These reports only confused Verendrye the more. The whole
American map was in worse chaos than ever. But the upper Missouri
and the Saskatchewan, the two essential routes to the Rockies, at
least had been found, even if no one understood their meaning.

Verendrye was now too old and too busy surviving the tax col-
lectors of Paris to follow his dream. His final purpose had been
foiled, Nevertheless, he had seized the farthest known West fot
Canada. His retreat from the Missouri across the 49th Parallel had
unconsciously forecast the future boundary bisecting the continent.
His new ring of posts across the prairies had reduced the flow of

THE

INDIAN WARS •
(TffJS S£Y2N YEARS* WAX)

1766 - 1763

cMap oft/ze Area

92 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BOBBER

fur into the English posts of Hudson Bay to a trickle, despite the
paper settlement of Utrecht.

The Hudson's Bay Company had sat too long, with English
phlegm, on the northern seacoast. As early as 1689, however, it
had permitted Henry Kelsey, a youngster of nineteen, perhaps the
boldest explorer in the West, who had learned his business from
the great Radisson, to walk inland and drum up business with the
distant tribes.

Kelsey was the first white man to see the barrens, the prairies,
grizzly bear, and musk ox. Accompanied by one frightened Indian,
he reached the edge of the Rockies, His reports, some of them
written in clumsy doggerel beside his campfires, failed to impress
the sleepy governors of his company in London. They remained
uninterested in poetry or geography, were concerned only with
dividends. Kelsey's discoveries were forgotten. The company con-
tinued to drowse on the bay while Verendrye outflanked it.

Maurepas finally dismissed Verendrye as a failure. The greatest
white plainsman returned to Three Rivers, sick and ruined. Two sons
of his own mold, Louis Joseph and Frangois, still pressed on their
father's work. In 1743 they retraced the old trail southwestward and
reached the Black Hills of South Dakota. These, then, were the last
mountains and doubtless visible on their far side lay the ocean.

The brothers pushed their horses up the foothills. At that electric
moment their Indian guides fled in panic from an imagined enemy.
The Canadians were carried along in the rout. Looking back help-
lessly from their saddles, they told each other that they had missed
the final secret of the continent by inches.

It was some compensation to claim everything in sight for France.
This they did by burying a lead plate at the junction of the Teton
River and the Missouri. The mere shadow of French power now
stretched south of the 49th Parallel in the far West, as on the Missis-
sippi. That lead plate would lie buried until 1913, to be dug up
accidentally by a schoolgirl of fourteen, called Hattie May Foster,
child of a nation called the United States.

The epic of the Verendrye family was finished and must soon be
erased as a political fact by events in the East. An experienced fron-
tiersman, Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, succeeded to command in the
West but did not remain there long. He was hurriedly summoned
eastward for more important business— a trying interview with a
young major from Virginia at Fort Le Boeuf .

Long before this, from the day when the peace was signed, France
had attempted to undo the losses of Utrecht. It wrangled over the
boundaries of the Hudson Bay territories while Verendrye dis-

A SOLDIER OF VIRGINIA 93

regarded them. It argued, with years of tiresome negotiation, that
in Acadia only the peninsula of Nova Scotia and not a mile of the
mainland beyond the isthmus of Chignecto had been surrendered.
It still occupied the land which would become New Brunswick and
it constantly agitated the Acadian farmers against their English
masters.

On the St. Lawrence and around the Great Lakes a desperate race
of military fortification was launched by both sides. Canada built
Fort Frederic on Lake Champlain to block the old invasion route
of the Richelieu. The English of New York struck to the shore of
Lake Ontario in 1727 with their fort of Oswego, on land up to now
always regarded as French. Canada replied with a new fort at
Niagara and a second called Rouille, on Lake Ontario, to guard the
passage around Niagara Falls and prevent the western furs reaching
Oswego. Two empires faced each other almost within musket shot.

Canada still held the Mississippi line, strengthened by the new
Fort Miami, east of Michigan, and Vincennes on the Wabash. This
far-flung trade system, siphoning the western furs into Montreal,
gave Canadians an era of unprecedented prosperity. It was to be
their last under the French flag.

Prosperity and all the affairs of America remained at the whim of
strange incidents.

Who, in Canada or the Thirteen Colonies, had ever heard of
Robert Jenkins, captain in the British Navy? Who knew that in
1731 he had set out from the West Indies, in the brig Rebecca,
wearing both his ears, and that, arriving in London, he wore only
one? The other had been cut off by a piratical captain of Spain, who
boarded the Rebecca and casually performed an amputation of
momentous results. A speechless parliamentary committee in Lon-
don beheld a one-eared servant of the crown. Such an outrage was
not to be endured. England went to war with Spain. As usual any
spark, or even a seaman's lost ear, served to light the tinderbox of
Europe into conflagration.

Besides, the Great Powers had just seen an easy chance to steal
the spoils and droppings of an Austrian empire recently inherited
by a young empress, the pathetic Maria Theresa, clutching her baby
and appealing to her Hungarian nobles for rescue. The appeal
aroused the cheering Hungarians but failed to move the chivalrous
statesmen of other countries. The War of Jenkins's Ear quickly
matured into the general War of the Austrian Succession and became
King George's War in America.

The Thirteen Colonies finally saw the chance to repair their past
mistakes and acquire Canada on the cheap. After many false starts,

94 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

this was to be the last contest. And in the new governor of Massa-
chusetts, William Shirley, the colonies had found a man who knew
how to win it.

Meanwhile the borders of New England, New York, and Pennsyl-
vania must bleed again under Canadian and Indian lightning raids.
Another attempt of the English to invade Canada by the Champlain
corridor failed miserably. As Shirley saw it, the central objective,
the sovereign prize, was that mirage of stone floating in the mists
of Cape Breton Island, the fortress of Louisbourg. When it fell
Canada would lose control of the St. Lawrence Gulf and quickly die
of starvation.

Louisbourg was impregnable, on the word of the ablest soldiers,
sailors, and architects of France. So they assured King Louis XV,
who replied that it ought to be after all the money lavished on it
for the last twenty-five years, Louisbourg had cost so much, said
Louis, that he expected at any moment to look through the window
of his swarming bedroom and see those bastions and spires clear
across the Atlantic.

The safe enclosure of Capt Breton—two and a half miles of walls
thirty feet high and twelve feet thick—housed the silken gallants
and their painted women, the pirates, smugglers, Indians, and graft-
ers of Louisbourg. They lived a gay life of balls, theater parties, and
dalliance, in a fair imitation of Versailles, supported mainly by illicit
trade with their enemies of New England. What if the garrison had
mutinied only last autumn? Louisbourg stood impregnable on its
stone perch.

Shirley, it appeared, was too stupid to understand that simple
fact. He summoned the lawmakers of Massachusetts in sworn secrecy
to reveal his impossible plan for the capture of America's strongest
fortress. One of the pious legislators, it is said, prayed so loudly for
divine guidance in this crisis that the Governor's strategy was over-
heard in the street below. At all events, everybody soon knew that
the Thirteen Colonies were planning a noble enterprise. The Assem-
bly in Boston approved it by a single vote because, as Canada was
informed, one of its opponents providentially fell and broke a leg
on his way to the meeting.

Shirley quickly recruited a rustic army of 4,000 from Massachu-
setts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire, each volunteer bringing his
own gun and only six able to load a cannon. William Pepperell was
given the command, not because this militia colonel understood war
but because he was a successful fish merchant and shipbuilder.
As it turned out, he was also a better soldier than Shirley,

Thus in the spring of 1745, full of patriotism, Protestantism, igno-

A SOLDIER OF VIRGINIA 95

ranee and rum, the madcap armada sailed north after a day of
fasting and prayer, its chaplain, Sam Moody, brandishing a hatchet
and vowing to chop down the "Catholic idols." At the Nova Scotia
port of Canso, recently sacked by the French, the New Englanders
were joined by an English fleet of four warships under Commodore
Peter Warren.

Dupont du Chambon, governor of Louisbourg, was entertaining
at a ball in his citadel as the English neared his harbor and asleep
at dawn as they entered it. An officer rushed in his nightshirt to the
Governor's chamber, bells were rung and cannon fired, but there
was surely no need for alarm. A freakish frost had blocked the harbor
with ice. The invaders spent three weeks in awkward drill while
absorbing the sermons of Parson Moody and more potent liquid
inspiration from the West Indies. Chambon could afford to smile at
such clumsy amateurs.

Pepperell ignored Shirley's insane plan of frontal attack and
approached the fort from the rear to burn the storehouses with
"three rousing cheers." The smoke blew into the French Grand
Battery at the harbor mouth. Its garrison fled in panic without even
spiking the guns. Chambon smiled no more.

His own guns of the Grand Battery were soon firing on his citadel.
The first shot killed fourteen persons. Parson Moody preached next
Sunday on an appropriate text: "Enter into His gates with thanks-
giving and into His courts with praise."

Then the English, blessed by an ignorance of war, dragged their
artillery on sledges through the swamps behind the fort, 200 men
for every sledge, and hauled up seven more cannon from the harbor
bottom, where the French had sunk them years before. Though
these rusty barrels often exploded with heavy damage to the gunners
and ammunition was so scarce that the New Englanders were paid
a shilling for every retrieved cannon ball, the plight of the French
had become still worse. Impregnable Louisbourg began to starve.

Pepperell's next maneuver wTas disastrously English. He sent 400
volunteers by night in rowboats, with muffled oars, to capture the
Island Battery. The attackers again announced their presence with
three rousing cheers. Immediately the French guns killed sixty
brave and idiotic men, 116 were captured, and the remainder driven
off.

It was a temporary disaster. Only forty-nine days of siege pulver-
ized Louisbourg into surrender on June 17. A week later twenty
French vessels, arriving too late to rescue the fort, were lured into
the harbor by the French flag (which Pepperell had kept flying for
that purpose), and captured. The loot provided Commodore War-

96 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

ren with £60,000 and each of his sailors with £250. Pepperell
enjoyed the privilege of spending £10,000 out of his own pocket.

The English garrison, already homesick and mutinous, had hardly
settled in and suffered 900 deaths by plague before it heard alarming
news from Paris. Half the French Navy, sixty-five ships under the
Due d'Anville, sailed from Brest in the summer of 1746 to recapture
Louisbourg, avenge the honor of France and, if possible, take
Boston.

D'Anville, a lucky nobleman, had risen to high naval rank without
bothering to learn seamanship. His luck suddenly deserted him. The
armada was wrecked and scattered off the coast of Nova Scotia. Its
remnants, desolated by scurvy, found refuge in Chebucto Bay.
D'Anville promptly died of humiliation and apoplexy. His successor,
d'Estournel, proposed to abandon Louisbourg and return to France.
His officers indignantly rejected his advice. Whereupon he retired
to his cabin, locked the door, and drove a sword through his heart.
His ghost, often seen by the English afterwards, alone remained at
Chebucto. The survivors of the French fleet finally sailed home,
nourished by a diet of rats. A Canadian and Indian war party man-
aged to reach Acadia overland but failed to take Annapolis Royal
and could not risk an attack on Louisbourg.

That "awful frown of God" had been removed from New England.
The homemade strategy of a Boston fish merchant had captured the
mightiest bastion of America, the Gulf of St. Lawrence was in
English control, and Parson Moody's hatchet had chopped down the
popish idols. So the fires of rejoicing burned throughout the Thirteen
Colonies— too soon.

At Aix-la-Chapelle, England, having fared indifferently in the
European campaigns, traded Louisbourg for the French post of
Madras in India. The Thirteen Colonies shouted betrayal, as well
they might. A distrust of England was sown deep in the minds of
Massachusetts, to be tended by sedulous gardeners, yet unknown,
and to ripen in the streets of Boston twenty years hence.

If Louisbourg was back in French hands, and control of the gulf
with it, Aix-la-Chapelle, like Utrecht, had settled nothing, had failed
to provide even a truce in America. And the immediate center of the
world struggle had shifted to the lonely Ohio forests, of all places.

The Ohio Company, of Virginia, containing two members of the
Washington family, was chartered a year before the peace of Aix-la-
Chapelle. It sent its first agents to spy out land for settlers west of
the Alleghenies in 1750. English traders already had oozed through
the mountain dike and, offering better kettles than their rivals,
brighter cloth of red and blue, and cheaper alcohol, distilled from

A SOLDIER OF VIRGINIA

French West Indies sugar, challenged the old Canadian fur
monopoly.

Actually settlement was far more serious than English trade for
Canadian and Indian alike. To Canada it would mean the loss of the
Mississippi line and the whole West, under weight of sheer numbers.
To the Indians it would mean destruction. The settler with his ax
and plow, more than the soldier with his musket and sword, must
determine the future of America. Most of the western Indians knew
it and hastily rediscovered their loyalty to Canada.

No one knew it better than the new Governor of Canada, the tall
and scholarly Marquis de La Jonquiere, who had led the broken
French armada home from Chebucto. He could only thrust a finger
here and there into the leaky Ohio dike.

In 1749~a notable year since it also saw the founding of the Brit-
ish stronghold of Halifax at Chebucto under Governor Edward
Cornwallis-Jonquiere sent Celeron de Blainville with a small com-
pany of Canadians and Indians to order the English out of the Ohio
Valley. The arms of the French King, engraved on tin plates, were
nailed to tree trunks and lead plates, similarly inscribed, buried at
the roots. Roving Indians soon found them and melted the lead for
bullets. English traders disregarded these warnings. They reap-
peared as soon as the Canadians had left.

Poor Jonquiere worried himself to death at Quebec after first
ordering the wax candles removed from his bedside. Cheaper tallow,
he said, was good enough to provide his last light in this world—
and the last economy ever practiced by a French government in
Canada.

Where plates of tin and lead had failed, the Canadians now re-
verted to their old and reliable weapon of unofficial war in this time
of official peace. Charles Langlade led a force of Ottawas and
Chippewas against Pickawillany, on the Miami River, main center
of English trade and seat of the famous chief called the Demoiselle
by the Canadians, Old Britain by the English. He was boiled and
eaten for his devotion to England. The fall of Pickawillany returned
the Miamis to French allegiance. English traders were driven back
to the Alleghenies.

To make sure they stayed there, the new Canadian Governor,
Marquis Duquesne, built Fort Le Boeuf, commanding, as he hoped,
the strategic forks of the Ohio. If this tiny cork could plug the
junction of the Monongahela and the Allegheny, Canada could hold
the West. A frail hope.

Thus had the final lines of the American struggle been drawn as
a distant annex to Europe's great game of power.

98 THE STRUGGLE FOB THE BORDER

The chief player, William Pitt, had arrived in the nick of time.
"We are undone both at home and abroad," groaned the immaculate
Lord Chesterfield. "I am sure," Pitt replied, "that I can save this
country and that nobody else can."

In truth England looked past saving. Its Elizabethan spirit and
the brief energies of the Orange William had sunk into the vinous
and gouty stupor of the German Georges. Its politics were ruled,
over the gaming tables, by the King's crapulous sons and over-
stuffed ministers, those "mountains of roast beef; its manners by
Beau Nash; its morals by the plump court strumpetry; its higher
tastes by Horace Walpole, with his monkeys and private printing
press at Strawberry Hill; its highways by Dick Turpin's successors;
its poor by gin. Only in Dr. Johnson's Club, it almost seemed, the old
lamp burned on, rather dimly.

Still, its guttering light was perhaps more reliable than the daz-
zling and final spurt of flame, with its flutter of suicidal moths, at
Paris. Pitt's principal adversary, Madame de Pompadour, born plain
Jane Fish, once mistress and now procuress of the bored fifteenth
Louis, managed the affairs of the world's greatest state as a boudoir
intrigue among a race of half -men in powder and patches, walking
on "a carpet of flowers unconscious that it covered an abyss."

Some few men saw the abyss, none more clearly than Voltaire.
That skeletal creature, shrunken within his oversized wig, went
everywhere and noted everything. He had recently stolen the candle-
sticks of his host, Frederick the Great, had left Prussia hurriedly as
a result of certain poisonous little forgeries, was now safely installed
outside Paris and giving his mind momentarily to America. As he
said, America was not worth more than a moment of thought. For
what did New France contain? Nothing but a few acres of snow.

Frederick, the third player, was worth watching, was already
marked as a future victim of the infuriated Pompadour for some of
his obscene verses touching her virtue. He had reached his hour
after long training by a father who drilled and caned him, sometimes
threw dinner plates at his head, and thus instructed him in the
mastery of Europe. But no Prussian, however trained, could master
Europe alone. Frederick needed a partner of comparable genius
and found him in Pitt. "England," said the admiring young prince,
"has been long in labor and at last she has brought forth a man."

A queer man, to be sure, egocentric, theatrical, an alien among
the mountains of roast beef, but a man. And with him another, still
young, with a caricature of a rabbit's face, a shock of red hair, and
a gangling, ill-jointed body. Recently he had written to his father a
boyish design for life: "All that I can wish for myself is that I may
at all times be ready and firm to meet the fate that we cannot shun,

A SOLDIER OF VIRGINIA 99

and to die gracefully and properly when the hour comes/' A parent
of those days must have regarded such a self-imposed debt to society
as a little naive and precious. It would be paid in full. The youth's
name was James Wolfe.

In the early murk of the eighteenth century a similar candle had
been lighted across the Channel. A French youth of small and deli-
cate mold, round, handsome face and lively, poetic spirit, wrote a
simple pledge to his father: "To be an honorable man, of good
morals, brave and Christian." It was a doubtful recipe in the current
world. Yet the writer, Louis Joseph, Marquis de Montcalm-Gozon
de Saint- V^ran, would fulfill it according to the motto of his family—
"War is the Grave of the Montcalms."

Those two youths, English and French, must meet not long hence
in an outlandish spot, the long-tilled upland of Louis Hebert's farm.
A third, from Virginia, would not be present, but the three, never
seeing one another's faces, would combine unwittingly to produce
curious results. The most casual, unexpected, and impossible by-
product of that combination would be the second nation of America,
created by three men who neither foresaw, liked, felt, nor under-
stood it. Even more curious, the joint death of the Englishman and
Frenchman would assure the immortality of the American and, on
the border of Canada, his only serious failure— the stubborn border
that he could never obliterate.

This obscure triumvirate was unknown to the famous posturers
of Europe, though its works must be accepted, for better or for
worse. Least known of all the Virginian. At Fort Le Boeuf, on the
night of December 11, 1753, the French commander, old Legardeur
Saint-Pierre, had never heard Washington's name. Nor could he
speak with him, as Washington knew no French. He could not even
read the messenger's letter from Lieutenant Governor Dinwiddie, of
Williamsburg. While Washington and his six followers were offered
dinner and good French wine, Saint-Pierre retired to another room
with a translator.

Dinwiddie, it appeared, must require the immediate departure
of the Canadian trespassers from the Ohio and "that you would
forebear prosecuting a purpose so interruptive of the harmony and
good understanding which His Majesty is desirous to continue and
cultivate with the Most Christian King."

The veteran Canadian woodsman, fresh from the Indian wars of
the farthest West, must have smiled. For he knew that the white
man's war, the ultimate war for America, already was under way,
however the politicians of Europe might disguise it. So, no doubt,
did the young Major from Virginia.

But there were many things that Washington could not yet know,

100 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

some obvious things that lie would have to discover for himself,
others that he would never guess.

Would he even know, so early in life, that all men are created
equal and endowed by their Creator with Certain Inalienable
Rights? Not likely when his family had long been owners of rich
lands and Negro slaves, when he himself was a typical Southern
aristocrat, in all his instincts an English country gentleman.

Or had he foreseen, had even Ben Franklin of Philadelphia, the
first fully formed American and so far the greatest, foreseen the
clearest political and military fact of the continent— that France,
England's enemy, was England's only real security in America; that
if France were driven out of Canada and the old menace removed
from the flank of the English colonies, they could risk a break with
their mother and her navy, but not otherwise?

Or if any American suspected that, as a few men in England
suspected it, could an immature soldier's mind like Washington's,
or a mature statesman's mind like Franklin's, discern a still more
tenuous fact— namely, that the remote and improbable event of an
American Revolution, designed to make one nation, must of itself
make two, and then, with blunder and bloodshed, draw the frontier
between them?

Finally, why should a healthy man of twenty-one, rested from his
hard ride and warmed with French wine, have any reason to expect
that within a week he would be saved from sudden death by some-
thing like a miracle of nature?

So, mercifully ignorant of his danger, Washington awaited at
Fort Le Boeuf an answer to Dinwiddie's ultimatum, an answer which
would ignite the Christian world.

The Canadian commander took three days to write a suitable
letter. It was a ticklish business for a backwoodsman out of the far
West. At last the message was complete and Washington read it
with the help of a translator. Doubtless he realized its result.

The Canadian proposed to refer Dinwiddie's demands to the
Governor at Quebec. Meanwhile Canada would not abandon the
Ohio country. The little garrison would stay put at Le Boeuf.

That answer— since the Ohio was the flash point of the world-
wide explosion— must mean nothing but war. Washington could
hardly have been surprised. War was assured in any case. Only its
timing and outcome remained in question.

The Virginian pocketed Saint-Pierre's letter safely beneath a
heavy Indian matchcoat and started back for Williamsburg. His
journey must be counted one of the most chancy and momentous in
the entire history of America.

As the horses soon tired, Washington left them with his servants

A SOLDIER OF VIRGINIA 101

and hurried forward on foot, accompanied only by Christopher
Gist, his guide. A bullet from the gun of a Canadian Indian at the
camp of Murdering Town narrowly missed Washington, but he
refused to let Gist kill the attacker. Worse danger lay immediately
ahead.

In fear of Indian pursuit, the two men walked through the rain
and snow for a night and a day without a break, each carrying a
gun and a pack, until they reached the Allegheny. It was not frozen,
as they had hoped, but aswirl with broken ice. Somehow the river
must be crossed and, without food, they could not wait. A few
fragments of rope tied some logs together to mak$ a raft. It bore
perhaps the most valuable cargo afloat in the eighteenth cen-
tury.

Washington used a pole to steer through the ice drift. All went
well at first. Then he slipped on the wet logs and plunged into the
water, sinking deep under the weight of his pack. Only the eyes of
Gist saw him struggle to the surface. The eyes of the world were
directed elsewhere, but some of its highest hopes struggled with
the drowning man in the Allegheny. Somehow Washington reached
the raft.

Its helpless passengers were spun down the main current and
tossed upon an island in midstream. They dragged themselves
ashore to lie through the night without food, fire, or shelter. Next
morning they found the river frozen solid and walked ashore on a
bridge miraculously provided by nature. She evidently knew what
she was about. Seldom had a whim of weather so altered, in one
night, the prospects of the human family.

Of that Washington knew nothing as he and Gist trudged to a
trader's house on the Monongahela and finally back to Williamsburg.
Europe was obsessed with its own affairs. It had missed the decisive
event of the times, on a wild river which had almost drowned and
suddenly saved the one essential instrument of America's future.

Dinwiddie prepared for war by ordering his London tailor, Mr.
Scott, to cut "a suit of regimentals." He did not "much like gayety
in dress," but "conceived this necessary," provided there was no lace
on the coat, only "a neat embroidered buttonhole."

It was easy to order a suit, harder to make the cranky Virginian
House of Burgesses vote money for the defense of the West. Din-
widdie managed to extract an appropriation of £10,000. With this
he was expected to drive the Canadians out of the Ohio country.
His only real asset was the Adjutant General.

Washington crossed the mountains again in the spring of 1754 to
fortify the strategic forks of the Ohio. A small advance party starting
to build a palisade suddenly beheld a fleet of bateaux, with some

102 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

five hundred men, sweep down the Allegheny. The Canadians took
possession of the forks and built their own Fort Duquesne.

This, to Dinwiddie, was an overt act of war, however London
might regard it. He undertook to fight the war in his own fashion
from Williamsburg, but events were soon out of his hands. The
young Adjutant General had taken over.

Washington's force of some 250 men cut a wagon road over the
divide, twenty miles in two weeks, and camped at Great Meadows,
which the commander pronounced "A charming field for an en-
counter." He should have stayed there.

Instead, hearing of a Canadian patrol nearby, he marched out
impetuously with forty men, fell on the enemy, and killed ten of
them. The French called it murder. Washington called it sound
strategy. Probably both were wrong. Whatever it was, a young
Virginian had fired the first shots of a world war.

He may have suspected that as he retreated to the charming field
of Great Meadows and hastily reared a rude fortification. Before it
was finished 700 Canadians from Fort Duquesne burst out of the
woods.

The plight of the 3,50 Virginians was hopeless but they fired from
their palisade for nine hours on the day of July 3. Both sides were
tired then, soaked by torrential rain and out of powder. The Cana-
dians proposed a capitulation. Washington read their letter by a
sputtering candle and knew when he was beaten. His deceptive
victory had trapped him into disaster. He had committed his first
blunder and suffered his first defeat, by no means the last.

Next morning he led his men back on the road to Virginia, the
wounded carried in hideous pain by their comrades. Canada held
the Ohio. It was the darkest day of Washington's life. It was July 4,
a day to remember.

The dullest settler on the Atlantic coast could understand the
meaning of Washington's defeat, small in dimensions, incalculably
large in future result. After nearly a century and a half of quarrel
and isolation, seven of the thirteen colonies met at Albany in
1754 to consider an almost impossible project, their confederation
under one government, loyal to the English crown.

Franklin, the first national mind of America, had brought along
from Philadelphia what he modestly labeled some "Short Hints,"
devised between his experiments with electricity, stoves, and jour-
nalism. These rough notes contained a detailed plan of colonial
union. It must be imposed by a law of the British Parliament so
that no colony, on joining the confederation, could ever escape.
Franklin considered union essential to repel the totalitarian power
of Canada and to carry the English west of the Alleghenies, since

A SOLDIER OF VIRGINIA 103

"The English settlements, as they are at present circumscribed, are
absolutely at a stand; they are settled to the mountains."

Not only circumscribed and at a stand, but heaving with strange
forces; divided between the idea of democracy, first imported on
the Mayflower, and the privileges of the ruling classes; moving to
a struggle between poor and rich; yet driven together for survival
against an external danger.

The Albany convention, overture to great conventions later on,
was "inflamed with patriotic spirit," its debates "nervous and
pathetic," and its decisions, said Attorney General Smith of New
York, "might properly be compared to one of the Ancient Greek
Conventions." In fact, they represented, though they could not
quite manage for the present, the process of union which Greece
had failed to achieve and, in failing, had perished.

Franklin's "Short Hints" and the scheme of union evolved from
them— including a claim to all lands from Atlantic to Pacific between
the 34th and 48th Parallels—also failed at first in the immature
colonial assemblies. It was a temporary postponement. Sooner or
later Franklin's logic must be faced. The idea of union had been
born and would not die. A nation, or the blurred image of it, had
appeared for the first time in America.

The corrupt courtiers of the Chateau St. Louis could not compre-
hend it, but Canadians no longer faced a rabble of helpless little
states. They faced the United States in the gristle, very weak yet
but soon to harden, as Burke would say, into the bone. One nation
had been forecast in a Short Hint, with long shadows. The last
thought in Quebec was the possibility of a second.

Pretenses of peace were elaborately maintained in London and
Paris through the winter following the Albany conference. Why,
asked London, was France feverishly building warships and assem-
bling troops for Canada? Nothing hostile was intended, Paris
answered, while instructing Governor Duquesne to destroy Halifax
but to pretend that he was acting without orders. Why, asked Paris,
was England massing an army under General Edward Braddock
for dispatch to Virginia? There was no intention of offending any
power, London insisted, while instructing Braddock to drive the
Canadians out of the Ohio Valley.

England was eager to strike quickly. France sought delay to build
up its forces. And Braddock, though shielded from the terrors of
intelligence, dimly foresaw his fate. He told his actress friend,
Anne Bellamy: "Dear Pop, we are sent like sacrifices to the altar."

So it happened in the summer of 1755, last year of official peace,
first year of large-scale war.

7
To Hebert's Farm

[1755-1759]

B HADDOCK'S ARMY, MIGHTIEST FORCE EVER ASSEMBLED IN AMERICA
—with wagons hurriedly commandeered by Franklin, with
axmen, cannons and cattle, with everything but leadership-
cut its way through the Alleghenies to the Monongahela. There it
fell headlong into an ambush of Canadians and Indians.

The British General was stupid but fearless. He met like a hero
the fate he had expected. Four horses killed beneath him, he cursed,
threatened, and refused to retreat. His sword hammered the backs
of his men to make them stand in suicidal ranks against 900 invisible
snipers, firing calmly from the underbrush. Three hours of mass
murder shot down the easy red target. The line broke and streamed
homeward. Retreat turned to rout and panic.

Braddock fell from his last horse, a bullet through his arm and
lungs, and was dragged along on a stretcher. "We shall know how
to deal with them better another time/' he whispered, practical and
British to the end. They buried him hastily in the middle of the
newly cut road so that the feet of his fleeing soldiery would obliter-
ate his grave against Indian mutilation.

His aide-de-camp, Colonel Washington, four bullet holes in his
uniform but his skin magically untouched, watched that retreat and
knew how to deal with them better another time. He did not suppose
that his enemies would be English, like himself.

The Canadians also retreated, not yet aware that they had de-
stroyed a whole army. Their Indian allies enjoyed the customary
sport of scalping and burning prisoners at leisure.

It was not all panic and rout for England and its colonies that
year. In Nova Scotia the great fort of Halifax balanced Louisbourg
and held the coastline. Fort Lawrence had been built on the isthmus

104

TO HEBEKT'S FAUM 105

of Chignecto, within sight of the new Canadian forts of Beausejour
and Gaspereau. Two empires stared at each other across the sluggish
stream of Missaguash, a queer international boundary.

At Beausejour the commandant, Captain Duchambon de Vergor,
a scrofulous and stuttering creature, contained in himself the ruin of
New France. He had been instructed by Francois Bigot, the
Canadian Intendant and another creature like himself, to "profit by
your place, my dear Vergor; clip and cut. You are free to do what
you please so that you can come home to join me in France and buy
an estate near me,"

Vergor clipped and cut with rapacious fingers. His own private
sale of military stores, while his fortress went short, might be no
great matter in a world war. Multiplied a thousandfold by Bigot
and the clippers and cutters of Quebec, it had become an incurable
disease, and mortal. As if by the inevitable pattern of things and
an iron law of history, it would be Vergor in person who must open
the doors of Quebec to England.

He first opened the doors of Beausejour in surrender and gave
England control of the entire Atlantic coast, except Cape Breton
and the fort of Louisbourg. This success would have satisfied Gov-
ernor Cornwallis of Halifax (uncle of a nephew whose future
lay in Yorktown), were it not for the insoluble problem of the
Acadians.

They stubbornly refused to become Englishmen and had long
refused even to sign the required oath of allegiance to King George.
Cornwallis found their passive resistance baffling. As neither Eng-
lishmen nor New Englanders cared to settle Nova Scotia, the only
settlers somehow must be made to see British horse sense. But how?
The Acadians were peaceable, respectful, and unyielding. They
would do everything else the Governor asked. They would not swear
an oath to the English heretic lest it destroy their hope of Para-
dise.

A stout British soldier called the thing inexplicable. He wrote in
despair to the government: "You have a secret, I fear an inveterate
Enemy praying on your Bowels, masked but rotten at bottom."
Shirley still believed that the Acadians could be gently Anglicized,
possibly Protestantized and turned into sound citizens of the British
Empire. Cornwallis knew now that Shirley was wrong, that the
Acadians had become a fifth column which quietly prevented him
from controlling Nova Scotia. The Acadians knew only two things—
they were Catholic and they owned this land.

The real enemy was not the local settlers, but their friends. Since
England's occupation of Nova Scotia the government at Quebec had

106 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

treated the Acadians less as human beings than as counters in the
old diplomatic game. The player in charge, a master, was Abbe
Joseph Louis Le Loutre.

This tireless priest and agitator served his king much better than
his God. Year after year he terrified the Acadians with threats of
God's anger, stirred them up against their new masters, intrigued
with the fierce Micmacs, organized raids on the English, and paid
100 livres apiece for English scalps. Le Loutre and his Indians were
financed and armed by Bigot, the Intendant, under instructions to
"manage the intrigue in such a way as not to appear in it."

Gornwallis was not fooled. He offered £100 for Le Loutre's head,
but the wily conspirator hid it successfully in the forest or behind
the walls of Beausejour.

Once that fort fell, the English could wait no longer. Governor
Charles Lawrence gave the Acadians a chance to take the oath and,
when they refused, herded more than 6,000 of them—the actual
numbers were never known— upon his ships. "Praying, singing and
crying," many parents separated from their children, the exiles were
unloaded in the English colonies, from Massachusetts to Georgia.
Some escaped the roundup. Some reached Louisiana and remained
there. Others trudged back to their homes in better times. Even an
expulsion, generally regarded as the crime of the century, could not
destroy them. The breed was indestructible. Actually, the English
had treated it far more leniently than the French had ever treated
heretics.

Le Loutre, the chief architect of the Acadians' tragedy, was cap-
tured at sea as he fled to France. He had eight years to meditate his
own crimes in Elizabeth Castle, on the Island of Jersey. Vergor was
court-martialed for graft at Quebec but saved, by Bigot's packed
court and doctored evidence, for a graver betrayal.

Canada had lost the Atlantic coast. In the last year of the official
peace it successfully blocked the Champlain corridor. Old Baron
Dieskau, a German commanding the Canadian forces, met at Lake
George a colonial army trained on rum and such sermon texts as
"Love Your Enemies." He was routed and captured, but the New
Englanders were too badly mauled and led to advance on Montreal.
An ill-managed expedition under Shirley struck at Niagara and
disintegrated at the news of Braddock's defeat.

The Governor of New France, Marquis de Vaudreuil, a native-
born Canadian and son of a former governor, was a born conspirator,
rogue and bungler, with a woman's face and pretty smiling mouth.
He concluded, after the successes of the interior campaign, that he
was America's military master. His letters to Paris advised the King

TO HEBERT'S FARM 107

that, under Vaudreuil's firm hand, Canada remained safe and New
England in terror.

His right-hand man, Bigot—a fat, red-haired, pimply, and ingrati-
ating little rascal, who somehow proved irresistible to women-
rested comfortably on the spoils of government contracts and various
hospitable beds. He spent his days in clipping and cutting, his nights
in venery. He had converted the government into a private purse to
nourish his massive estates and prodigious love life by methods
crude but effective.

Learning, for example, that the Canadians had advanced against
Washington on the Ohio, Bigot smuggled into the freight of the
expedition the obliging cuckold husband of his latest mistress,
Madame Pean. It was a small affair, easily arranged. Expanded by
plunder of the King's supplies, by extortionate prices to the Canadian
people in the royal stores (known to everybody as La Frippone, the
Cheat), such arrangements in Quebec and Paris were bleeding
Canada into defeat, France into revolution.

Canada had lived for 147 years since Champlain's arrival. Only
ten thousand immigrants had come from France, but they had pro-
duced a population of some sixty thousand, who were expected by
their king to hold off the power of about a million English in the
Thirteen Colonies. So far they had done it. Now, for the first time,
they were growing angry with a master never questioned before, or
at least with his grafting servants.

Vaudreuil boasted of his victories, but he soon found the people
short of bread, agitated by "seditious libels,'* and displaying "une
independance extraordinaire." They were beginning to act, in short,
like Canadians. A succession of crop failures deepened the general
misery. Bigot, now thoroughly alarmed, reported that the hungry
habitants would have revolted but for his charity in distributing free
grain, a small debit in his personal ledger of peculation.

Canada, in truth, was bankrupt. The accountants of Paris demon-
strated, by their annual figures, that it never paid its way in trade
with the mother country. Bigot was warned by his king that if he
could not change the colony from a perpetual liability to a profitable
investment it would be abandoned altogether. The Intendant was
shocked, for he had not quite completed his clipping and cutting. He
needed a little more time to prepare for his comfortable retirement
in France.

Happily, men like ex-Governor Glassonniere, the brave little
hunchback, who had seen the potential wealth of Canada, persuaded
the court that its loss would be serious to France, He argued that,
while France might not be able to defeat an English coalition in

108 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

Europe, because it could not control the sea, in Canada and Louisi-
ana and in the old Spanish territory, which it now controlled, France
could drain off England's power and checkmate its world-wide
designs. The court reluctantly accepted this advice, groaning under
the cost.

So far as Canada itself was concerned, there appeared precious
little to save. In the West stood forty-four posts, some, like Detroit
and Niagara, formidable military centers, most of the others mere
cabins behind flimsy wooden walls; at Quebec some noble buildings,
about eight thousand people, and a ridiculous court of gallants in
laces and powdered ladies in high-heeled shoes; at Montreal four
thousand inhabitants within their village palisades; on the St. Law-
rence an almost unbroken street of churches and steep-roofed,
whitewashed cottages.

The tenants of the local seigneuries were hospitable, courteous,
high-spirited, religious, and litigious. Of Quebec they knew little, of
France, New England, and England nothing. They were carefully
shielded from all outside ideas. That dangerous invention, the print-
ing press, had never been allowed in Canada. After Frontenac's
quarrel with Bishop Saint- Vallier over the performance of Moli&re's
Tartuffe, Canadians had seen no theatrical show.

Despite this isolation, or rather because of it, a curious and, for
France and England, a secret and deadly thing had happened in
Canada, not to be discovered for a long time— to the Canadian,
France was no longer home. He had escaped entirely the Enlighten-
ment, which was rapidly engulfing France and carrying it toward
revolution. And when that revolution exploded in Enlightened god-
lessness it must cut forever the spiritual link between France and its
Canadian children. That was a profound continental fact. England
and New England would learn it with difficulty.

The other fact— that the Canadian was now a distinct breed, as
indestructible as the Acadians— would take still longer to penetrate
the English mind, in England and America, would not penetrate it
completely for two centuries, if ever. Shortly, however, the English
of England and America would find, to their amazement, that the
French Canadian would fight for Canada against anybody, for the
only home he knew.

The figures of a million people confronting a twentieth of that
number strung along the St. Lawrence must impress the military
mind of London and Boston. In military terms there could be only
one answer to such a contest. The ever-changing border between the
two peoples inevitably would be expunged.

Unknown to the soldier's pat calculations, much more than mili-

TO BQ&BEKT'S FAKM 109

tary terms were involved— much more, indeed, than the ablest brains
of English politics could distinguish. Even the brain of a Burke did
not realize yet that Canada, like the Thirteen Colonies, was a
tough gristle. Given time, it could harden into the bone of nation-
hood.

When the Seven Years' War of Europe, the French and Indian
War of America, became official in 1756, France could hurl 100,000
troops against the alliance of Pitt's England and Frederick's Prussia,
and France was backed by Austria, Russia, Sweden, and Saxony. Yet
King Louis could spare only 1,200 soldiers for Canada and a little-
known commander, Montcalm, age forty-four.

Montcalm's plump face, small stature, delicate manners, and
bubbling speech deceived the homespun Canadian Governor. An
Indian chief, wiser than Vaudreuil, quickly gauged the true dimen-
sions of the new General: "We wanted to see this famous man who
tramples the English under his feet. We thought we should find him
so tall that his head would be lost in the clouds. But you are a little
man, my father. It is when we look into your eyes that we see the
greatness of the pine tree and the fire of the eagle."

Here, then, was the usual divided triumvirate of Quebec-Vau-
dreuil, holding supreme power and determined in his jealousy and
wrong-headed Canadianism to suppress the French General; Bigot,
determined on nothing but loot and venery; Montcalm, doomed as
their victim from the beginning, another eagle like Frontenac but,
unlike him, pinioned between two vultures.

At first sight Montcalm hated Canada because he never saw more
than its sordid side. He yearned only for his wife, his ten children,
his estate at Candiac, and his olive groves. As he looked across a
soil forever alien to him, his cry~"What a country, where rogues
grow rich and honest men are ruined!"— was the despairing cry of
the Old World, It could not long hold the New.

Montcalm quickly grasped the desperate plight of the colony.
Some barren victories had been won. The English colonials, un-
trained and idiotically led, had been thrown back. Canada's Indian
allies were murdering, torturing, and raping at will on the aban-
doned English frontiers, whence a settler wrote: "It is really very
shocking for the husband to see the wife of his bosom, her head cut
off, and the children's blood drunk like water by these bloody and
cruel savages." But back of the frontier panic stood a million Eng-
lish learning at last the need of unity, and back of them the over-
whelming strategic fact of English sea power, able to bottle up and
starve Canada.

What strength Montcalm possessed lay largely in geography. The

110 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

English could attack Canada only by the St. Lawrence, which
Quebec commanded; by the narrow Champlain corridor, which
perhaps could be defended; by the difficult Mohawk trail to Lake
Ontario, which was separated from Montreal by dangerous rapids;
and by Washington's route through Pennsylvania, past the grave of
Braddock and into the Ohio watershed, where a road must be cut
to carry an army.

The St. Lawrence being safe for the present, Montcalm instantly
struck at the Mohawk and Champlain invasion trails to close them.
On Lake Ontario he seized Oswego by surprise at night. Its bewil-
dered officers were the first to learn that Canada was led by the
ablest soldier yet to appear in America. Then Montcalm hurried to
Ticonderoga, on Lake Champlain, to await, with 5,000 men, an
attack by 10,000 English under the blustering General Loudon.
But Loudon retreated in the autumn without a fight, muttering, as
was his custom, "God damn my blood!"

Vaudreuil claimed entire credit for these successes and assured
his king that "the hopes of His Britannic Majesty have vanished and
will hardly revive again, for I shall take care to crush them in the
bud."

Canada, as Montcalm knew, had felt only the enemy's first feeble
resistance. He knew also that Vaudreuil was undermining him at
Paris while flattering him at Quebec. In the same letter the Governor
asked the King how the General "can restrain his officers when he
cannot restrain himself?" and yet promised to maintain "the most
perfect union and understanding" with the man he was systemati-
cally destroying.

Montcalm had no stomach for such intrigue. After the Governor's
wife had publicly questioned his strategy at a banquet, the General
replied: "Permit me to have the honor to say that ladies ought not
to talk of war." Madame Vaudreuil and everybody else in the court
circle continued to talk behind his back. From sheer boredom, he
threw himself into the winter festivities at Quebec and Montreal,
entertained at dinner "three times a week," played cards for high
stakes, overspent his salary, and like Frontenac, danced with the
Indians.

The family man was sick at heart under this public pose. A con-
stant stream of his disjointed and unpunctuated letters asked his
wife for news of his children, his farm, and his olive mill. He re-
quested a shipment of prunes, olives, anchovies, muscat wine,
capers, sausages, confectionery, scent bags, perfumed pomatum for
presents, and especially a dozen bottles of English lavender to cut
the very smell of Canada. He had "no time to occupy myself with

TO HEBERT'S FABM 111

the ladies even if I wished to" but in a letter from Montreal to
Quebec he confessed to a friend that he was glad to be remembered
by "the three ladies in the Rue du Parloir and I am flattered by their
remembrance, especially by that of one of them in whom I find at
certain moments too much wit and too many charms for rny
tranquillity."

He perceived, through the brief comedy, the approaching tragedy
of Canada and his own: "I am a general-in-chief subordinated [to
the Governor]; I am esteemed, respected, beloved, envied, hated;
I pass for proud, supple, stiff, yielding, polite, devout, gallant etc.;
and I long for peace." This was the civilized spirit of France, deso-
late and rootless in the wilderness. It was not the spirit that could
save Canada. If Montcalm was America's ablest soldier, he could
never be a Canadian.

The spring of '57 rang down the curtain on the winter tableau.
England began real war with another siege of Louisbourg, only to
find that the French Navy, for once, was there in time. The great
fortress stood invulnerable and the colonial armies, moved out of
the interior for a siege, were hustled back again— too late.

In their absence Montcalm struck again, as only he could strike.
The helpless garrison of Fort William Henry, at the south end of
Lake George, was surrounded and forced to surrender. Whereupon
Montcalm's Indians fell upon the prisoners as he rushed about vainly
shouting: "Kill me, but spare the English who are under my pro-
tection!" No one knows how many English were murdered. The
French said fifty, but six or seven hundred were carried off, of
whom Montcalm rescued some four hundred. He was appalled to
see the Indians forcing some Englishmen to eat their fellows and,
to his protest, a cannibal chief made a classic reply: "You have
French taste. I have Indian. This is good meat for me." The civilized
General was confirmed in his horror of America, sickened by a
victory which the English remembered only as a massacre.

Massacre or victory, it drove England and its thirteen colonies
together. Montcalm in his second winter at Quebec, could see the
jaws of that leisurely beast, the English lion, closing rapidly. "I
don't know," he wrote home, "what to do or say or read or where
to go and I think at the end of the next campaign I shall ask bluntly
blindly for my recall only because I am bored." There was to be no
such easy way out.

Vaudreuil could see nothing. He did nothing but write of his vic-
tories and the incompetence of his general. Bigot saw everything
and profited by everything he saw. He inflated the currency, drove
the peasants to starvation and riot, feasted the aristocracy at his

112 THE STEUGGLE FOB THE BO3RDEE

palace (quaintly called the Hermitage), gambled at Madame Pean's
bagnio, and dragged his friends by sleigh on the St. Lawrence from
Quebec to Montreal, with a ball at every nightly stopping place.

Pitt had finally perfected the amphibious strategy designed to
capture Canada entire. His general, Jeffrey Amherst, a stupid, slow,
but competent soldier, besieged Louisbourg on the way to Quebec
in the summer of '58. The fortress proved more formidable than he
had expected. By the time it surrendered under his bombardment
the season was too far gone for the intended advance up the river.

Pitt* s master plan had failed temporarily under Amherst, but
young Wolfe had landed in America, among the first ashore at
Louisbourg. He carried no weapon except a wooden cane. Though
his tall body in scarlet uniform was a reckless and easy target,
the French gunners managed to miss it. He was preserved for an-
other landing the next year. The delay infuriated him. When Am-
herst refused to attack Quebec, Wolfe threatened to resign, but he
was mollified and spent the next winter in England. There he con-
trived with Pitt a larger plan for '59.

Observing the gaunt and fiery soldier, that eminent political fixer,
the Duke of Newcastle, remarked that Pitt's young general was
mad. "Mad, is he?" replied the King in a passing moment of intel-
ligence. "Then I hope he will bite some of my other generals/'

The fall of Louisbourg threatened to seal Canada on the east. In
the same summer the English tried to cut it through the center by
the well-worn Champlain corridor. They might have succeeded
under the gallant young Lord Howe— a general who washed his
own clothes in the brook and entertained his officers on pork and
beans— but for a chance bullet. It killed him instantly on his march
to Ticonderoga. His witless successor, James Abercromby, hesitated
too long and finally threw his force of 20,000 men against Mont-
calm's 5,000, safe behind their breastwork of fallen trees.

The ensuing battle produced the worst carnage yet witnessed in
the New World. A scarlet English army was skewered like game on
sharpened stakes, seldom seeing even the white uniforms of the
French. Having fought all day in shirt sleeves, Montcalm looked out
from his hill upon a shambles, the English in frantic retreat, the
lilies of France still serene above the towers of Ticonderoga. He
raised a cross bearing a Latin poem of his own composition and sat
down on the battlefield to write a letter of triumph to his wife.

It was his greatest and his last triumph and it was overbalanced
by defeat elsewhere.

Louisbourg had been surrendered. John Bradstreet's army had
reached Lake Ontario and easily captured Fort Frontenac. Montreal

TO HEBERT'S FAKM 113

and Quebec were isolated from the interior. John Forbes, dying on
his stretcher, and quarreling with Washington, had avenged Brad-
dock. His army cut its way through the Alleghenies to Fort
Duquesne, which the fleeing Canadians had burned. In its place
Forbes built Fort Pitt, the future Pittsburgh. His soldiers buried
the bleached bones of Braddock's victim.

Thus the Ohio, where Washington had begun the war, Louisiana,
and the West were lost to Canada. It was truncated by land, bottled
up by sea. The campaign of '58, as Montcalm realized, had assured
the end. He might hope at best to hold Quebec and, with it as a
bargaining counter, the diplomats perhaps could salvage something
in this wretched country.

Even VaudreuiFs tone had changed. He wrote in despair to Paris,
blamed Montcalm for everything and demanded the General's re-
call for "infamous conduct and indecent talk." A last flicker of sense
made Paris refuse.

Montcalm's personal emissary pleaded for help but the desperate
colonial minister, surveying the disastrous campaigns of Europe,
retorted: "Eh, monsieur, when the house is on fire one cannot
occupy one's self with the stable." That reply wrote the true obituary
of New France. Old France had tried to make it a stable. As a
stable it was allowed to burn. From the stable would issue a sur-
prising species of animals.

So Montcalm awaited through the endless winter the doom he
foresaw in the spring. He was helpless to undo the systematic ruin
of Vaudreuil and Bigot. He was numb with grief at the vague news
of a daughter's death and would never know which of his family
he had lost. "Oh, when shall we get out of this country?" It would
not be long.

In England, Wolfe waited also, now aged thirty-two, youngest
general in the British Army— his earlier promotions purchased by
money, according to the usual custom—and the luckiest. Pitt, he
wrote, might "dispose of my slight carcass as he pleases. I am in a
very bad condition with the gravel and the rheumatism." He ar-
ranged for the care of his dogs, "especially my friend Caesar, who
has great merit and much good humor." And with small chance of
consummation he engaged himself to Katherine Lowther. Her min-
iature portrait around his neck, he was ready to capture Canada.

The flagship Sutherland rode at anchor in the St. Lawrence
above Quebec on the night of September 12, 1759. In her cabin
Wolfe made ready to redeem the promise given to his father long

114 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

ago. He wrote his final orders in his own hand and, since he ex-
pected to die in the morning, took the miniature from his breast
and handed it to his friend, John Jervis. It was to be returned to
Katherine, set with jewels costing £500, As everything was ready,
he recited to his officers Gray's "Elegy." "Gentlemen/' he added,
"I would rather have written those lines than take Quebec."

The man who had written them, as it happened, was snug in a
professor's apartment at Cambridge University, where he had lately
stood in his nightcap, shaking at his students' false alarm of fire.
Hence a curious juxtaposition for the study of philosophers— the man
who defies death in poetry shrieks in terror at a freshmen's prank;
the man who reverently recites the poet's lines faces death at first
hand, with nothing more than a dull melancholy, in the darkness of
an alien river on the other side of the world, yet knows better than
the poet that the paths of glory lead only to the grave. Wolfe was no
philosopher. But he understood himself as "a man that must neces-
sarily be ruined." Death had been at his side since boyhood. It was
welcome.

His scant store of strength had been used up by now. All summer
he had lain with Admiral Saunders's fleet and an army of 9,000 men,
impotent before the black rock. Below it, on the river's northern
bank, his first rash attack had sunk into the mud. His cannons had
smashed the town, emptied it of all but 2,000 soldiers and reduced
them to a ration of two ounces of bread a day, while Bigot and the
court circle feasted as usual. The rock, though almost deserted,
seemed through Wolfe's telescope to remain invincible.

And so he writhed with fever in the attic of a farmhouse and
saw the summer ebb out. The first autumn frost announced the
approach of winter which must soon drive his ships from the river—
and, with winter, that other dark visitor, long expected, Quebec
must be taken now or Wolfe would not live to take it.

Ainherst, the Fabian General, had promised to invade Canada
from the south before now but had bogged down on Lake Cham-
plain, dosed his army of 11?000 men on salubrious spruce beer and
built unnecessary forts wholesale. Wolfe was alone, the supreme
prize of the New World a few yards off, beyond his reach. He made
a dozen plans and rejected them. In the end he adopted, without
telling even his staff, the most unlikely plan of all.

To climb the heights west of the town and risk battle there with
an army possibly twice the size of his own was madness. The Duke
of Newcastle had been right for once. Pitt's general, fortunately,
was mad and lucky.

He needed only enough physical strength to see his gamble

TO HEBERT'S FARM 115

through. "I know perfectly well/' he told his surgeon, "y°u cannot
cure me, but pray make me up so that I may be without pain for
a few days and do rny duty." fie would not return to England with-
out victory, "to be exposed to the censure and reproach of an
ignorant populace/' Somehow the surgeon made him up.

From the south bank of the river Wolfe turned his telescope for
the last time on the steep slopes west of the Quebec citadel. There
seemed to be a rough trail leading from a cove on the shore, called
the Anse au Foulon, to the flat field above— once Hebert's farm, now
the Plains of Maitre Abraham Martin, a dead river pilot, whose
name would soon be immortal. A few French were camped at the
top of the trail— a hundred, in fact, enough to withhold an army
on these heights until the arrival of Montcalm from Quebec or the
forces of his lieutenant, Bougainville, now marching wearily up
and down the river to watch the English ships.

The hundred guards at the Anse au Foulon were commanded by
Bigot's old friend, Vergon That veteran of Beaus&jour was still
faithfully clipping and cutting. He had sent his soldiers home to
harvest their crops and reap his own fields as well. If Wolfe had
known that, he would have felt more confident in the cabin of the
Sutherland.

As it was, he revealed the night's desperate plan to his staff with
no assurance of victory, in complete confidence of death. At the
turn of the tide two lanterns were hoisted to the Sutherland's
shrouds, the signal to his army. It had marched upriver on the
south bank, without attracting Bougainville's attention. Now it em-
barked silently in bateaux and floated downstream on the tide.

Below the town, on the Beauport flats, Montcalm paced the fields
that night, too nervous to sleep. He expected another attack there,
for the English warships had begun a heavy bombardment. Boats
filled with sailors prowled up and down the shore to delude him.
Time was all he asked, time for the river to freeze and drive the
English home. But he knew that even if winter saved him now the
colony was lost by blockade, by the fall of Fort Niagara before
Amherst's leisurely assault and by the inevitable loss of Montreal.

Even on the heights above the town— though no general, even an
Englishman, could be mad enough to attack them— Montcalm had
taken no chances. He had sent a battalion of troops to Anse au
Foulon, that fatal dent in the riverbank, and Vaudreuil had re-
turned them to the Beauport lines. Three days later Montcalm had
ordered the battalion back and again Vaudreuil had returned it—
this a day before Wolfe's assault. Still Montcalm had no reason for
alarm in that quarter. A hundred men could easily hold the narrow

116 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

trail until Bougainville reached them. How could Montcalm imagine
that Vergor was asleep in his tent and most of his men gone home?
The General himself had not taken off his clothes since the twenty-
third of June.

As Montcalm paced the fields, with a sense of imminent danger,
Vaudreuil, the indefatigable penman, was comfortably installed in
a distant farmhouse, and writing to France that "I shall do the im-
possible to prevent our enemies from making progress in any direc-
tion'* and "will fight them with an ardor, and even a fury which
so exceeds the range of their ambitious designs." His farmhouse far
exceeded the range of the English guns.

Montcalm paced, Vaudreuil wrote, and Wolfe's boats slipped,
unseen, down the river, A Canadian sentry sang out: "Qui vive?"
Wolfe had prepared for that, on information from Canadian de-
serters. In perfect French a Highland officer, Simon Fraser, an-
swered quietly: "France!" and added: "Provision boats. Don't make
a noise; the English will hear us." The sentries expected provision
boats from Montreal that night. They let the English pass.

The clumsy figure of Wolfe, his resplendent new uniform hidden
under a massive gray cape, was the first ashore at Anse au Foulon.
He looked up the slippery heights and remarked quite cheerfully to
his officers: "I don't think we can by any possible means get up
there, but, however, we must use our best endeavor."

They slithered up the wet trail, fell upon Vergor in his tent, shot
him in the heel as he fled, and captured his handful of soldiers with-
out warning Bougainville, a few miles up the river. By dawn 4,800
English, all Wolfe could muster, stood in a double scarlet line
across Maitre Abraham's plains. Louis Hebert had sunk the first
Canadian plow in this earth. Now it lay under the sword of the
invader. The plow would remain when the sword had gone.

Montcalm, at Beauport, had asked Vaudreuil to warn him of
any danger in Quebec. Vaudreuil was safe abed and sent no answer.
After a sleepless night of cannon fire, Montcalm was suspicious. He
called for his horse and rode in the first light toward the town.
Even before he reached it he beheld the line of scarlet across the
plains. "This," he muttered to his aide, "is a serious business."

More serious than he yet realized. When he galloped through the
town and past the St. Louis Gate he found not a raiding party but
the British Army. It stood stolid, motionless, in a silence cut only
by the squeal of Highland pipes. "There they are," cried Montcalm,
"where they have no right to be!"

To defend Quebec's walls or risk everything on a quick attack?
Montcalm hesitated for a moment only. Impetuosity had always

TO HEBERT'S FARM 117

been his weakness, but up to now it had succeeded. He would at-
tack. First he sent to the town for twenty-five guns. Had they
arrived the English, with only two small field pieces, would have
been mowed down where they stood. Ramezay, commander of the
Quebec garrison, would spare only three cannons. Vaudreuil, in
answer to Montcalm's message, refused to send any troops from
Beauport He was waiting, as usual, to claim victory for himself or
to blame defeat on his general. So Montcalm must advance with
his present force of some five thousand French regulars, Canadians,
and Indians before the English landed any more men or starved
Quebec into surrender.

He ranged the army before the town walls and moved up and
down their lines, a minute figure on a black horse, sword raised,
cuirass glinting beneath his dark coat. At nine o'clock the impetu-
ous General could wait no longer. He gave the order to advance.
It was the last order he would ever give. He, too, was about to
fulfill a promise to his father.

The line moved forward, the white ranks of the French regulars
steady in the center, the Indians whooping on the flanks, the Ca-
nadians falling to the ground to reload at every shot. It was a
ragged line, not what Montcalm had ordered.

Wolfe stood at the right end of his double ranks. His towering
figure and scarlet uniform already had proved an attractive target.
A bullet shattered his wrist. He wrapped it in a handkerchief with-
out a word. Another pierced his groin, but he gave no sign of pain.
The English stood beside him, no muscle moving. Then, at forty
paces, they fired as one man and charged with bayonet. Through
the smoke the French were seen shattered, in full flight.

Wolfe led the charge. A third bullet passed through his chest.
Slowly, with a surprised look, he slumped upon the soil of Canada.
His comrades called out for a surgeon. "There's no need," said the
factual young man. He had foreseen everything. "It's all over
with me."

Just then he heard above the crash of musketry and the shrieks
of the Highlanders a soldier shouting: "They run!" He opened his
eyes for the last time. "Who run?" "The enemy, sir. Egad, they give
way everywhere." "Now God be praised; I'll die in peace." A mo-
ment later the parental vow had been redeemed.

Montcalm redeemed his also. Shot in the back, he had been car-
ried by the rout through the St. Louis Gate. The townspeople
clamored around his horse. "It's nothing, nothing," he told them.
"Don't be troubled for me, my good friends." They took him to the
house of Surgeon Arnoux, who pronounced his wound mortal. "So

118 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

much the better/* Montcalm replied. "I am happy that I shall not
live to see the surrender of Quebec."

He sent a note to the English, imploring them to be the pro-
tectors, of the French Canadians "as I have been their father." That
done, he refused to give further orders. "I have much business that
must be attended to, of greater moment than your ruined garrison
and this wretched country,"

Thus he died, an exile and an alien, a child of Europe lost with all
his kind in America.

A rough box was hastily nailed together to hold his small body.
'War is the Grave of the Montcalms," but no Montcalm had found
a grave like his. The box was thrust into a shell hole beneath the
floor of the Ursuline Convent and covered with rubble,

The town surrendered. A second and ferocious battle of Quebec
had yet to be fought. Next spring the dauntless Chevalier de L6vis,
Montcalm's second-in-command, a bon vivant, amorist and skillful
soldier, descended the river from Montreal, defeated the English
under General Murray and drove them helter-skelter behind their
walls. The Canadians might have captured the town but for the
opportune arrival of an English fleet. That was the end, assured
from the beginning. Britain held the sea and the power to starve
its enemy. It had mobilized almost as many soldiers as there were
people in Canada.

Amherst finally closed in on Montreal and accepted its surrender.
Vaudreuil signed the final capitulation of Canada, blaming it, of
course, on the dead French General, and somehow was acquited
of his own crimes in the courts of France. Bigot was first imprisoned
in the Bastille and later banished to live on the savings of his last
mistress, the lovely and thrifty Ang^lique des Meloises.

Thus ended New France, conquered by overpowering numbers,
by the sure strangulation of sea power, by the corruption and
stupidity of the Bourbons, by the luck or genius of a young invalid.
The future of a continent seemed permanently settled by two men,
English and French, who had kept their promises to their fathers.

Wolfe and Montcalm had accomplished much, but not that New
France had died in name only, had become Canada in substance.

Apparently North America, between the North Pole and the
Spanish territories, was within England's clutch. There was to be?
then, no boundary across the middle of the continent. The 49th
Parallel would remain an unnoted line on a map of undivided
British ownership. A few men guessed otherwise.

As bonfires blazed across the British Isles, as Walpole scribbled
hysterically at Strawberry Hill and Dr, Johnson uttered his pro-

TO HEBERT'S FARM 119

fluidities in the club, down in Boston a farseeing young preacher,
Jonathan Mayhew, announced in his next Sunday sermon that the
English colonies, freed of the French menace beside them, must
become "a mighty Empire."

Mayhew, perhaps, but not many others, vaguely guessed the ulti-
mate meaning of Wolfe's victory. No longer dependent on England
for protection against French Canada, the Thirteen Colonies had
the chance to decide their own future, in separation from their
mother, if necessary. On Hubert's farm, a new crop had been surely
sown, would sprout soon and bear the name of the American
Revolution.

Another crop likewise was in the ground, but invisible, and would
bear no permanent name for more than a hundred years. English
soldiers were helping the Canadians to harvest grain in the autumn
of 1760 and sharing their scanty rations with the Quebec towns-
folk. The kilted and barelegged Highlanders wore woolen drawers
knitted by Canadian nuns against the northern cold. In this friend-
ship between two races, neither quite understandable to the other,
the second nation of America already was conceived.

8

The English Gentleman

[1763-1775]

A:ONG THE ENGLISH GENTLEMEN OF THE OLD SCHOOL WHO HEARD
the latest rumblings from the Thirteen Colonies, not the least
startled and incredulous was Guy Carleton.

The news was indeed startling and incredible to such a gentle-
man as Carleton. A Virginian named Patrick Henry— a shambling,
shabby and redheaded yokel, as it was reported in London—had
introduced in the House of Burgesses a series of outlandish "Re-
solves" and had cried out: "If this be treason, make the most of it."
Sam Adams, in English eyes an even more repulsive character, a
mere demagogue, burly, ragged and vulgar, was stirring up the
mobs of Boston. Why, even the American gentry seemed to be
losing their senses in pursuit of what they were pleased to call
liberty— as if they had not secured, by the Seven Years' War, all the
liberty that any Englishman could possibly desire.

Carleton had fought in that war. He had supposed that the
British victory would settle the future of America for good and to
the satisfaction of all sensible men. Hence it was disturbing and
painful for a gentleman of the old school to hear that the Thirteen
Colonies doubted the result of the war and the wisdom of His
Majesty's government, which had saved them from the French
of Canada.

Being an English gentleman (though born in Ireland), Carleton
rather resembled in character his future enemy, Washington. In
appearance also the two men were not unlike. Carleton stood six
feet tall, his body was massive and muscular, his face, like Wash-
ington's, was square, heavy-jawed, and solid. A young officer in the
British Army, he had earned the nickname of "grave Carleton." Two
grave men of middle age, one from Virginia and the other from

THE ENGLISH GENTLEMAN 121

County Tyrone, had some ten years of business to transact between
them, none of it pleasant.

Now that Wolfe and Montcalm were gone and France driven
from America, who would govern the continent? As it was to hap-
pen—against all calculation, all geographic facts, economic laws, and
political theories— Washington and Carleton would split the conti-
nent and share the government.

If North American history holds any parallel to Washington's
career, it is Carleton's. That fact is generally overlooked, but the
parallel is close. Nor does either of them suffer from such a com-
parison.

Only second to Washington, Carleton was to shape the conti-
nent's political future, so far as individual men could shape it. For
which he received small thanks from the British government, little
recognition from the Canadian people whose nation he made pos-
sible, and the hatred of the United States because he held it south
of the 49th Parallel. Carleton doubtless was not a man to attract
thanks or recognition— too grave, too inflexible, too sure of his own
virtue, too ignorant of ordinary men, and a trifle pompous. Yet one
of North America's major architects.

His career, like Washington's, began in misfortune and mistake.
About the time when Washington was driven from Fort Necessity,
after a military blunder, Carleton incurred the high dudgeon of
King George II by some indiscreet and bitter remarks about the
alien Hanoverian dynasty. The King never forgave him.

But Carleton was an able officer, distinguished in battle, and had
caught the eyes of Pitt and Amherst Ordered to capture Louis-
bourg, Amherst wanted Carleton with him. The King indignantly
refused, to Wolfe's "very great grief and disappointment." When
Wolfe was ordered next year to capture Quebec, he insisted on
Carleton's appointment to his staff. Again the King objected. Three
times Pitt himself begged the royal mind to change and finally got
a grudging approval, though George was sure no good would come
of it

The King was habitually wrong. Carleton served as quartermaster
general at Quebec with outstanding skill, was wounded in the head
during the Battle of the Plains, and was willed a thousand pounds
by his commander, besides all Wolfe's books and papers. He had
become the dead hero's closest friend and nothing more. Between
1759 and 1766 he continued to fight bravely in Britain's wars, being
twice wounded, in France and the West Indies.

Meantime, the new British colony of Quebec remained under the
gentle military rule of General Murray. That friendly officer loved

122 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

the quaint ways of the French Canadians but had begun to suspect
that they were difficult, if not impossible to Anglicize. More difficult
still, and quite impossible, in another fashion, were the immigrants,
fur traders, merchants, political agitators, and carpetbaggers who
had flocked to Quebec and Montreal from the Thirteen Colonies
to exploit a conquered people.

Murray had trouble even with his own army. It actually threatened
to mutiny because its pay was cut by the British government. As a
result, among all the endless spectacles witnessed at Quebec, none
was more remarkable than the redcoats lined up and ordered, as a
sign of obedience, to march between two flagpoles, on pain of in-
stant death, the General promising to kill with his own hands the
first man who refused. The army marched.

Much larger armies of a deadlier sort were soon marching to the
westward, far beyond Murray's control. A struggle for the West
had precipitated the Seven Years* War. Soon it would precipitate the
American Revolution. The Peace of Paris had hardly been signed
in 1763 before the West precipitated the largest and bloodiest Indian
war on record.

White statesmen in Paris had understood little about America.
In the lodges of the Ottawas, near Detroit, a red statesman named
Pontiac understood the peace treaty better than its makers did—
understood at least that it meant the destruction of Indian life.

According to its terms, France ceded all of Canada to Britain,
which did not want it. Britain would have preferred the West
Indian island of Guadeloupe, with its tons of sugar, to Canada, with
its acres of snow, but that sweet prize was reluctantly abandoned
in generosity to France, in "deference to the existing British sugar
interests and in compliance with the prejudices of the Thirteen
Colonies, They would never tolerate French power on their borders.

Louisiana, west of the Mississippi, was given to Spain. It now
controlled a southern and western empire of indeterminate dimen-
sions, creeping slowly up from Mexico along the California coast.

East of the central river, north to the pole, and no one knew
how far west in the Hudson's Bay Company territories, Britain's
flag could fly undisputed wherever Britons cared to raise it.

The sprawling substance of the first real British Empire, in Amer-
ica and other continents, must be organized somehow, and Britain
did not know how to organize it. The ensuing errors assured the
dissolution of the first empire and the beginnings of the short-lived
second.

In America the fatal error was to subordinate the interests not
only of conquered Canada but of the original English colonies to a

NORTH AMERICA 17.55-1760

British
i- - French

124 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BOKDEB

scheme of empire centralized in London. England misjudged the
Thirteen Colonies. It totally misunderstood the new Canadian
colony of Quebec, and for that misunderstanding would pay a high
price, though not the price of revolution and divorce, to be paid in
the case of the United States. But it was not the colonies, English
or Canadian, that began to smash the imperial design. The first blow
came from the Indians.

Pontiac saw at once that when the English owned the eastern half
of Louisiana they would occupy it. The settlers, long contained by
the French, would soon pour down the Ohio, Each settler who
cleared his spot of soil destroyed some part of the old hunting
ground, the habitat of the fur bearers, the basis of the Indians'
existence.

The Senecas had grasped the danger as soon as did the Ottawa
chief. They sent emissaries to the more western tribes to propose a
general confederacy of defense— the old dream of the Iroquois na-
tions—and a war of extermination against the whites.

The Seneca war belts were welcomed throughout the interior
where the Indians had listened to their old friends, the Canadian
fur traders, remembered Onontio, and expected France to recapture
Canada after a temporary defeat. Now, in Pontiac, the Indian race
had produced its first political and military giant. He must fail in
his own purpose, since his race was doomed. But in his squalid bark
house he held the power to launch a civil war large enough to
sunder the English race.

The white man could find for a leader against Pontiac nothing
better than Amherst, a general who had arrived too late at Quebec,
who never bothered to comprehend America, who considered a
native uprising "of very little consequence/' who thought he could
subdue the Indians by refusing them all goods, even essential gun-
powder, and proposed instead to give them blankets infected with
smallpox and thus annihilate them by epidemic.

Amherst learned better, again too late. Pontiac besieged Detroit
and isolated it for six months. Under his influence and the racialist
preaching of a Delaware sage known as the Prophet, most of the
tribes south of the St. Lawrence rose in a series of sudden coups to
spread tomahawk, fire, and torture across the whole western frontier.

One after another, in the course of a few weeks, Mackinac, San-
dusky, Venango, Quiatenon, Le Boeuf, Presque Isle, and St. Joseph
all fell to assault or treachery. Usually their garrisons, a sergeant's
guard and a dozen men, were lured outside the palisades for a con-
ference and murdered. The Mackinac soldiers were entertained, on
King George's birthday, by an innocent game of lacrosse, while

THE ENGLISH GENTLEMAN 125

the squaws, carrying sawed-off muskets under their blankets, in-
filtrated the fort and produced these weapons at the right moment
to butcher the inhabitants. Detroit and Pitt were warned by these
disasters, but barely managed to survive their long sieges.

Probably five hundred English soldiers and two thousand settlers
were killed during the summer and autumn of 1763, many of them
boiled and eaten with the usual religious ritual. The English suf-
fered heavier losses from Pontiac's tomahawks than from the French
guns in the victorious campaign of 1759. After ousting France, Eng-
land seemed likely to lose control of the entire West to its original
owners.

Pontiac's genius, however, could not long contend with the facts
of power, geography, and economics. The far western tribes needed
trade goods, and while they preferred to deal with French Cana-
dians, English traders were better than none. As quickly as it had
arisen, the native conspiracy collapsed. Pontiac buried the hatchet
in Fort Oswego at the feet of Sir William Johnson, the Iroquois*
great friend, received a silver medal and kept his pledge of peace.
A wandering exile, he was soon murdered by his friends in a
drunken brawl.

Nevertheless, he had scared the British government. It hastened
to guarantee the Indians an inviolate reserve between the Alle-
ghenies and the Mississippi, where no white man could settle.

The Proclamation of 1763 thus attempted to clamp down an im-
possible boundary on Quebec and on the English colonies. Quebec
was bounded on the west by a line drawn from the crossing of the
45th Parallel and the St. Lawrence to Lake Nipissing, roughly the
line of the Ottawa River moved slightly westward. Still more fragile
was the line drawn north and south on the watershed of the Alle-
ghenies to halt the settlers who would never be halted.

Neither the Indians nor the English colonies were fooled by these
arbitrary exercises in geography. The Indians knew the colonists
would move west. The colonists had started the war on the Ohio,
with Washington's guns at Fort Necessity, they had won it, or
thought they had, and were entitled to their reward. The western
land was theirs and they would have it. Quebec, a conquered colony
of France, could hardly complain if it was treated as such and
truncated. The Thirteen Colonies exploded in anger because they
were betrayed. And from England's standpoint the betrayal had
the added disadvantage of being unenforceable.

The attempt to close the West, therefore, became one of the
Intolerable Acts listed in the Thirteen Colonies* bill of particulars
against the British government. It was the first and largest cause

126 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

of the Revolution. Without other Intolerable Acts, the closure of
the West alone, if seriously maintained, assured the break with
England. Again the empty Ohio wilds were disrupting the power
balance of die world.

The project of a vast Indian reservation had possibly demon-
strated the British government's humanity, or its terror, but its chief
motive in practical politics was to preserve the western fur trade
from destruction by the settlers of the Thirteen Colonies. England
had inherited the complex and delicate anatomy of Talon's trading
empire and knew no better than he how to manage it. Like France,
England was being sucked into the West and, like France, could
not foresee the results.

Though inevitable, they revealed themselves slowly. The Thirteen
Colonies were determined to possess the western land and enforce
the old charters, running from the Atlantic to the Pacific. They were
not yet ready to revolt Men like Franklin greeted the coronation
of the sober young King George III as an assurance that England
would do the right thing by its sons overseas. "Faction/' he said,
"will dissolve and be dissipated like a morning fog before the rising
sun." Franklin did not know George or the eminent blockheads
around him.

Appointed governor of Quebec by the new monarch— his old
affronts to the royal family forgiven— Carleton arrived at his capital
in 1766 to find it astir, not for the reasons agitating the Thirteen
Colonies and not so angrily, yet with a depressing lack of loyalty
to its new king. What, for example, was an English gentleman of
the old school to make of the ridiculous affair of Walker's Ear,
which had long disturbed Canada as Jenkins's Ear had once dis-
turbed England?

Walker was one of the new English magistrates in Montreal.
He and the other immigrants from the Thirteen Colonies resented
Murray's softness toward the Canadians and detested his troops
for the same reason. When Captain Payne, an English officer, was
billeted on a Montreal family, Walker threw him into jail, quite
illegally, on the excuse that billeting was prohibited. A posse of
masked men, supposedly Canadians, beat up the magistrate and, to
mark their displeasure permanently, cut off one of his ears.

That lost ear became the symbol and rallying cry of the British
in Canada, the badge of Murray's shameful surrender to the Cana-
dians, a useful piece of propaganda for the agitators of the Thirteen
Colonies, already engaged at home in redbaiting the redcoats.
Walker's accident also infuriated the British Parliament. But it left
the new Canadian Governor as cool and grave as ever,

THE ENGLISH GENTLEMAN 127

Carleton saw that much more was involved in Canada than the
amputation of a scheming local politician. The important question-
far more urgent than he had supposed— was whether Canada would
be amputated from Britain and grafted to the rebellious body of
the Thirteen Colonies.

Busily stamping down the imperial design upon the Thirteen,
the government of England had little time to consider the Four-
teenth, in Quebec. Carleton was left alone to grapple with the same
design in Canadian terms. He found those terms unworkable but,
unlike the conspirators of Boston and Williamsburg, he could quietly
change the design in a lonely foreign region, where an alien and
conquered people would do whatever he ordered, where EnglancJ
saw little of interest or importance anyway.

Actually, Quebec was the second key to the riddle of America,
The first key was being fashioned in Boston and would soon be
inserted in the unlikely keyhole of Lexington Common. The secon4
lay in the hands of the Canadian Governor. It was the key to th@
northern half of the continent.

So far neither Carleton nor anyone else knew how to apply it. Aa
ill-shaped key, designed in England, just would not fit the huge
doorway of the Canadian West. England understood no better than
France the nature of this country, its geography, its economics, or
its people.

The Canadian colonies of Quebec and Nova Scotia, however, had
no immediate reason to complain of their conquerors.

Nova Scotia already was a going concern, with its own legislative
assembly, granted immediately after the fall of Louisbourg. It was
mainly a Yankee concern, peopled by New England immigration
from Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. It held the northern
Atlantic coast for England at such high military expenditure that
Edmund Burke groaned out in Parliament: "Good God, what sums
the nursing of that ill-thriven, hard-visaged, ill-favored brat have
cost this wittol nation!" Yes, but a good investment, as it would
soon appear. The hard-visaged Nova Scotians were hard on
the inside as well, hard enough to reject the American Revolu-
tion.

Quebec was a different proposition. Apart from a small parcel of
postwar immigrants from the Thirteen Colonies, its 65,000 people
were all French by origin, although (as England had yet to learn)
they were no longer French by any other measurement.

At first it was not the native Canadians who undertook to violate
and destroy the neat boundary lines of 1763; it was the little coterie
of New York and New England merchants who had hurried into

128 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

Quebec after the conquest and taken over the old French fur
trade. Since the trade had always lived on the great peltry of the
West and far down the Mississippi, its English heirs were deter-
mined to control the western furs as their predecessors had long
controlled them— and their monoply was not to be shared with their
fellow countrymen of the Thirteen Colonies.

British Canada was even less able than French Canada had been
to hold those regions against the increasing pressures from the
Atlantic seaboard. The only practical problem was not whether the
Thirteen Colonies would burst the paper dike of 1763 but how far
they would flow west and north, how much land they would leave
to Quebec— where, in short, the boundary between the fourteenth
and the other thirteen colonies would come to rest. No one imagined
then that the line, wherever it might lie, would be the boundary of
two separate nations.

The local politics of Quebec soon warped the whole impossible
design of the British Empire in America and at last received the
earnest attention of the British government. What it had heard from
its local governor was most confusing. The new Canadians from the
Thirteen Colonies were determined to smash the western boundary
and revive the old French fur monopoly, and to this end were
demanding an elected legislature which their small racial minority
would dominate. The native Canadians apparently were not inter-
ested in enlightened, elected British institutions.

Still more confusing, the British governors seemed to turn almost
into Frenchmen, or at least into Canadians.

Murray had quickly attracted and relished the jolly, carefree
nature of the Canadians, so much like his own. He knew they would
not change and sooner or later would have their own institutions,
regardless of imperial design. Carleton wrote to London that
"Barring a catastrophe shocking to think of, this country must to the
end of time be peopled by the Canadian race, who have already
taken such firm root and got so great a height that any new stock
transplanted will be totally hid, except in the towns of Quebec and
Montreal."

He was wrong about that because he did not expect an American
Revolution to alter the racial balance of Canada. How could he
foresee that the French-speaking Canadians of Quebec would soon
be a minority in an unimaginable new state? For the present he had
only the first known fact to work with— the fact that the Canadians
would be themselves— and it was enough to reverse the entire policy
of Britain in America.

The original policy was designed to Anglicize the Canadians and,

THE ENGLISH GENTLEMAN 129

if possible, convert them to Protestantism as part of a homogeneous
British and Protestant continent. Carleton had not been in Canada a
year before he saw the futility of that hope. Since the Canadians
would remain Canadian, if not French, Britain must accept the fact
and alter its policies accordingly. Since the other thirteen colonies
were growing restive, Britain must consolidate the loyal fourteenth,
even if it was not British by race or religion.

This policy must be a poor second-best after the brave hopes of
the Seven Years' War and not easily enforced. The Canadians were
exposed to the blandishments and democratic heresies of their neigh-
bors. In the event of trouble between America and Britain, France
might fish in these troubled waters and try to hook Canada. To avert
these two threats the Canadians must be attached to Britain, not
on Britain's terms but on their own.

That conclusion was the gauge of Carleton's statesmanship and
marked him as one of the decisive figures in North American history.
For under his cool management began the great Canadian paradox.
It would drastically alter in America the course of human events
so complacently laid down and so greatly misunderstood in the
Thirteen Colonies.

Anyway, English gentlemen like Murray and Carleton could see
great political advantages and a highly congenial social climate in
Quebec. There was no democratic nonsense among the peaceable
Canadians, none of those instincts of revolt and class warfare now
upsetting even the stable society of New England.

A gentleman in Quebec could remain a gentleman. The well-
trained, respectful peasants would not question his status, having
always been governed by gentlemen; whereas in the Thirteen Col-
onies persons obviously not gentlemen were uttering the most out-
rageous notions of sovereignty, equality, human rights, and God
alone knew what other seditious libels. Why, then, destroy, by
amalgamation, standardization and social debasement, this Cana-
dian island of sanity in the dark and rising ocean of American
democracy?

So Carleton began to break the Proclamation of 1763, not out-
wardly at first but in detail. That document, like so many other
imperial designs for America, was soon in tatters.

It had imposed English law in Quebec, but the local courts still
followed the law of Paris in civil disputes.

It had promised freehold tenure of land on the English model,
but land was still being granted in the French style, en fief et
seigneurie.

It had abolished the established Catholic Church, but the church

130 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BOBBER

still controlled the people and was not only tolerated but encour-
aged as the most useful implement of government.

It had promised a legislative assembly, but neither Murray nor
Carleton ever called one together. Nobody wanted it, save the
carpetbaggers from the Thirteen Colonies, who wanted it mainly
to nail down their monopoly of the fur trade.

Thus, by another of the queer paradoxes which must always gov-
ern Canada, its new English settlers from the Thirteen Colonies
were mostly opposed to the English King, the Canadian seigneurs
and priests were his ardent supporters, and the peasantry was
largely disregarded by its betters. Not, however, by Carleton. To
satisfy the ordinary Canadian, he was reducing the proclamation,
with its boundaries, to a solemn fiction, more transparent every year.

But for events in the Thirteen Colonies, the British policy might
have been left to perish peaceably in stages. As Carleton judged
them, those events necessitated a sudden change to end the dying
fiction outright and substitute a viable fact, if Britain was to hold
Canada.

Patrick Henry's treason~as an English gentleman must view it-
had spread far, rephrased in the gaudy language of a former clerk
and bankrupt corsetmaker from London named Tom Paine, who
considered Icings "crowned ruffians" and would soon announce, in
a pamphlet oddly entitled Common Sense, that America was "an
asylum of mankind." In Boston Sam Adams, that master of politics
in the raw, was repeating the Virginia Resolves, with the extraordi-
nary proposal that all the colonies must meet right away for com-
mon action. The colonists decided to accept the invitation and con-
vene for worse mischief.

Mobs were breaking into the King's New England offices merely
because his officers collected a harmless stamp tax to pay a small
fraction of the cost of the last war. The colonials, with a lack of
gratitude beyond the comprehension of English gentlemen, were
boycotting British goods and burning Governor Hutchinson's man-
sion. Presently the Stamp Act Congress actually declared that only
their own legislatures could tax Englishmen living in America. The
world of English gentlemen was turning upside down.

Even England seemed not entirely immune to this derangement.
A befuddled government might attribute the confusions of the
Thirteen Colonies to a few treacherous madmen. To Pitt, the Great
Commoner, the colonists were neither treacherous nor mad. They
were Englishmen like those of England and equally entitled to
their rights.

On January 14, 1766, Pitt, crippled by gout, emaciated, wrapped

THE ENGLISH GENTLEMAN 131

in clumsy bandages of flannel, the wreckage of the leader who had
won the Seven Years' War, had hobbled on crutches into the House
of Commons. Those watching him included Franklin, agent of Penn-
sylvania, seated unruffled in the gallery and thinking his own long
thoughts.

Pitt's voice, as he began to speak, was the hollow voice of a ghost
but his eyes, glaring beside his sharp hawk's beak, "would cut a
diamond" and he had mastered the actor's art, had even coached the
peerless Garrick. What would he say about the Thirteen Colonies
and the stamp tax?

The House waited uneasily. Franklin "could not divine on which
side of the question relating to America he would be." After delib-
erately keeping his audience in suspense to build up the actor's
climax, Pitt suddenly denounced the stamp tax and spat out his
imperishable dictum: "The Americans are the sons, not the bastards
of England!" This, even from the Great Commoner, was too much.
Grenville, who had framed the tax, leaped up to defend it and
accuse Pitt of advocating revolution in the colonies. To which Pitt
retorted in words like Henry's: "I rejoice that America has resisted!"

If this was treason in Williamsburg, Pitt had made the most of it
in London. Lesser men could not resist the power of that ghostly
voice. The stamp tax was canceled. Franklin was satisfied. The loyal
and cheering crowds of New York erected a statue of King George,
with firing of cannon and ringing of bells. A barrel of Madeira was
opened at the door of John Hancock, on Boston's exclusive Beacon
Hill, so that all passers-by might drink the health of His Majesty
and the wise old Parliament of England.

This was all very well for the colonies, but their loyalty had been
purchased at substantial cost to the taxpayers of England. Because
the Americans ( as they would be called henceforth ) would not pay
their just share of the cost of protecting themselves in the recent
war, the taxes must be paid mainly by the English gentry, and
they had a profound, highly principled objection to taxes.

Their outburst of rage was more than Pitt could survive as he
formed a pro-American ministry. Under the stress of war, illness,
and his defense of the colonies he lost his reason. The sanest mind
in England went insane at the very moment when it might have
saved the first British Empire.

Pitt's successors, led by "Champagne Charley" Townsend, re-
garded themselves as models of sanity. They proceeded to impose
the final insanity on America. There would be no more of Pitt's
nonsense, no more truckling; to the rabble-rousers like Burke in Lon-
don or Adams in Boston. The Americans would pay their taxes and,

1S2 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

if necessary, the King's army would make them pay. The imperial
design must not be sabotaged by a few lunatics in the jungles of the
New World. Thus spoke Champagne Charley and the higher
lunatics.

Boston crowds seizing one of the King's own revenue cutters; his
officials driven into Castle William by Adams's hoodlums; that
incorrigible patriot mouthing his sedition from Faneuil Hall, nay,
shouting that "if you are men, behave like men ... let us take
arms immediately and be free and seize all the King's officers";
English goods boycotted again; even Franklin, the moderate con-
ciliator, at last "confirmed in opinion that no middle ground can be
well maintained"; in King Street, Boston (on the very day when
England withdrew the intolerable customs duties), some small boys
tossing snowballs at an English sentry, a crowd of idlers assembling,
a guard called out, a stone thrown, a soldier firing his musket, five
citizens hit, and all the Thirteen Colonies ringing with the tale of
the Boston Massacre— this news, quickly carried to Quebec, must
set even a cautious man like Carleton thinking furiously.

What, in sober fact, had happened? Though it seemed complex
and was generally blurred in the excitements of the moment, it was
really very simple. The economic interests of the Thirteen Colonies
had collided with the imperial designs of a mercantilist England,
which regarded America as a fixed source of raw materials and a
protected market for English manufactures, while the colonists
intended to do business where and as they pleased. Their demand
for practical, bread-and-butter economic rights had now fused with
the doctrine of abstract rights imported in the hold of the May-
flower. The resulting chemical combination produced explosion.

For a little while it was delayed by England's second retreat from
its tax policies. A young American named John Adams was bold
enough to defend the Boston Massacre in the courts of Boston.
Franklin reoccupied the lost middle ground and thought the
crackup of the empire would be a "catastrophe." But the truce
would not last long if Sam Adams could break it.

The first manager of machine politics in America, "the master of
the puppets," as his enemies called him, and the idol of the little
men, was comfortably installed among his Caucus Club, his Mo-
hawks, and Sons of Liberty in a grocer's smoky and rum-flavored
backroom, whence poured his endless stream of letters to the
underground throughout the colonies, his lampoons, cartoons and
handbills, his parades and fireworks, his libels against British
officers who, in his imagination, slept with the virtuous womanhood
of America. "The foulest and most venomous serpent ever issued

THE ENGLISH GENTLEMAN 183

from the egg of sedition," Governor Hutchinson now realized, was
building revolution by democratic methods, by sheer organization
and weight of local votes, to be maintained and perfected by others,
for other purposes, in the future.

The chemical combination of commercial interest and abstract
human rights was already well mixed in the grocer's backroom. All
it needed was a spark to touch it off. That spark emerged, curiously
enough, from a cargo of tea in Boston harbor and exploded the first
British Empire.

After the Boston Tea Party-$100,OOQ worth of the East India
Company's precious cargo dumped into the harbor lest it damage
the American merchants by unfair British competition— no middle
ground was left. England closed the port of Boston, threatened the
American businessman with ruin and, as Adams had planned it,
assured the Revolution.

The hectic young man from Virginia, Patrick Henry, summed up
the new posture of things by announcing that "Government is dis-
solved—we are in a state of nature!" What that might mean neither
Henry nor the other revolutionists seemed to know. Certainly it
did not mean only revolt against England.

Political separation was but half the Revolution. The other half,
within the disunited colonies that called themselves united, was
becoming clear, rather late, to all the American businessmen. They
might quarrel with England but, having no wish to lose their prop-
erty and privilege, were appalled to note the rise of the lower
classes, the internal social revolution already flowing in strange
channels. The propertied classes were getting far more than they
had bargained for. Inalienable Rights evidently covered many
things besides the right to dissolve the old political bonds of the
Atlantic. This two-sided revolution began to look like a Pandora's
box from which sprang ugly shapes never mentioned in the noble
debates of the Continental Congress. Society, in a state of nature, as
the rich observed it, wore the dark habit of anarchy.

Nothing could stop the swelling tide. Somewhat disguised by
abstract principles and fine words on paper, it must roll to ends
still unknown after almost two more centuries of perpetual motion.
Yet men like Washington, the natural leader of the political revo-
lution, were ready to pursue it, whatever the later consequences of
social revolution might be.

Treason in Canada had gone to no such lengths, was confined,
indeed, to a few agitators like Walker from the rebellious colonies
to the south. The Canadians were sullen and disgruntled like any
conquered people, heartsick at the loss of their motherland and

134 THE STRUGGLE FOB THE BORDER

their fathers* dream, soul-wounded, baffled by a process beyond
their comprehension, but they were passive. Under an outer air of
submission they hid their passions— deeper, more stubborn and
durable than an American revolutionary or an English gentleman
could conceive.

Still, grave Carleton saw enough below the calm exterior to con-
firm his early calculation. He hurried to London with his own
revolutionary notions, designed to prevent a revolution in Canada.
It took him four years to sell those notions to the British govern-
ment, which was hardly surprising since they proposed a complete
and overt change in the imperial design. At length, when the Thir-
teen Colonies were clearly on the verge of rebellion, the British
government decided that Carleton could be right about his colony
after all, that his new plan might insulate Canada from the
approaching storm,

So, in 1774, Parliament began a new and unique experiment with
the passage of the Quebec Act. It was the first timid and uncon-
scious step in the construction of the second empire and, unknown
to its authors, a step toward the third, to be called a commonwealth.

The Quebec Act repealed the Proclamation of 1763 bag, baggage,
and boundary. The old French system was virtually re-established
in Canada. There was to be no legislative assembly but an ap-
pointed gentlemen's government, composed of a few British gentle-
men, supported by the Canadian gentlemen who, though Catholic,
were legalized and made fit for office by an ingenious new oath.
The seigneurial land laws were confirmed, French law was estab-
lished in civil and English law in criminal cases. The Catholic
Church was permitted to collect its old tithes. Far more important
for the future of the continent, the country between the Ohio and
the Mississippi was restored to the Canadian colony, its original
discoverer and owner.

Britain had retreated from the imperial design, so far as Canada
was concerned, swallowed its pride, and sacrificed its Anglo-Saxon
ideals within eleven years. The Thirteen Colonies, however, saw
only a surrender to the French idolaters, whom they had defeated,
a brazen theft of their western lands, another absolutely Intolerable
Act. Burke called it "squinting at tyranny."

The Ohio, where Washington had started the war, where Brad-
dock had died, where Forbes had beaten the French, was handed
back not to France direct but to Frenchmen called Canadians, the
old enemies. To suit the political convenience of England in the
minor colony of Quebec, the great and victorious colonies of the
Atlantic coast were still barred from their destiny in the West

THE ENGLISH GENTLEMAN 135

Nothing could better suit Sam Adams and the hotheads of
New England.

If England had made another fatal mistake in the Thirteen Col-
onies, it had achieved, whether it knew what it was doing or not, a
supreme stroke of statecraft in Canada. It had laid the foundations
of a loyal British community—not the community it expected or
desired, to be sure, but a friendly community perhaps able to abort
the whole concept of continentalism and draw a boundary across
the continent. A community, in short, which held the first stuff
of nationhood.

Carleton, that cold, imperious English gentleman, could not see
far through the mists of the latest human events. Who could? Not
even a Washington or a Franklin, much less an Adams. For human
events were now running wild from New England to Georgia in the
first stages of a civil war within the English-speaking family.

9

Blunder at Philadelphia

[1775-1782]

ON THE NIGHT OF APRIL 18, 1775, A LANTERN GLOWED IN THE
steeple of a Boston church, a silversmith named Paul Revere
rode breakneck into the countryside, and next morning,
at Lexington, an angry knot of American farmers fired on English
troops the opening shots of the civil war.

This, then, was the end of something and the beginning of some-
thing else. King George did not guess that yet, but it was clear to a
greater man. Franklin, in London, heard of Lexington from a long
distance. The news shattered his last hopes of reconciliation and
revived his "Short Hints" of the almost forgotten Albany Conference.
On them, perhaps, a new nation might be built, but at the moment
it seemed a doubtful hope in the squabbles of the "united" colonies.
So tears blinded old Franklin's eyes as he read the American news-
papers to the great chemist, Joseph Priestley, on his last night in
England.

Carleton did not cry so easily. At times he seemed to have no
emotion in him but a loyalty to the King and his own private code.
However, at the age of forty-eight, while the world reeled and
exploded and the British Parliament was pondering his Quebec
Act, he had yielded to a brief and rather stuffy interlude of ro-
mance by proposing marriage to Lady Anne Howard, youthful
enough to be his daughter. She declined the honor and, with
appropriate weeping, admitted to her younger sister, Lady Maria,
that she had "been obliged to refuse the best man on earth."

"The more fool you," Maria retorted. "I only wish he had given
me the chance."

A matchmaking spinster carried that story to the downcast lover.
He immediately accepted the alternative thus offered and married

136

BLUNDEB AT PHILADELPHIA 137

Maria. She was tiny, with fair hair, blue eyes, and such a delusion
of grandeur that the court at Quebec soon became the fussiest in
the contemporary world. Carleton humored his child-wife, almost
as if he remembered the domestic misfortunes of his predecessors.,
Champlain and Frontenac. When the bridal pair arrived at Quebec,
early in 1775, protocol was of small account. The Continental Con-
gress was preparing to invade and liberate Canada.

Its reasons were sound enough in the strategy of war. Canada was
a base from which the British would certainly strike southward, as
the French had always done, by the Achilles* heel of the Champlain
route. Canada, therefore, must be neutralized. Moreover, the con-
tinual irritation of a French and Catholic community at the edge
of the Thirteen Colonies could be removed in stages by education,
absorption, and Protestant revelation.

To this end the Congress first invited delegates from Quebec to
join Canada to the Revolution. As the Canadians paid no atten-
tion—the seigneurs and priests saw to that— they must be liberated
from their British oppressors by force.

Little force surely would be required. Quebec had been softened
up by American agitators, who said the Quebec Act would reimpose
the church tithes, institute the barbarous punishments of English
criminal law, and unloose a new tyranny. The agents reported to
the Congress that Canada was groaning, like its neighbors, under
the imperial boot.

Only eleven days after Lexington, some unknown Canadian sons
of liberty had defaced the King's statue in Montreal with a necklace
of potatoes and a placard proclaiming in French: "Here's the Cana-
dian Pope and English Fool." This was a very hopeful sign. As
viewed from Philadelphia, Canada looked ripe for rebellion and
needed only a little outside help to throw off its chains. An inexpen-
sive combination of force and persuasion should be enough to drive
England out of the north, before its power could be consolidated
there, and extend the writ of the Congress to the North Pole.

Carleton, the statesman, reluctantly laid aside his Quebec Act,
which had been intended to keep Canada loyal by generous conces-
sions, and became a soldier again. There was no alternative. He
found himself in the exact middle of the Empire's civil war. For
once, by blind luck, England had the right man in the right place.

While the Congress argued and delayed, Ethan Allen, a towering
frontiersman and leader of the Green Mountain Boys, had been con-
ducting a private war with the authorities of New York. Now he
took the war against Canada into his own hands.

Across Lake Champlain from Ticonderoga he was joined by a

138 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

horse dealer and amateur soldier, Benedict Arnold. They mustered
altogether 230 men. The great fortress was held by some forty un-
suspecting troops who freely allowed spies to inspect their lack
of preparation.

The Americans crossed the lake in the first light of May 10, 1775,
the sentry's musket missed fire, the commander was awakened by
a knock on his door and the hoarse voice of Allen ordering him to
surrender "In the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental
Congress!" Or so Allen told the story afterwards. The commander
surrendered in his dressing gown.

Allen's partner, Seth Warner, captured Crown Point and its thir-
teen surprised soldiers. Arnold seized Fort St, John on the Richelieu
in the same bloodless fashion.

The American Revolution controlled the historic invasion corri-
dor at the moment when the Continental Congress was solemnly
resolving "That no Expedition or Incursion ought to be undertaken
or made, by any Colony or body of Colonies, against or into
Canada." Philadelphia changed its mind within a few days and
commissioned General Schuyler to "pursue any measures in Canada
that may have a tendency to promote the peace and security of these
colonies," always providing that "it will not be disagreeable to the
Canadians."

By mid-August 1,500 troops and three generals were at Ticon-
deroga on their way to Canada. As Schuyler fell ill, the supreme
command fell to Richard Montgomery, a former captain in the
British Army. He was now thirty-eight years old, tall, handsome
and dashing, the very image of America in arms. But concerning his
army he wrote to his wife: "Such a set of pusillanimous wretches
never were collected." Their orders were to take Montreal and
besiege Quebec, according to the proved strategy of Amherst and
Wolfe.

The right wing of a double assault, under Arnold ("that horse
jockey,*' as Carleton called him), was to strike at Quebec overland
from the southeast, In September Arnold's force of 1,100 picked
men was dragging its bateaux up the Kennebec. The toiling colonials
included some of the crack frontier fighters of the Seven Years'
War and an undistinguished character called Aaron Burr, of whom
more would be heard.

Canada's old friend, northern winter, caught the expedition on
an overgrown, swampy, and almost impassable trail. Three hundred
starving men turned back. The dauntless remainder pushed forward,
eating dogs and moccasins, shot down the Chaudiere by raft and
reached Levis, opposite Quebec, on November 8. After one of the

BLUNDER AT PHILADELPHIA 139

most desperate marches on record, Arnold stood where Wolfe had
stood and prepared to duplicate his strategy without his resources
or his luck.

Beside the river loomed the rock, as Kirke, Phips, and Wolfe had
seen it. There was a difference this time. The Canadian habitants,
who had fought the English invaders for a century and a half, now
decided to help them. It was a good omen for the Thirteen Colonies.
As always, they were deceived by the outer look of Canada.

Boats and scaling ladders were supplied by the Canadians.
Arnold landed at Anse au Foulon in Wolfe's footsteps and marched
his bold scarecrow army toward the walls of Quebec. His written
demand for surrender was ignored by Colonel Hector Theophilus
Cramahe, the Swiss officer commanding the weak town garrison in
Carleton's absence at Montreal.

This was not what Arnold had been led to expect by the pundits
of the Continental Congress. Inalienable Rights, it now appeared,
included one not dreamt of in the philosophy of Philadelphia. The
French Canadians and British in Quebec, under a Swiss com-
mander, assumed the right to exclude Canada from the Revolution.
Arnold thought that over and wisely marched twenty miles upriver
to await the other invasion army of the Richelieu.

Carleton, in Montreal, now faced at first hand the unanswered
question of Canada's future— would the French Canadians defend
British America? Evidently not. The idiotic government in London
had authorized the Governor to raise 6,000 of the King's loyal Ca-
nadian subjects, but the Canadians refused to rise even at the
exhortation of their seigneurs and priests. Why should they? The
civil war among the English was none of their business. The in-
vaders under Montgomery probably would be no worse and might
be better than those under Wolfe. A conquered people saw no
reason to assist their conquerors.

The sullen and passive habitants around Montreal represented
the abiding racial problem of the future nation, not yet glimpsed.
While they would glimpse it later, almost too late, Carleton had
no means of knowing that. A lesser man would have judged the
prospects hopeless. With a handful of British and a few Canadian
seigneurs he was expected to hold the historic line of the St. Law-
rence against the nearly three million people of the Thirteen
Colonies, Like France before it, England had left Canada and the
few acres of snow to their fate. The prospects were worse than
Carleton then knew. He had heard nothing of Arnold's army as
he faced the advance guard of Montgomery's.

The advance guard was led by Allen. Disregarding his com-

140 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BOEDER

mander, the chosen instrument of Jehovah and the Congress under-
took to seize Montreal almost singlehanded as he had seized Ticon-
deroga. His 120 men were easily captured or driven off by Carleton's
little force. Allen was handcuffed, angrily protesting this indignity
to a soldier, and later imprisoned in a Cornish castle.

Montgomery easily took the Richelieu forts and advanced on
Montreal. Carleton knew his town could not be defended. Most of
the few Canadian militia who had grudgingly enlisted promptly
deserted. The Indian allies fled. Following Montcalm, in precisely
the same circumstances, Carleton was compelled to fall back on
the citadel of Quebec.

This proved no simple matter. Arnold and Montgomery had
blocked the roads on both sides of the St. Lawrence. Carleton pro-
posed to descend the river by boat, but a northeast gale held him
landlocked in Montreal. The wind shifted on November 11. A single
cannon shot summoned the "whole military establishment" of 130
men, among whom stood Carleton, grave as usual, "wrung to the
soul but firm, unshaken and serene," perhaps aware that half a
continent might well depend on his ability to reach Quebec, The
little company boarded eleven boats and slipped down the river
in the darkness.

Carleton had once been afloat with his lucky friend, Wolfe, on a
similar adventure. Now Wolfe's luck deserted him. Near Sorel the
tiny British fleet stumbled without warning on Arnold's ambush.
Offered honorable surrender, Carleton still refused, staking his
life and probably Canada's on a last wild gamble. Since his fleet
was doomed he withdrew it upstream and left it. He must reach
Quebec alone.

The English gentleman quickly dressed himself as a Canadian
habitant, in a tasseled red bonnet, gray homespun clothes, a gay
sash, and moccasins. Thus disguised, he boarded the whaleboat
of a French-Canadian riverman named Bouchette, better known
for his exploits as the "Wild Pigeon."

The Wild Pigeon knew his business. His crew rowed silently
downriver in the night, oars muffled, and at the narrow passage
between Isle St. Ignace and the Isle du Pas, a few yards from
Arnold's battery, paddled with their hands. Now Wolfe's luck re-
turned to rescue Carleton. The American sentries heard nothing.

Carleton's escape on the St. Lawrence, like Washington's on the
Ohio, was to produce large consequences. Bouchette, the Wild
Pigeon, had played his little part in the course of human events
and, with many other vital players, was forgotten.

"On the 19th," says the diary of Thomas Ainslie, customs collec-

BLUNDER AT PEDDLADELPHIA 141

tor at Quebec, "to the unspeakable joy of the friends of the Gov-
ernment, and to the utter Dismay of the abettors of Sedition and
Rebellion, General Carleton arrived. . , . We saw our Salvation in
his Presence."

Arnold captured the Canadian flotilla up the river only to see
that his essential British quarry had slipped through his fingers, in
the guise of a Canadian.

Carleton found Quebec in grave straits and himself in a singular
situation. Only sixteen years earlier he had helped Wolfe capture
this town from a French general, now buried in a British shell hole.
A British general must take Montcalm's place and defend the town
for England against English troops calling themselves Americans.
For England? Possibly Carleton alone among his miserable garri-
son, among the statesmen of England and the philosophers of
Philadelphia, dimly suspected that he was defending Quebec for
the Canadians.

He was caught in the perennial paradox of Canada and must
use the means at hand. They were not much, proportionately about
equal to Montcalm's.

His first step was to expel from the town all the able-bodied
Canadians who would not fight. That left 5,000 people of doubt-
ful sentiment within the walls, some 350 British regulars, 400
sailors, and 530 Canadian militia. About 1,300 men must face the
resources of the Continental Congress, hold Quebec under its fourth
siege or, in losing it, probably lose Canada to the Revolution. As
so many times before, a scant square mile of rock beside the river
contained the destiny of at least half the continent.

Montgomery took Montreal and joined Arnold at Quebec. The
two American generals surveyed, in their shrunken army, the tragic
military miscalculations of the Continental Congress— and some-
thing more, Philadelphia's total miscalculations of the Canadian
nature. Desertion and disease had reduced the American force on
the Plains of Abraham to about a thousand men. Still Montgomery,
knowing war but not Canada, was certain that the Canadians
would surrender. He had that on the word of the Philadelphia
philosophers, and who could doubt it? Therefore, he would "eat
his Christmas dinner in Quebec or in hell." He ate it in his own
camp. He would eat only seven more in this world.

A written demand for Quebec's surrender was tied to an arrow
and shot over the walls. It informed Carleton that Quebec was
"incapable of defence, manned by a motley crew of sailors, the
greatest part our friends, or of citizens who wish to see us within
their walls and a few of the worst troops who ever styled them-

142 THE STRUGGLE FOB THE BOEDER

selves soldiers/' The townspeople were warned that Quebec would
soon be a "city in flames, carnage, confusion, plunder, all caused
by a General courting ruin to avoid his shame."

There spoke the Continental Congress. It was speaking a lot
these days and knew everything. Not enough, however, to save its
gallant servant, Montgomery.

Carleton paid no attention to the message by arrow. The Cana-
dians of his garrison appeared to have little wish for liberation.
And in their loyalty under siege Canada unwittingly was turning
the critical corner of its future.

The futile arrow was followed by mortar shells which "even the
woman came to laugh at." The walls were weak but Montgomery
lacked artillery to smash them. His troops shivered in their thin
captured British uniforms and soon were assailed by a familiar
enemy. With smallpox in his camp and Quebec deaf to the counsels
of democracy, Montgomery must attack or retreat.

He hesitated for some time, knowing that the odds were against
him, decided on a frontal assault from the plains but yielded to Ms
own officers, on the new principles of democratic decision by vote,
and accepted a subtler strategy.

Christmas came. His broken promise to eat his dinner in the
town, his lack of money, the quarrels between his officers and the
well-hated Arnold had changed Montgomery from a gay conqueror
to a tired and despondent young man. In the depressed humor of
his predecessor, Wolfe, he had almost given up hope of victory.
Finally he ordered the two-pronged assault for the night of De-
cember 81, a New Year's Eve to be remembered throughout Amer-
ica,

It did not find Carleton unprepared. His garrison was in good
order. The Canadian militia stood with unquestioning discipline
beside the British regulars— for the first time, but by no means the
last. Unity of the two races under arms might mean Quebec's sal-
vation now. It meant much more later. If it could survive this
night it might turn the tide of sentiment among the wavering Ca-
nadians, Though no one thought of it then, the men of Quebec
might begin, for all their puny numbers, to demonstrate the possi-
bility of a biracial state.

On that last bitter night of 1775 their freezing hands clutched
sword and musket. They also clutched the conflicting ingredients
of a new nation. All that could be lost before another day had
passed.

Carleton had no time for such long thoughts. As midnight passed
and the world entered a new year of Independence, Inalienable

144 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

Rights, and Self -Evident Truth, a swirling blizzard hid the Plains
of Abraham and the American camp. Then, toward four o'clock,
signal fires blazed beside the St. Charles, north of the town. They
were answered by two green rockets, arching across the blackness
beyond the rock of Cape Diamond. The attack evidently was com-
ing from two sides. Carleton's hour, like Champlain's, Frontenac's
and Montcalm's, was coming with it.

The American guns on the plains began to fire against the west-
ern walls. Carleton soon surmised that their sound, dulled by the
howl of the blizzard, was a feint. He was right. Montgomery in-
tended to round Cape Diamond and attack the lower town from
the St. Lawrence bank. Arnold, attacking from the St. Charles on
the north, would meet Montgomery and the joint forces would scale
the heights to capture the garrison.

Carleton had guarded against all these possibilities. Grave as
usual, he stood with his reserves in the Place d'Arrnes, ready to
move where he was needed. Drams, bugles and church bells
sounded a general alarm.

Montgomery and 500 men crept out of Wolfe's Cove, by a nar-
row trail along the river bluffs, in the teeth of a fine, cutting snow.
This time no Vergor but an alert guard of fifty British and Cana-
dians, under John Coffin, stood at the barricade of Pres-de-Ville
with four small guns. They waited in silence and saw nothing but
the snow, heard only the guns on the plains.

Suddenly vague figures appeared not twenty yards away, A man
crawled forward, looked at the barricade and retreated. Still the
guard kept silent in their baited trap.

Now they could see a knot of Americans huddled together in
consultation. Montgomery waved his sword and shouted: "Come
on, brave lads, Quebec is ours!" As he charged, the trap closed.
From a distance of ten yards the four guns of Pres-de-Ville fired
their single volley of grapeshot The foremost Americans lay on
the snow. No second volley was needed. The surviving attackers
had fled.

A man came screaming down the street with the false news that
the Americans had burst into the town from the St. Charles. The
guard at Pres-de-Ville started to bolt in panic. Its commander
threatened to shoot the first man who moved. No one moved but
the danger had passed. Montgomery would never come back.

The battle had shifted to the north. There Arnold's force of 600,
in captured British uniforms, a scrawled slogan, "Liberty or Death,"
pinned to their hats, was advancing along the road between the
St. Charles and the walled cliffs of Quebec. They swept past the

BLUNDER AT PHILADELPHIA 145

outer Canadian lines of snipers with heavy losses and reached the
main defense works of Sault-au-Matelot Their single gun, hauled
on a sleigh to smash the barricade, stuck fast in the snow. Arnold
paused only a moment before ordering a charge. "Now, boys/' he
cried, "all together, rush!"

The words were hardly uttered before he fell with a bullet
through his leg. He propped himself against a wall with a musket
for a crutch but soon fainted from loss of blood and was carried
out of gunshot.

Daniel Morgan, leading the charge against the barricade, found
himself snared in a dark street, enfiladed by British guns, raked
by Canadian muskets from every house window. The cul-de-sac
instantly became a shambles of confusing red uniforms on both
sides, cannon flashes, grapeshot, and exploding grenades— a few
hundred men, cooped up in a few square yards, but fighting one
of the world's decisive battles. American soldiers would never fight
better or more hopelessly. Such men could make a revolution. They
could not capture Quebec against these odds.

Two hours of blind tumult and carnage left a third of the invad-
ers dead in the snow of a mean Canadian alley. When Carleton's
reserves sallied out from the Palace Gate and took the Americans
in the rear, Morgan perforce surrendered.

The defenders haid lost thirty men, killed and wounded. That
was the price of saving Quebec. But Quebec was a foothold only
of British power in America. Carleton understood the larger forces
and dangers in play and was desperately anxious to save the last
small chance of reconciliation with the Americans. His prisoners,
therefore, were given a good breakfast, warm quarters, and a
friendly lecture.

"My lads," said the Governor, "why did you come to disturb an
honest man in his government that never did you any harm in his
life? Come, my boys, you are in a very painful situation and not
able to go home in any comfort. I must provide you with shoes,
with stockings and good warm waistcoats. I must give you some
victuals to carry you home. Take care, my lads, that you do not
come here again, lest I should not treat you so kindly ." Sound ad-
vice, no doubt, but the Revolution was past its point of no return
and, for its leaders, Quebec was only a minor incident.

Search parties were sent out to collect the wounded Americans
and bury the dead. They found thirteen rounded humps of snow
beside the Pres-de-Ville barricade. From one of them a frozen hand
protruded. It was the hand of Montgomery.

Carleton and his officers watched the body of that rash and gal-

146 THE STRUGGLE FOB THE BORDER

lant young man lowered into an honorable grave hard by the St.
Louis Gate. After all, this was no ordinary war. It was a hateful
quarrel within the British family. Montgomery had died because
neither he nor the Continental Congress understood the position
of Canadians in that quarrel.

Why should they understand it when the Canadians hardly un-
derstood it themselves? Even Ben Franklin, wisest of English-speak-
ing North Americans, was baffled by these Americans of older
residence and different tongue. Next spring he set up a printing
press in the basement of the CMteau de Ramezay at Montreal, he
concentrated the ablest journalistic mind of the continent on per-
suasive propaganda, he proved beyond the doubt of reasonable
men that Canada's place was in the free union of the Thirteen
Colonies. Obviously the Canadians were not reasonable men. They
listened, unmoved, to Franklin's arguments as they had been
equally unmoved by Carleton's.

Up to now most of them had remained neutral in the English
family quarrel. When Carleton had saved their beloved Quebec,
when the American commissioners paid for supplies in the worth-
less paper money of the Continental Congress, when the soldiers
mocked the Catholic Church, when Franklin's proclamation of
liberty began to wear the look of an unwanted alien system, the
habitants turned sour. Liberation of this sort seemed to be only
another invasion of the Canadian homeland under a new name.
Militarily and morally it was already the Revolution's first and only
permanent defeat.

The survivors of Montgomery's army could maintain the futile
siege of Quebec through the winter. Franklin could turn out his
tracts, manifestoes, and homespun logic in the Montreal cellar, but
the doubtful scales of Canadian sentiment had tilted quietly and
forever in favor of England, not because the Canadians loved it
more but the Americans and their democracy less. On these humble
and invisible scales the political balance of the continent tilted also
—and much farther than the British government or the Continental
Congress yet supposed. The Revolution had lost its fourteenth state
and America's northern half. That decision could be challenged
again, thirty-seven years hence, but then it would be too late to
shake the French Canadian from the foundation laid by Carleton's
Quebec Act and his Quebec victory.

Franklin saw after a fortnight that the land of Canada could not
be captured by the small forces sent against it, or its mind by rea-
sonable argument. His reports disappointed the Continental Con-
gress which, however, had more urgent business than the few stra-

BLUNDER AT P3EHLADELPHIA 147

tegic acres of snow. In the larger strategy now opening, the
immediate and highly dubious issue was whether the loose Ameri-
can union could survive at all against the full power of England,
aroused at last.

On May 6, 1776, Carleton saw the sails of a British fleet moving
up the river. The 800 Americans still camped around Quebec saw
them also and ran, leaving their cannon, muskets, and half -cooked
dinners.

Almost alone in Philadelphia, John Adams remained as unyield-
ing as Cato. Canada, like Carthage, must be destroyed as a British
possession: "The Unanimous Voice of the Continent is Canada
must be ours! Quebec must be takenl" Adams could save his ener-
gies for more practical tasks. The Congress and Washington were
tired of the Canadian problem, for it yielded neither to reason nor
to force. They decided to let Quebec alone, temporarily at least,
and the Congress contented itself with a resolution inviting the
Canadians to join the new union when they came to their senses.

In the early summer of 1776, while Jefferson pondered the Dec-
laration of Independence, the British General, John Burgoyne, was
moving into the St. Lawrence with a mighty British force to stamp
out the rebels' disrespect for the decent opinions of mankind. Arnold
hurriedly extricated the remains of his army and disappeared up
the Richelieu to entrench himself at Ticonderoga and Crown Point.
Carleton may have been glad to let the invaders escape and was
slow in pursuit, perhaps deliberately. He still held the impossible
hope of a reconciliation.

It was now October, Carleton must risk a winter campaign, far
from his base, or leave the Americans astride the Champlain corri-
dor. He reconnoitered Ticonderoga and retired to Montreal.

George Germain, the British minister responsible for Canadian
affairs, was publicly outraged at this retreat and secretly delighted.
He hated Carleton for refusing to appoint one of his henchmen to
a comfortable job. That offense could now be repaid.

Germain—a sleazy character, who had been cashiered from the
British Army in his youth for insubordination, his sentence being
read on every British parade ground throughout the world on the
King's special instruction, and of whom a colleague said that "there
was a general diffidence as to his honor and a general disrespect
of his person"— demoted Carleton by restricting his power exclu-
sively to Canada. "Gentleman Johnny" Burgoyne, author of plays,
gambler, bon vivant and ardent lady killer, was given full command
of next year's expedition, and ordered to cut the Thirteen Colonies
in two.

148 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

Caiieton may have been mistaken in letting the American invad-
ers escape, and in hoping still for a reconciliation, but he had
avoided the disaster awaiting Burgoyne. The successful London
playwright must now act his own tragedy, written in advance by
other hands.

Having saved Quebec and Canada for Britain, and being re-
warded by demotion, Caiieton at once wrote his resignation to
Germain, in a model of restrained and heavy sarcasm, including
the hope that his work might be improved by his successor or "at
least that the dignity of the Crown may not appear beneath Your
Lordship's concern."

His Lordship could not relieve Carleton for another year. In the
spring of 77 Burgoyne was launched at the Americans by the
Champlain corridor. The great army moving south was to be joined
by Lord Howe's forces from New York to bisect and exterminate
the Revolution. Unfortunately, in rushing off to a country weekend,
Germain forgot to inform Howe of these plans. Howe, therefore,
was preparing to take his fleet and army to Philadelphia as Bur-
goyne advanced against Ticonderoga.

The huge British expedition of 8,000 swept down Lake Cham-
plain in a splendid armada of boats, barges, and canoes. It was led
by Indian paddlers, painted and feathered. Behind them came
barges, scarlet with British uniforms, and the handsome pinnacles
of the field officers. Then the endless impediment of a European
campaign, among it two dozen wagons to hold Burgoyne's dress
uniforms, silver plate, wine, and other necessities of war. Swarms
of camp followers and 2,000 women pursued the advancing host
as, with banners flying, drums rolling, and brass bands assaulting
the silence of the lake, it approached the battlements of Ticonder-
oga.

The Americans abandoned the fort at the first sight of an irresisti-
ble enemy. Arnold skillfully moved his fleet through the clumsy
British armada under cover of darkness, burned all his boats and
departed southward. That was enough to remove King George's
last passing doubts of his own wisdom. "I have beat them/' he cried,
"beat all the Americans!"

News of Ticonderoga reached London just as Burgoyne and his
army were laboring across the soaked watershed to the Hudson,
where Howe was expected at any moment, Howe still had received
no contrary instructions from Germain and was blithely sailing for
Philadelphia, to the amazement of Washington. No enemy, the
American Commander in Chief believed, could be quite that stupid.
He had not met Germain.

BLUNDER AT PHILADELPHIA 149

King George's next news, therefore, was not what he had con-
fidently expected. The British force had shrunk to 5,000. At a re-
mote hamlet called Saratoga it was surrounded by 12,000 Americans,
outmaneuvered by Arnold (who "had been drinking freely and
behaved like a madman"), divided by sudden wild charges, and
hacked to pieces.

Night fell on a scene of havoc but Gentleman Johnny still thought
he had won the battle. Next morning, %hen he saw the pitiable
remains of his forces and the Americans ready to complete their
work, he surrendered. The surrender probably ended King George's
chance to recapture the lost colonies. It brought France into the
war against England. Spain followed and then Holland. England
had blundered from a colonial revolution to a general war which
would soon become the still larger wars of Napoleon, now an un-
promising boy in Corsica.

After one siege Quebec was not endangered again and its peo-
ple were no longer tempted to join the Revolution.

Nova Scotia's position was entirely different Its people were ex-
posed to attack, were British by blood but divided in interest and
loyalty. Its assembly passed rousing addresses of confidence in the
King. Secret meetings in the villages pledged support to the Ameri-
cans. Thus split, and vulnerable from both sides, the Nova Scotians,
from Scotland and New England, instinctively reverted to the neu-
tral posture of the original Acadians. They wanted, in the words of
a Yarmouth petition, to be "in a peaceable state . . . the only situa-
tion in which we with our Wives and Children can be in any toler-
able degree safe."

The Americans resented neutrality—the more bitterly when they
found it not in natural enemies like the French, but in fellow
Americans recently emigrated from New England. American priva-
teers raided the Nova Scotia coast, despite the patrols of the Brit-
ish Navy. In 1776 an expedition from New England attacked but
failed to take Fort Cumberland on the Chignecto Isthmus. A larger
plan of invasion was repeatedly proposed in Massachusetts, but
Washington vetoed it as "unlikely to produce lasting Effects"
against British sea power. Britain slowly drove the American raid-
ers out of the Bay of Fundy, preserved Nova Scotia, and pushed
down to the mouth of the Penobscot.

Canada's danger was not quite finished. Lafayette, the Americans'
new ally, wanted to invade Quebec again and, to prepare the way,
eloquently urged the Canadians to fight for their French birth-
right. Washington vetoed that plan also. If Canada must remain
outside his grasp, it would be safer, for the Americans, under Brit-

150 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

ish than French control. The Revolution had no desire for a re^
turn of France, the old racial enemy, to America.

Encouraged by his own successes, Washington later changed his
rnind and considered an advance into Canada. France also had
changed its mind and refused to cooperate. On second thought it
preferred Britain to the United States in Canada. Lacking the north-
ern half of America and close to British power, the new American
Union would be weak enough to depend on French support and
might serve French imperial interests. So reasoned the wise states-
men of Paris, who stood unconsciously on the edge of their revolu-
tion.

Thus in the quarrels of its enemies Canada escaped further dam-
age. It had ceased to be an important base of Britain's war against
the Thirteen Colonies, but out of the Lake Ontario country Sir
John Johnson and Colonel John Butler, with their Rangers, and
Joseph Brant, with his Iroquois, ravaged the New York and Penn-
sylvania border in the old and bloody style of the French and
Indians. Farther west another sort of contest, hardly noted at the
main center of events, was carrying the struggle of the North Amer-
ican boundary toward the Pacific.

British arms staggered from Saratoga to Yorktown and there were
laid down for good, or so it appeared. Lord North's groan, "Oh,
God, it's all over!" echoed throughout England, the King thought
of abdicating, Horace Walpole, almost demented at Strawberry
Hill, wrote feverishly as if this were the end of the world, and
Carleton, the only undefeated British general and the man who
more than any other had saved Canada, was left at home, discred-
ited.

Lord North, according to his invariable custom, had been wrong.
It was not all over. It was only beginning. After two more centuries
it still would not be over. For with the surrender at Yorktown and
the flight of American Loyalists to Nova Scotia and the upper St.
Lawrence, the second sovereign fact of the Revolution already was
emerging, the fact which Britain had never anticipated, which the
Continental Congress was loath to admit, which the American peo-
ple hardly understand today. The Revolution, designed to create
one nation, had created two. From its womb and from no other
source was issuing, as surely as the United States, the improbable
embryo of Canada.

The diplomats of London and Philadelphia met in Paris to wind
up the family quarrel and there met this stubborn, intractable, and
absurd fact of Canada. What was Canada to be— in race, govern-

BLUNDER AT PHILADELPHIA 151

ment, boundary, and future? Was the disregarded second child of
the Revolution even viable?

The statesmen at Paris, each with his own subtle game to play,
hardly understood the questions, much less the answers. One of
them at least sensed the ultimate fact of power in America. David
Hartley, of Britain, arose to note an "awful and important truth,"
a truth often forgotten, ignored, or denied in the ensuing years, yet
as awful and important today as ever. Concerning the boundary
between the United States and Canada, Hartley said: "Our re-
spective territories are in vicinity and therefore we must be insep-
arable. . . . Political intercourse and interests will obtrude them-
selves between our two countries because they are the two great
powers dividing the Continent of North America."

In vicinity, yes. But where would the line between the two pow-
ers lie? How could it be held? The diplomats of Paris obviously
did not know. They did not know even American geography. So
they began to draw an impossible line on a distorted map. The
American and Canadian peoples would have to rectify those mis-
takes and many others by trial, error, another war, and a full cen-
tury of wrangle. And if, in the end, any line was to be held across
America, only the Canadian people— if such a breed appeared in
time—could permanently hold it.

10

The Yankee Horse Traders

[1782]

IN THE SUMMER OF 1782 PARIS BEHELD, THROUGH THE FRONT WIN-
dow of Europe, three of that strange race of men who had
beaten England, now imagined that they could build a nation
in the American wilds, and were ready to draw its boundaries.

Few of the better European minds believed that the nation, if
ever built, would amount to much or last long. It consisted of
thirteen fractious splinters, called itself a confederation, and by no
definition could be called a state. It lacked any effective central
government. It had no general laws. Its money, those torrrents of
paper flowing out of the so-called Congress, were, as the Cana-
dians already had found, "not worth a Continental/*

Just the same, its representatives appeared literate, confident,
and smooth. Also, they professed to know all about America and
entertained extraordinary and rather boyish hopes for its future.
Since hardly anyone in the governments of Europe knew anything
about America, the Americans' ignorance of at least half the conti-
nent passed unnoted. If they did not even realize that the Con-
gress itself was assuring a second nation in the northern half, if the
peace conference of Paris was about to ratify the unlimited sover-
eignty of the United States at the very moment when the United
States was limiting its own power, territory and future, all these
dubious affairs were of little interest to Europe.

England may have begun, however, to grasp the huge and bitter
irony of its recent defeat— all the money, people, and genius it had
invested in the southern half of the continent had been used to
drive it into the northern half, the former empire of France. Eng-
land's own success in the Thirteen Colonies had turned against it.
Having defeated foreigners throughout the world, it could be de-

152

THE YANKEE HORSE TRADERS 153

feated only by its own sons, its own instincts of freedom carried
by Englishmen across the Atlantic.

Some men in England also saw dimly beyond this paradox and
realized that the American Revolution had been the largest human
tragedy of modern times— not because it brought independence to
the Americans, who must surely gain it one way or another, sooner
or later, but because it had been accomplished by blood and hate
when, with better judgment in England, it could have been accom-
plished by friendly agreement.

Until the eve of Lexington only a minority of Americans and of
the Congress had desired a revolution. The blunders of England
and a series of sheer accidents had produced the present angry
parting, of which the political arrangements were the lesser part.
The great, lasting, and tragic loss— not alone to England but to civili-
zation itself— lay not in American independence but in the spiritual
schism of the English-speaking peoples. And that schism of the
spirit would take incalculable time to repair, with incalculable
future costs, risks, and damage to both sides of the unnecessary
war.

The American delegates to the Paris peace conference, in the
heady days of their triumph, were the last men who could be ex-
pected to see these things. They knew all the answers to the imme-
diate questions, supplied them freely, and had few doubts about
anything.

Ben Franklin, with his homely, smiling face, his genial and in-
gratiating manners, his humorous and crackling pen, his way with
the ladies, his intimate knowledge of such things as stoves and
electricity, had long since found his way through the offices, draw-
ing rooms, and coffeehouses of London, the salons, boudoirs, and
intrigues of Paris.

John Jay was a competent New York lawyer, cool, austere, and
aristocratic. He had drafted some of the basic documents of the
Revolution, had presided over its Congress, and only missed sign-
ing the Declaration by an unfortunate absence on other business.

John Adams, of Boston, though inflicted with a dreadful cousin,
Sam, appeared to the English as a gentleman learned in the law,
handsome, impetuous, vain, and fearless. He regarded the Paris
mission as "a difficult errand in diplomacy, demanding wariness
and adroitness, if not craft and dissimulation."

The trio of Americans possessed more wisdom, knowledge, and
talent than all the experienced diplomats of England, France, and
Spain combined, as they at once proceeded to demonstrate. But in
the considered opinion of King George (who had decided not to

154 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

abdicate after all and had yet to lose his sanity) Americans were
all knaves" and must pursue their knavishness with his blessings as
a good loser. England's oracle, the omniscient Dr, Johnson, had
written off the Americans as a species which "multiplied with the
fecundity of their own rattlesnakes," was drunk with "delerious
dreams" and pregnant with "abortions of folly." Horace Walpole,
wiser than the oracle, "laughed that I may not weep" and wrote
to a friend: "We do not yet know the extent of our loss. You would
think it very slight if you saw how little impression it makes on a
luxurious capital." The hardheaded politicians of France and Spain
saw in the conference only a chance of gain. The parody of a na-
tion installed on some obscure roost at Philadelphia seemed certain
to provide good pickings when it fell apart.

Three backwoodsmen from the New World, somewhat polished
by fortunate contact with the Old, must confront the ablest brains
of England or, at all events, the ablest that the existing government
could provide.

Lord Shelburne, the new prime minister, was engaged at home
in business far more important than a family quarrel overseas and
"probably knew less about Canada than about any portion of the
British Empire." He cared still less, though Canada remained the
Empire's only hold in America. His chief negotiator at Paris, Rich-
ard Oswald, was a feeble, vacillating person and had no notion of
his responsibilities. Apparently he wished only to make the best of
a bad job and get it finished as quickly as possible on any terms.

Canada, the unresolved riddle of the Revolution, was not repre-
sented. England's interests alone were to be considered by England,
and those carelessly, stupidly, almost blindly. For the contempo-
rary statesmen of England the acres of snow and rattlesnakes could
never be more than a minor interest on the fringes of the broken
Empire— perhaps might have been better traded for the sugar
island of Guadeloupe twenty years before to save all this present
fuss.

The dominant fact at Paris thus was not the sagacity of the three
Americans, great as it must be reckoned, nor the futility of the Eng-
lish government, equally profound, but the current mood of the
English people.

Small wonder— after Wolfe's victory at Quebec, the heavy costs
of the Seven Years" War, the ingratitude of its American benefi-
ciaries, the interracial bloodshed, the humiliation of defeat, the
whole sorry end of the first empire in the sundering of the English
race— that England was disillusioned, sick at heart, wounded in the
vitals of its spirit. The motherland had suffered not from ordinary

THE YANKEE HOESE TRADERS 155

war, which it understood, but from a kind of matricide beyond its
experience or understanding. Therefore, the American experiment,
from Raleigh's time onward, must be assigned in bankruptcy with
no more trouble.

Not only pride but sound business calculation demanded a quick
and generous settlement. England had founded colonies, on the
Mercantile theory and by the prevailiing philosophy of Rational-
ism, as sources of raw materials and, above all, as markets. They
were a business proposition to be reckoned only on a ledger. The
age of Mercantilism and Rationalism was dying already. The mys-
tique of Empire, to be worshiped as a racial dream, and the wor-
ship of international trade, almost as a religion, had just begun to
appear.

In 1776, while Jefferson was meditating the Declaration, the first
light of a new economic philosophy had dawned in The Wealth of
Nations, written by a revolutionary economist named Adam Smith,
who proposed to repeal the wisdom of the ages, all the well-tried re-
strictions on trade, the entire apparatus of the Mercantile state,
substituting therefor the ineluctable, all-wise, and harmonious
mechanism of the Market.

As the Paris conference opened, Smith was supposed to have the
ear of the Prime Minister, had advised him to abandon political
connection with America altogether, to build it up, by the magic
of Free Trade, as a larger market for English goods than ever. To
the outright economic determinist, half a century ahead of Marx,
political boundaries were of relatively small account. Trade, the
Market, the natural Division of Labor, the spur of competition, and
the unrestricted energies of individual enterprisers offered the true
means of greatness, peace, what Jefferson had first called Property,
and what the Declaration, as altered in a brilliant flash by Franklin,
called the Pursuit of Happiness.

Smith was a little ahead of his time, but not much. In a half
century England would fully embrace his theories. So far as the
new American nation was concerned, however, Smith had over-
looked a disagreeable and essential point The rebellious Thirteen
Colonies would disregard his discoveries. They would soon install
the unrestricted, tariff -free Market within their own boundaries.
They would not extend it to English goods— or Canadian. England
could find other markets. For Canada (if any Canada was left at
the end of the peace conference) the plans brought to Paris by
Franklin, Jay, and Adams seemed to spell nothing but economic
ruin and probably political extinction not long hence.

Smith and Shelburne could not see that far. England's paramount

156 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

objective at Paris was to part from the Americans as foreigners but,
if possible, as friends, to make them good customers and perhaps
useful allies against the permanent European enemies. Oswald's
assignment, in short, was to cut losses and liquidate a disastrous
investment on practically any terms that the Americans proposed.
Canada entered the conference vicariously, so far as it entered at
all, hamstrung from the beginning.

The Americans, unlike the English, were not tired, frustrated, or
disillusioned. They were not dealing with some distant colony, but
with their homeland. They were not at the end but at the beginning
of things. They alone glimpsed the wealth, the space, the glory of
their continent, had only begun to see its possibilities, intended to
possess them all, and were aflame with the American Drearn. So
they know exactly what they wanted.

In a contest of this sort— the English defeated and disgusted, and
confused by new economic and political theories, the Americans
victorious, confident, overflowing with Life, Liberty, and the Pur-
suit of Happiness, clutching the world's oyster in their hands—poor
Shelburne and Oswald, those fatuous servants of a fatuous king,
were no match for the Philadelphia printer, the New York aristo-
crat, and the impetuous lawyer from Boston.

Before England's follies at Paris are too quickly condemned, as
they would always be condemned by hindsight in Canada, con-
sider the known facts of the day. Consider even the little-known
map and the unreliable census. They showed something like three
million English colonists living between the Alleghenies and the
Atlantic; much less than a hundred thousand Canadians, nearly
all French by blood, clinging to the St. Lawrence, with weak tenta-
cles stretched southward and westward. Beyond these sparsely
settled regions nothing but empty wilderness, buffalo, fur traders,
Indians, and cold. The calculations of businessmen and economists
like Smith showed that wilderness to be worth little. It produced
nothing but a few furs and interminable, bloody border wars.

True, English forts held the whole interior, which the Revolution
had never been able to capture. West of the Mississippi lay the
barrier of Spanish Louisiana. The Philadelphia confederation,
though pleased to call itself a nation, was too weak to resist British
power in the West, if it were ever fully exerted by a man like Pitt,
as it certainly had never been exerted in the Revolution.

England also possessed unchallengeable control of the world's
oceans. (And at that precise moment, by an odd coincidence, its
greatest seamen, Horatio Nelson, aged twenty-four, was rowing
ashore secretly at Quebec to marry a Miss Simpson, desert the navy
and settle down in Canada: from which nersonal and national

THE YANKEE HORSE TRADERS 157

catastrophe he was dissuaded in the nick of time and hustled back
to his ship, )

England's bargaining position at Paris thus was strong by Mstory,
geography, and power. But the interior, including Canada, was
hardly worth arguing about, assuredly not worth another civil war.
The Americans seemed to prize it for some odd reason, so let them
have it, with England's best wishes. Then, perhaps, they would
become England's friends again.

For all these queer reasons England's case at Paris—which really
meant Canada's— was dissipated in advance, to the secret amaze-
ment of Franklin, Jay, and Adams. They went to the conference
prepared for a hard fight and a tough bargain. They found a debili-
tated English government ready to give most of a continent away
for nothing but the possible hope of goodwill

The one-sided bargaining began in denial of all the real facts of
power. Strangely enough, there began also the enduring legend
that the United States never loses a war or wins a conference. It
was not the first time that Paris had settled the future of America.
Paris, under its French kings, had split America in the first place.
At Paris, France had surrendered Canada in 1763. At Paris, nearly
a century and a half hence, Woodrow Wilson would try to settle
the future of the world, and his failure would bring Americans
back to Paris again within twenty-five years for another attempt.
Paris, indeed, had become, with the arrival of the American dele-
gates in 1782, almost the unofficial capital of the New World.

Now that the independence and sovereignty of the Thirteen
Colonies must be admitted, the only important problem, it ap-
peared, was to draw their boundaries and wish them well. Since
these decisions must forever affect all future occupants of North
America—the Americans, the Canadians, the Spanish, the Indians,
the unknown Eskimos, and immigrant races without number— they
are worth following rather closely.

Franklin, the unequaled horse trader, naturally began the bar-
gain by demanding far more than he expected to receive. Blandly
he suggested to Oswald that England hand over Canada entire to
the United States as proof of good intentions, as a magnanimous
and not very expensive gesture certain to get England and the new
nation off to a friendly start. Oswald thought well of the idea and
recommended it to Shelburne, who, educated in Smith's new eco-
nomics, was inclined at first to accept it.

Political and economic calculation could not quite overcome the
ancient instincts of England. As Smith had remarked, in grudging
concession to human passions, "no nation willingly surrenders ter-
ritory." Besides, in both military and sentimental terms, England

158 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

could hardly desert the loyal English colony of Nova Scotia and
especially the great naval base at Halifax. In sound economics it
must retain the fisheries of the Atlantic coast and especially those of
Newfoundland.

Anyway, it soon became clear that no one, not even the Amer-
icans, really wanted England out of America altogether. France
wanted the United States limited in boundary and power, de-
pendent on French support, for French imperial purposes in the
future. So did Spain. The Americans might ask for Canada but if
it must remain outside their control, as they expected, certainly it
was better to have England beside them than to risk a reviving
France astride the St. Lawrence.

Franklin's offer was refused for such reasons as these, though none
of them was ever stated. All the motives of England at Paris re-
mained mysterious, ad hoc, and varying from day to day. The Amer-
icans may well have concluded that an English government which
had mismanaged the Revolution was capable of any folly. Never-
theless, beyond the wit of English or American to see, England as
usual was blundering through and already creating, quite uncon-
sciously, its second empire. The decision to retain a toe hold in
America being reached by the amorphous processes of the English
mind— almost in a fit of absent-mindedness, as it would always be
said in the future— the first boundaries of the new Empire began
to appear.

They appeared first in the Jungles of the Atlantic coast. Here was
a tricky business for the American delegates. British power had
been pushed during the Revolution to the Penobscot. Accordingly,
in sound horse trading, the Americans ignored the facts and de-
manded a boundary well to the north, on the St. John River. That
was too crude, even for Oswald and Shelburne.

The Americans then suggested a generous compromise, doubt-
less planned beforehand. Let the line run by the St. Croix River,
south and west of the St. John, on the boundary of Nova Scotia as
fixed in 1763. This generosity was immediately accepted by Eng-
land and the Americans found it difficult to hide their satisfaction.

Of course, no one in Paris knew where the St. Croix lay exactly
and no one in England particularly cared. Beyond the unmapped
river the line would strike due north, almost to the St. Lawrence,
then turn south on the horseshoe of the watershed dividing the
tributaries of the St Lawrence from the streams falling into the
Atlantic— again a line unknown to the map. The western half of the
horseshoe, at its southern end, would strike the 45th Parallel, which
had been given an arbitrary validity, as the boundary of Quebec
in 1763 and again in the Quebec Act of 1774. The 45th Parallel to

THE YANKEE HORSE TRADERS 159

the westward would meet the St. Lawrence about halfway between
Montreal and Lake Ontario.

So far agreement had been easy for the Americans when England
ignored or was uninterested in the fact that it had cut its Atlantic
regions off from their natural connections with central Canada, that
if there was to be a Canadian nation its whole geography and
sound economic pattern had been grossly warped in advance. That
was a minor concern and any bothersome local difficulties discov-
ered by the mapmakers on the unmapped horseshoe would be ad-
justed by a joint commission later on. England could not foresee
that those small concerns would continue to agitate the Canadians
and cost them dear for a long time to come.

The more difficult and important problem of the conference re-
mained. Westward from the intersection of the 45th Parallel and
the St. Lawrence, where should the boundary lie? Any answer given
to that question in Paris must largely fix the future anatomy of the
continent. The decision here involved perhaps the greatest stake in
the world— the West, for which French Canada had vainly strug-
gled this century and a half, from which the Revolution had first
emerged, and in which lay treasures of land, mineral, and forest
beyond reckoning. La Salle's dictum of the seventeenth century was
still valid in the eighteenth. England overlooked or forgot it.

There was no ostensible reason in practical politics why England
should abandon the West, the Ohio country, and all the territory
west of the Alleghenies and east of the Mississippi. The Revolution,
with its series of raids and marches, had been unable to shake Eng-
land's hold here. The forts still flew the English flag. However,
seeing the English negotiators so pliant and so anxious for the
United States' goodwill at any price, the Americans proposed that
England retire from the West altogether.

Their first horse-trading gambit was the old western boundary of
Quebec, stretching from the intersection of the 45th Parallel and
the St. Lawrence, near the present city of Cornwall, and paralleling
the Ottawa northwestward to the south end of Lake Nipissing.

That line, if it halted the movement of furs out of the West, must
destroy the historic business of Canada, and in any case must
leave the colony as a small island of French race in the eastern St.
Lawrence Valley. Even the hopeful American delegates must have
been secretly dumbfounded when the British Cabinet decided, in
August, to accept this bargain and virtually write off any prospect
of permanent British power in Canada.

Just as the United States had most of the spoils in its grasp, a delay
occurred at Paris and saved the chance of a Canadian nation. Be-
tween August and October the British garrison at Gibraltar, under

160 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

Spanish siege since 1779, proved, with Its newly invented artillery
and red-hot cannon balls, that it could survive Spain's supreme
effort in the form of unsinkable floating batteries made of green
timber. England's power at the gate of the Mediterranean had been
saved. The Empire was not crumbling entirely after all. Englishmen
rejoiced, the imperial mood returned, the nation suddenly sum-
moned up its ancient energies, and the government changed its
mind about America. If Gibraltar was worth holding, so, perhaps,
was Canada.

The English delegates met the Americans again in October.
Franklin, Jay, and Adams found that their original gambit had been
lost. A reviving England not only rejected the Nipissing line, but
intended to retain the whole interior down to the Ohio.

This was staggering news for the Americans. England's posses-
sion of the Ohio country would be disastrous to the ambitions of the
United States, for it must have the West, a primary and declared
objective ever since Washington's mission to Fort Le Boeuf.

Now the American delegates were compelled to reassess the
actual facts of power, so far disguised by the earlier weakness of
the English government. In such terms the American position looked
distressingly weak, the position of England incomparably stronger.

An American confederation existed in hopes, ideals, principles,
and Inalienable Rights. A nation did not exist, even in a paper con-
stitution. There was nothing more than a congeries of thirteen states,
each jealous of its own sovereignty. England, though defeated by its
own blunders, was still a leading world power. It held the West by
military occupation. And assuredly the Americans were not ready
for another war to capture the West, if war could be avoided.

England's demand for the Ohio country, therefore, must be met
with diplomacy. When it came to diplomacy the Americans now
discovered that their real position was even more difficult than it
looked on the surface.

The representatives of the Congress had been instructed "to
make the most candid and confidential communications on all sub-
jects to the Ministers of our generous ally, the King of France; to
undertake nothing in the negotiations for peace or truce without
their knowledge or concurrence; and ultimately to govern yourself
by their advice and opinion."

It did not take Jays shrewd lawyer's mind long to sense the
duplicity of the French. They were playing their own game to keep
the United States so weak that it would remain dependent on
French power. What territorial advantage France hoped to ^gain
from this double cross, now that it had lost its hold on America,
was never clear, probably even to the French government. But a

THE YANKEE HORSE TRADERS 161

weak United States, requiring French support for existence, would
tend to strengthen French power and somewhere along the line
might come in handy for imperial purposes.

The double cross suited Spain, France's temporary friend and also
a great empire. Spain held more land in America and had held it
longer than any other European nation. It hoped to push the boun-
dary of Louisiana east of the Mississippi and recover the Floridas.
In diplomatic combination, and with appropriate dirty work at the
crossroads of the West, French and Spanish power might still keep
the Americans behind or near the Alleghenies and Louisiana safe
from their pressure.

France had immediate interests apart from territory. It proposed,
in secret advances to England, that American fishermen be ex-
cluded from the historic waters of Newfoundland to provide more
fish for Englishmen and Frenchmen. England, the enemy of the
American Revolution, was not prepared to follow the Revolution's
allies in double-crossing it. The French proposal was rejected.

Spain then proposed to bound Louisiana on the east by a line
running from the western end of Lake Erie to the border of Florida.
France countered with a plan for a vast Indian buffer state to hold
the Americans at the Alleghenies and indicated that Britain could
have all the land north of the Ohio.

These backstage maneuvers of European real politique were rap-
idly teaching the American delegates the facts of life, which the
noble ideals of Philadelphia did not seem to comprehend. Franklin.
Jay, and Adams faced a possible combination of power fatal to
their nation's future, a combination which could not be resisted,
if it was seriously maintained.

Happily the combination never got past the stage of diplomatic
whispering. England had the clear chance to grasp the Ohio coun-
try and change the whole course of human events in America. It
declined to play with France and Spain, for motives both generous
and selfish. The Americans must be given justice to settle the family
quarrel with a minimum of bitterness and the chance of future
friendship; and if they were refused justice they might well be
thrown permanently into alliance with France and Spain against
England. The Ohio was not worth that risk even in the cold bar-
gaining of power politics. England, in fact, was not so stupid as
the king and his former ministers who had provoked the Revolution.

Things thus were moving fast at Paris. On learning of France's
overtures to England, Jay and Adams decided to break their in-
structions and disregard the French government entirely. It would
be a serious thing for Congressional delegates to disobey the Con-
gress, but something must be done without delay. They could not

162 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BOEDER

wait for new instructions, weeks hence. Franklin objected to his
colleagues' daring strategy. He was outvoted. The delegation ap-
proached the English negotiators direct and proceeded skillfully
to exploit the feuds of the Great Powers. That was the great turn-
ing point of the conference, a watershed in American history.

Having demanded most of Canada and then been threatened with
the loss of the Ohio country, the Americans proposed a new com-
promise. It looked generous after their original demands. England
could have the north if it would abandon the Ohio claim and sup-
port the United States in holding the Mississippi line against Louisi-
ana. Where would the boundary then run between Canada and the
United States west of the 45th Parallel at its junction with the St.
Lawrence? The Americans were ready with two alternatives, both
far more ambitious than American resources could presently enforce.

Britain could have either a straight boundary on the 45th Parallel
to the headwaters of the Mississippi or a wriggling line along the
course of the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes, westward to the
northwest corner of the Lake of the Woods and thence directly west
to the Mississippi.

The second line was geographically impossible, since the Missis-
sippi headwaters lay southwest, not west, of the Lake of the Woods,
but no one knew that. Moreover, there was a vast difference be-
tween the two alternative lines in territory, natural wealth, and
routes of transportation, a difference which must drastically affect
the future of Canada, if it had any.

The line of the 45th Parallel would give the United States the
rich Niagara peninsula, where Canadian settlement would soon be
concentrated, all of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, half of Lake
Huron; but it would give Canada the main artery of travel to the
prairies, the northern third of Lake Michigan, all of Lake Superior,
much of the farm land of Wisconsin and Minnesota, and the price-
less, unknown Minnesota iron field. If the line was ever extended
beyond the Mississippi, it would give Canada also North Dakota,
Montana, and Washington.

Britain either was unaware of the difference between the two
lines or thought it unimportant. What were a few miles north or
south between enemies now becoming friends?

Anyway, to the ignorant but practical mind of London the more
northern boundary of the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes looked
natural on the map. England accepted it without further argument
and surrendered all the country to the south. A stroke of the pen
gave away the work of Talon, Jolliet, Marquette, La Salle, and all
the old explorers, the fur route, and the interior valley for which
innumerable battles had been fought in the wilderness and innu-

THE YANKEE HORSE TRADERS 163

merable men had died. Huge areas, in modern Wisconsin and
Minnesota, though no American had ever seen them, were included
in the surrender. To make matters worse for Canada, the line across
Lake Superior was pushed north of Isle Royale, close to the north
shore, and Canadians were almost barred from the lake's western
end. As the cynical French statesmen remarked, "England does not
make peace, she buys it."

The fur traders of Canada, both English and French Canadian,
were the first to realize the extent of that surrender. Their trail to
the West had been cut. The canoe passage threaded by the first
French voyageurs, the portages tramped down by Canadian moc-
casins for a century, the old peltry, the defending posts of Niagara,
Detroit, Mackinac and the others, the control of the Indian fur
harvesters, all were handed over to American settlement for the
political convenience of England. This was the ultimate betrayal
of Canada and it was much larger than the fur traders supposed.
Loss of furs would prove to be the least part of the total loss.

English and American negotiators had an easy and false answer
to the fur trade and its Indian friends. After all, they said, the
political line, a mere scribble on the map, meant little. The impor-
tant thing for the Canadians was the opportunity to trade with the
interior, and this would be protected. England had the assurance of
the Americans that Canadian traders would be admitted freely
south of the new boundary. It was only on such an understanding
that England had consented to the bargain.

If the London government believed that, it would believe any-
thing. Obviously nothing could stop the American businessmen,
once they were strong enough, from making the boundary not an
imaginary line but a firm wall against Canadian commerce in fur
and everything else. The Americans were not undertaking an ab-
stract exercise in Smith's new economics of free trade. They were
building a nation and would build it as they pleased.

England failed even to write the proposed system of free trade
into a treaty-but not entirely out of neglect or stupidity, as the
Canadians might imagine. There were businessmen in London also,
as hardheaded as those in Philadelphia. They had been told by the
Americans, quite reasonably, that if there was to be freedom of
trade in the western wilderness there must be the same kind of
freedom elsewhere. English business, built on the theory of mercan-
tilism and protected, discriminatory trade, would not surrender its
Navigation Acts and other forms of protection to satisfy a few Ca-
nadian fur traders.

The whole problem of trade, therefore, was postponed for later
negotiation, the Canadians fobbed off with the promise of a satis-

164 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

factory commercial treaty at some time in the future. No such treaty
would be negotiated for three-quarters of a century and then it
would last only ten years. The political boundary drawn in Paris
inevitably must bisect not only the territory but the business of
North America in pursuit of commercial, political, human and emo-
tional objectives, in denial of all geographic and economic law, in
defiance of nature itself.

But a still higher law was operating here, as in all nations—subtle,
intangible, illogical, and irresistible. Two different peoples were
going their separate ways because they prized their myths more
than their treasure.

No one at Paris could yet estimate the full dimensions of myth
or treasure.

The Americans certainly had established their myth already. It
was written in the Declaration and in the hearts of the people; and
because men are always governed in essentials not by fact but by
feeling, the myth was more valuable to them and more potent than
any map, political system, or economic theory.

The Canadians had a myth also, a French-Canadian myth, but
so far inarticulate, and only half the myth necessary to nourish a
nation. The Americans, without ever suspecting it, were about to
supply the complementary half, already moving into Canada from
the new American nation while the Paris conference scrawled its
curious line across the map.

It was far too early yet to gauge intangibles far more decisive
than the apparent facts. The new map seemed to show only that
loyal Canada was imprisoned within a northland barren, poor, and
almost worthless beside the rich heritage of the Revolution, Canada
had been sold out, not for the first or the last time. Or so it thought.

In their anger the handful of existing Canadians— or those of them
interested in the West— overlooked two facts.

The first was the undiscovered fact that north of the new line,
in all this mess of Pre-Cambrian rock and stunted trees, lay some
of the world's most precious minerals; the sparse prairies, now feed-
ing buffalo and Indian, could grow hard wheat; the foothills of the
Rockies covered a lake of oil; and farther west, where no boundary
was yet considered, the dark smear of a giant forest ran down to
the sea rocks.

The second fact was that a line fixed by power politics, by horse
trading and ignorance, by guess and by God, probably was the only
line that would stay put in America. It gave the Canadians far less
than they deserved, but it also gave the Americans enough to satisfy
their appetite. If Britain had pushed the line south to the Ohio, or

THE YANKEE HORSE 1HADERS 165

even to the 45th Parallel, a powerful United States, in due time,
would have rolled it back to acquire what the expanding nation
needed for its purposes and might have kept rolling to the North
Pole.

The southern Canadian boundary, in plain truth, could be held,
mainly and perhaps only because the Americans had temporarily
lost their appetite for Canada. They seemed to have all the land
they knew what to do with on the north. They would somehow
secure Louisiana on the west when they got around to it, would
cross the Mississippi and reach the Pacific.

In the meantime., winding up their revolution, they were secure
south of the natural line of the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes.
West of the lakes, so long as Spain held a Louisiana of indeterminate
shape, no boundary between English and American power was
needed. Out there the buffalo, the Indians, and the fur traders
could continue to cross the 49th Parallel without interruption.

So far, so good for the Americans in the proceedings of the Paris
conference. Two other disagreeable matters must be settled.

American fishermen had long fished in English territorial waters
along the Atlantic coast. They intended to keep on fishing even if
the coast north of the St. Croix lay beyond the boundaries of their
new nation. They would land and dry their fish, as usual, on these
foreign shores. Franklin called the old fishing rights a sine qua non
of any peace settlement. The impetuous Adams bluntly threatened
another war to keep the fisheries open.

"If," he said, in a sudden outburst of moral indignation, "we were
forced off, at three leagues distance, we should smuggle eternally,
that their men-of-war might have the glory of sinking now and then
a fishing schooner, but this would not prevent a repetition of the
crime, it would only inflame and irritate and enkindle a new war,
that in seven years we should break through all restraints and con-
quer from them the island of Newfoundland itself, and Nova
Scotia, too."

The threat of war might be a bluff. That the American fishermen
would continue to fish and smuggle eternally, beyond England's
power to control them, at least without destroying any chance of
friendship with the United States, could not be doubted. So Eng-
land yielded on the fisheries, a business much more valuable than
furs. The American fishermen could take fish as they wished in
England's territorial waters and could dry them on the shore of
its colonies, wherever it was uninhabited. This, too, was surrender
on the grand scale. And the sea settlement of the Atlantic would
C&use more and longer trouble th?tn the land settlement of the West,

166 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

The second item of unfinished business at Paris, though it seemed
minor, was infinitely more important to the United States and
Canada alike than any nice division of land or sea. It contained the
great intangible of Canadian nationhood. It housed the essential
Canadian myth. It seemed a small item on the Paris agenda, but
perhaps more than any other single factor it must settle the future
division of America.

The conference was concerned only with the troublesome but
apparently practical and businesslike matter of debts owed in the
United States to those who had opposed the Revolution. Those
debts were substantial. In most of the old Thirteen Colonies, now
sovereign states, the lands, homes, and businesses of the Tories had
been confiscated. Their owners had been treated roughly,, though
not so roughly as they doubtless would have been treated in any
other nation fighting for its life. A few had been killed as traitors.
Some had been tarred, feathered, and ridden out of town on
fence rails. The American delegates at Paris could not deny that,
in a settlement between future friends, the victims of revolution
should be compensated.

Unfortunately, it was difficult to arrange compensation. In the
first place, there were so many Tories, as the Americans called them,
or United Empire Loyalists as they called themselves, Adams
reckoned, indeed, that a third of the people in the Thirteen Colonies
had opposed the Revolution. To pay off all who thought them-
selves injured would be quite beyond the resources of the Con-
tinental Congress. The Congress had no power to compensate them
anyway. A loose confederation could not compel sovereign states
They would deal with the Tories as they chose individually. The
Congress could only promise to recommend "earnestly" to the states
that the Tories should be treated fairly. As the states had no inten-
tion of rewarding treachery to the Revolution, and generally thought
that the Tories were lucky to escape with their skins, the promise
made at Paris was worthless, its result decisive to the future of
Canada.

11

Tragedy at New York

[1782-1787]

WHILE THE CONFERENCE OF PARIS DELIBERATED, THE PEACE NOT
yet settled, New York presented one of the strangest spec-
tacles yet witnessed in the New World—also tragic, heart
sickening, and of profound consequence to all America.

England had ceased to fight seriously after the fall of Yorktown,
but it still held New York. The active Loyalists, who had reason to
fear for their safety, flocked behind the English lines. For the second
time, in the same man, England found the means of protecting its
supporters.

Carleton had been summoned from retirement in his country
home and sent posthaste to New York, his quarrel with Germain
forgiven. Like King Louis in the case of Frontenac, King George
had suddenly realized that he could not do without his reliable old
servant.

As the King and government had no clear plans in the present
catastrophe, Carleton was given carte blanche along with the com-
mand of all English forces in America. He had saved Quebec. Maybe
he could save the helpless victims of the Revolution. They were
committed to his "tenderest and most honorable care" by the King
himself. The government added that "the resources of your mind
in the most perplexing and critical situations have been already
tried and proved successful. At this perilous moment they give hope
to the nation." To Canada they would give the chance of survival.

When Carleton reached New York in May, 1782, it was to find
a pitiable and penniless horde of Loyalists seeking immediate evacu-
ation and increasing daily as more exiles poured in from the country-
side. The power of England and the United States was represented
again, as in 1775, by two grave men whose careers had always run

167

168 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

parallel. Carleton at once established a polite correspondence with
Washington. They met, as gentlemen of the same mold, with pon-
derous dignity on both sides but without chance of satisfactory
agreement.

Washington, naturally enough, was bitter toward the Loyalists,
his enemies. He had been quoted as saying, in an angry moment,
that he "could see nothing better for them than to commit suicide."
He knew now that his half -formed nation would soon have inde-
pendence in law as in fact and thus could treat all persons within
its bounds as it chose.

Carleton's duty, on the other hand, was to protect the Loyalists,
and he still expected a friendly settlement of the war without a
political breach. From the beginning, at Quebec and on Lake Cham-
plain, he had sought a reconciliation, had been punished for treat-
ing the American invaders too lightly, and in his limited imagination
could not conceive of England's total surrender to its erring sons.

Hearing that independence had been granted to the United
States, the English gentleman of the old school was outraged. He
resigned immediately. The resignation was refused because Eng-
land could find no substitute. On second thought, Carleton decided
to remain at New York and salvage what he could from the wreck.

In April, 1783, he shipped 5,593 Loyalists to the nearest haven
of Nova Scotia. The exiles carried little baggage that the Americans
could observe but that first ship, like the Mayflower, contained in
secret freight the missing ingredient of a Canadian nation.

The Americans impatiently demanded their harbor of New York
and their last sight of the Tories. Carleton refused to be hurried.
He would not withdraw his troops until all the Loyalists had been
safely removed.

About a hundred thousand of them left the United States. A third,
mostly the English-born, rich and official classes, went to England.
Most of the exiles had neither the means nor the desire to leave
America. It was their home as much as it was the home of the revo-
lutionists—and that also was a disregarded fact of profound con-
sequence. Some went to the West Indies and Florida. The largest
group, probably between forty and fifty thousand— no one ever
taiew the exact numbers—chose Nova Scotia because it was part of
America and close at hand. By the end of November the greatest
mass exodus in North American history was complete. And though
he could not sense it yet, Carleton's job of salvage had assured a
second, but peaceful revolution in the politics of the continent.

Nova Scotia was overwhelmed by the sudden influx, which tripled
its population overnight. The Loyalists burst the accommodations of

TRAGEDY AT NEW YORK 169

Halifax and camped around it in a city of tents. They started to
build a bigger and better Halifax at Shelbume, on the southwest tip
of the peninsula. The former French Port Razoir, corrupted into the
English Roseway, then hopefully called New Jerusalem and pres-
ently occupied by three fishing families, was now renamed in honor
of the English statesman who had just sold out Canada at Paris. To
accommodate some eight or ten thousand new residents, the town
was divided into wide streets, town lots, and surrounding farms and
the gentry were soon giving routs and balls with all the old splendor
of silk, crinoline, and silver buckles.

Shelbume was quickly abandoned, having nothing to live on.
Other Loyalist settlements in Nova Scotia flourished permanently,
despite the return of many of the exiles to the United States. But
Nova Scotia never became a truly Loyalist colony. Basically an off-
shoot of New England, its future population was to be mostly
Yankee and Scottish—for a long time more Nova Scotian than
Canadian.

The colony, christened "Nova Scarcity" by disillusioned settlers,
and the other little colony of Prince Edward Island could not hold
the invasion. It poured across the Chignecto Isthmus, peopled St
John, paddled up the St. John River and founded Fredericton, near
the ruins of the old French fort of Ste. Anne.

Here the comfortable farmers and tradesmen of the Thirteen
Colonies and the disbanded Loyalist regiments confronted a wilder-
ness as naked, cruel, and cold as it had always been since the first
days of American settlement. Many of them, accustomed to snug
houses, lived through the first winter in tents and bark huts.

The government at distant Halifax could not cope with the de-
mand for land, food, and clothing. There were so many settlers west
of Chignecto, so many petitions, so much discontent that the new
colony of New Brunswick was established, complete with a legisla-
tive assembly at Fredericton like that of Halifax, and Loyalist to the
core.

This division of Nova Scotia suited the government at London,
then under the impression that the Canadian colonies should be
widely separated, kept weak, and prevented from uniting in some
new version of a Continental Congress with dangerous notions of
freedom.

The first New Brunswick elections showed how ill London had
gauged the future of Canada and what it might expect from
Canadians, even Loyalists later on. In St. John the working classes
of the "Lower Cove" outvoted the gentry of the "Upper Cove" and
would have defeated two important officers of the government if a

170 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

practical sheriff had not saved them by striking out eighty opposi-
tion votes. That portent was significant but unobserved.

A few settlers turned back in despair to the United States, after
political passions had cooled there. Most of them remained to found
an entirely new and distinctive life of their own— not without regret
for the easier life left behind. A woman who was to be the grand-
mother of Leonard Tilley, New Brunswick's great statesman, left a
vivid picture of the general homesickness in the first days of St.
John when she "climbed to the top of Chapman's Hill and watched
the sails disappear in the distance, and such a feeling of loneliness
came over me that, although I had not shed a tear through all the
war, I sat down on the damp moss with my baby in my lap and
cried." But nobody cried for long.

The Loyalists had undertaken one of the true epics of North
America and none succeeded better. For all their local differences,
the new communities of the Atlantic coast had a basic unity of
character and instinct. They were to be the "Maritimes," the home
of a unique Canadian breed. It was hard, poor, thrifty, proud, in-
genious, indestructible, and forever distinguishable from other
Canadians.

The court, the navy, and the military at Halifax, now reinforced
by Loyalist aristocrats, gave the Maritimes also a certain elegance
and glamour lacking elsewhere. The Duke of Kent, arriving in
Halifax a few years after the Loyalists, to live publicly with his
mistress, Julie St. Laurent, to build the Citadel and leave his
pompous mark permanently on the town, felt quite at home in a
Georgian environment. That exuberant young man was quite cast
down when he left Nova Scotia, abandoned his faithful paramour
to die of heartbreak, and returned to England for the patriotic duty
of begetting a much-needed English sovereign named Queen
Victoria.

Fewer Loyalists settled in the St. Lawrence colony of Quebec,
but strategically and politically they were even more important than
the Maritimers.

As early as 1774 the first refugees from the Revolution had trickled
into the region around Montreal. Soon after the signing of peace
Governor Frederick Haldimand, the able Swiss soldier of fortune at
Quebec, had on his hands some seven thousand destitute exiles who
had come with "unreasonable expectations."

He housed and fed them in rude camps at government expense
and often in wise disregard of his instructions. As soon as the ice
thawed in the spring of '84 he moved them up the St. Lawrence in
boats and barges piled high with supplies, tools, and cattle.

TRAGEDY AT NEW YORK 171

They were settled along the river west of Montreal, on the north
shore of Lake Ontario to Niagara, and on the Detroit River, in
racial groups—Yankees from New England, Dutchmen from the
Hudson River, Highland soldiers, Hessian mercenaries—among
whom those of English race could have been a small majority at
most No matter, they were all Loyalists, they hated the Americans
and accepted King George.

Government surveyors hastily and inaccurately surveyed town-
ships in farms of 200 acres, townsites, and streets. The land was
distributed to everybody by lots drawn from a hat, officers of the
defeated regiments receiving five to ten times as much as ordinary
settlers. Even this discrimination failed to satisfy some ambitious
officers. Haldimand replied tartly that most of the malcontents
were "in fact mechanics, only removed from one situation to practice
their trade in another/'

Six miles on either side of the Grand River were excluded from
the King's sovereignty and given to the loyal Mohawks, who had
ravaged the western American borders in some of the bloodiest
massacres of the Revolution. Their handsome, well-educated chief,
Joseph Brant, settled down in a mansion at Brantford, refused large
bribes offered by the American government if he would keep the
western tribes peaceful, became the lion of New York and London
society, excited James Boswell, refused, as a king, to kiss King
George's hand, and on a fancied insult almost tomahawked the
Turkish ambassador at a state ball.

Social and racial distinctions counted for little in the Loyalist
settlements when nearly all the settlers were destitute. They con-
ducted their business, such as it was, by barter. They depended on
the government for food. They were clothed in issues of rough
cloth to make trousers and skirts, blankets to make coats. Soon, like
their Indian neighbors, they were making their own garments of
deerskin.

Each family received an unserviceable ship's ax and a handsaw.
A single firelock must serve five families for hunting. A portable
gristmill, worked by hand, ground the grain of the whole village. In
the "hungry year" of *88, after a crop failure, the Loyalists almost
starved. A pound or two of flour could be traded for 200 acres of
land. A soupbone might be passed from house to house for suc-
cessive boilings. Many families ground tree buds and leaves for
food.

There were probably ten thousand settlers above Montreal by the
end of the eighties. Not all of them could claim to be Loyalists, for
every newcomer arriving overland from New York and Pennsylvania

172 THE STRUGGLE FOR 1HE BORDER

by the old route to Niagara, who swore an oath of loyalty to the
King, was welcome and given land, no questions asked concerning
his part in the Revolution.

It was a poor man s settlement. Many of the settlers were illiterate.
A few had managed to lug some pathetic relic of better times across
the border— a spinning wheel, a grandfather's clock, a bed or table,
to be installed in a log shanty with oiled-paper windows and per-
haps no chimney.

If these people lacked money and social background, they held in
common an adventure, a hope, and a legend. To preserve these
memories, Carleton (now Lord Dorchester on his return to Quebec)
proclaimed that as a "Marke of Honour" the United Empire Loyal-
ists were "to be distinguished by the letters U.E. affixed to then-
names, alluding to their great principle, the unity of the Empire."

That distinction fell out of use, but the Loyalists were drawn
together by both memories and necessity. They helped one another
at barn raisings and quilting parties. They celebrated at dances,
wrestling matches, and drinking bouts. They were further united in
demanding their own government, separate from the government of
French-speaking Quebec.

Their demand contradicted the whole policy of the Quebec Act,
which had confirmed Quebec as a French community without rep-
resentative institutions. But the Loyalists could not be long resisted,
especially when such institutions already had been conferred on the
Maritime colonies.

Carleton faced a baffling problem. The Loyalists wanted some
kind of elected government. In French Canada all save a small
English-speaking minority had no wish to change their old ways and
regarded elected government as a device for extorting taxes.

Only about 21,000 of the 130,000 people on the St. Lawrence in
1791 were English-speaking, most of them in the upriver settle-
ments. The colony was split by race, history and custom, but its
economic interests were joined by the river highway and by com-
mon conditions of life. The government's budget was hopelessly
unbalanced and dependent on the British taxpayer; the administra-
tion chaotic; the "English judges following English, French judges
French law, and some followed no particular laws of any sort
whatsoever."

Carleton was old and bewildered and, for the first time, seemed
impotent. Tired of his delays, the London government of the
younger Pitt decided on its own ad hoc solution and cut the colony
in two.

The Constitutional Act of 1791, with its subsequent orders in

TRAGEDY AT NEW YORK 173

council, created a diminished Quebec, bounded on the west by the
convenient line of the Ottawa and now called Lower Canada. The
western, English-speaking settlements, of vague dimensions, be-
came Upper Canada.

Both were given governors, appointed executive councils, and
parliaments consisting of an appointed Legislative Council cor-
responding to the House of Lords and an elected Assembly cor-
responding to the House of Commons.

Lower Canada was allowed to live its own life, to retain its
seigneurial land system, support its church, and on the bitter Jpread
of conquest, to become more Canadian than ever.

Upper Canada was expected to reproduce in the wilds the stable,
authoritarian system of England under what Pitt called "the very
image and transcript of the British constitution." One-seventh of all
land was set aside for the support of a privileged but not established
Protestant Church. A hereditary nobility was to be created but
fortunately was soon forgotten.

Thus with governors who could veto the will of their assemblies
and all local laws subject to the approval of the King, England
proposed to avoid in Canada the weakness that, in its judgment, had
caused the American Revolution. Democratic heresies were to be
kept south of the new boundary, Canadians in their places.

Pitt's "image and transcript" at once began to perish, like so
many other things of English origin, in the harsh climate of the
St. Lawrence Valley.

A unique adventure of racial conflict was under way, an adven-
ture more complicated, difficult, and doubtful than any statesman
in London or any settler in Canada yet suspected. Nothing would
turn out as planned.

The Loyalist movement looked at first to Englishmen like an act
of charity, high in expense, small in result. It cost the English tax-
payers probably £6,000,000 altogether in compensation grants,
ranging from £10 to the £44,500 awarded to a great landowner
like Sir John Johnson. But the Loyalist movement could never be
reckoned in money or in numbers. For Canada, for England, for
the Anglo-Saxon peoples all over the world it was to prove revolu-
tionary in the following century and a half.

It was revolutionary in Canada from the beginning because it
provided an English-speaking population (all the immigrants soon
learning to speak that tongue) in which the French Canadians must
soon be a minority.

The Loyalists seized the new bridgehead and exploited it so well
that larger immigration was continually attracted from the British

174 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

Isles and the United States. Before the arrival of the Loyalists few
observers in London or Philadelphia could imagine Canada, a tiny
French-speaking colony, remaining long within the British Empire.
Sooner or later such a vulnerable island must be engulfed by the
rising tides of the United States. Now, with a small but substantial
and growing population of British stock, the Empire might hold
Canada—not, however, on the Empire's existing terms and not for
long as a handful of mere colonies.

In the Empire as a whole the Loyalist movement must prove
revolutionary for other reasons, not to be understood within a cen-
tury. Those reasons must also deeply affect the future of the United
States— the seed of the world-wide Commonwealth of the twentieth
century had been planted on the north shore of the St. Lawrence.

Meanwhile the most conservative elements of North American
society had moved out of the United States, some for purely
patriotic reasons, more from sheer necessity. The immediate effect
of this movement on the society of the United States cannot be
estimated. Its immediate effect on Canada can hardly be over-
estimated. Its long-term effect on the Empire and on the United
States is not clear even to this day. Certain subtle and almost secret
changes, much larger than the migration itself and the grafting of
a new English-speaking population to the French race of Canada,
had occurred in America.

To begin with, the sundering of the British peoples had not been
accomplished, as men like Carleton hoped, in goodwill and without
spiritual scars. It had been accomplished in anger and agony. It had
left a wound on every United Empire Loyalist, to be inherited by
his sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons and not to be healed for a
hundred years at least, not entirely healed yet. It had made the
American and the Canadian not only antipathetic to each other but,
in the deepest sense, incomprehensible.

The original French Canadian had seen the United States as an
aggressive power, an invader, and a religious heretic. The first
English-speaking population of the St. Lawrence remembered the
United States only as an enemy, a persecutor, a traitor to the
motherland, a political heretic. Such was half the legacy left in
Canada by the American Revolution— an incalculable loss to the
future spiritual unity of the continent.

The other half, so far as it affected the creation of a Canadian
state, was a disguised and negative asset. The Loyalists had fled to
Canada hating the Americans. At first, anyway, that hatred, as much
as any positive love of England, compelled the new Canadians to
create a community of some sort if they were to be safe from Amer-

TRAGEDY AT NEW YORK 175

ican pursuit and annexation. The full power of those joint emotions
of hate and love must be fully tested, along with the United States'
appetite for Canadian territory, in a war only three decades away.

By these curious means the Revolution had given birth to the
future Canadian nation as surely as the American. It had given
Canada an English-speaking population, fortified that population
with anger and resolve, provided not only the first physical but also
the essential and enduring psychic elements of nationhood.

Some of the differences between the American and Canadian
communities were obvious enough. The American had some three
million people, the Canadian less than a hundred and fifty thousand.
The American had established a rudimentary national government
and legislature, independent of foreign states, and they would soon
be perfected under a Federal Constitution. The Canadian had no
central government, except a governor in Quebec with tenuous,
theoretical control over the subgovernors of the loose-knit colonies.
All of them were governed in great affairs from London. Only a few
hopeful men supposed that the mutually suspicious knots of settle-
ment from Halifax to Niagara could ever weld themselves into a
nation or prove capable of independent sovereignty.

All that was obvious, so obvious that few Americans realized
then, or for a century afterwards, that their revolution of itself had
made a second nation possible. Other obscure and little-noted facts
were the important ones.

Canada differed entirely from the United States in another re-
spect. Its English-speaking people had refused to cut their roots in
England. Its pious Catholic French-speaking people had been
betrayed by France at the Conquest of 1759, were finally severed
from their motherland by the godlessness of the French Revolution
and, therefore, by calculation, though not by emotion, were pre-
pared to accept government from England. The great paradox
and ambivalence of the Canadian mind was now established and
would endure— a mind split by its love of the Canadian earth and its
nostalgia for the Old World, by the vision of England in the English-
speaking Canadian, the vision of the lost France in the French
Canadian, a mind thus in constant tension and secret conflict be-
tween the opposite pulls of geography and history as even Cham-
plain had felt them.

There lay perhaps the deepest difference between the American
and the Canadian creature. The United States began spiritually
whole. Canada began in division between two races and, within the
races, in conflict between two emotions. Finally, the Loyalist
tragedy and epic left a permanent tinge on the character and

176 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

thought processes of all Canadians, conditioning the weather of
their life thenceforth in a certain conservatism, skepticism, stubborn
silence, and studied outer dullness, all used as a disguise before
foreigners to protect a young, weak nation living always under
siege.

Even that does not tell the whole story. The least suspected fact
of all was that the Loyalists had not been transplanted Englishmen
when they came to Canada, as England supposed. They had been
North Americans. Most of them had been born in America and
were not landed aristocrats, like those of England, but poor me-
chanics and farmers. All were accustomed to representative gov-
ernment in the assemblies of the Thirteen Colonies. Few had been
entirely satisfied with England's policies; many were angry with
English taxes and eager for reform. They had broken from their
neighbors on the single issue of political separation by civil war.
When they reached Canada they had no intention of accepting
dictatorial government from London.

It was all very well for John Graves Simcoe, the beefy English
Governor of Upper Canada, to declare that "the best Security that
all just Government has for its Existence is founded on the Morality
of the People" and for a successor to promise to "contend against
Democratic principles," but the colonists demanded at least as much
political freedom as they had known in the Thirteen Colonies-
much more, indeed, as they would shortly demonstrate. The germ
of self-government had been introduced in the unworkable Consti-
tutional Act, was fatal to future English control of Canada, and—
most surprising of all— was fatal to the whole British Empire as it
then existed.

In the United States democracy had come as an explosion. In
Canada it would grow slowly, quietly, steadily, illogically, with
roots still spanning the Atlantic. Canada, therefore, was to be the
laboratory of the Empire, in which its future must be worked out
by experiments culminating in a commonwealth of free states, that
supreme Canadian invention.

The United States could not escape either the immediate effects
of a new nation growing up beside it and dividing the continent or
the wider effects of a political organization girdling the world, since
the British peoples must be essential American allies in every future
trial of strength, finally in two world wars. It is hardly too much to
say that the process begun in the American Revolution and carried
into Canada by the Loyalists is the most urgent business of all the
English-speaking peoples in the world of the twentieth century.

Such a process— if anyone sensed it at the end of the eighteenth

TRAGEDY AT NEW YORK 177

century— must take time, wisdom, and experience in Canada, in
Britain, and in the United States because it represented nothing less
than the reconciliation of the English-speaking race after its sunder-
ing in the American Revolution. For many years, however, the
victors and the victims of the Revolution were too busy to think
much of these tilings.

The sparsely settled, far-flung, and poverty-stricken Canadian
colonies somehow survived their first growing pains under political
arrangements which could not last and must be altered.

Washington had seen that the existing American system would
not serve either, that "something must be done, or the fabric will
fall, for it is certainly tottering."

The Philadelphia Convention soon framed the Constitution of the
United States. Washington took his oath as president on the balcony
of Federal Hall, in New York. The first American nation had a
national government at last, seventy-eight years before Canada
could achieve it, and seemed to have almost everything that a new
nation could desire. No, it still lacked the far West. In pursuit of the
West the two nations of America, the older shaped and strong, the
younger shapeless and weak, were about to enter a long series of
violent collisions. Canada's chance of surviving them appeared
small; to most thoughtful Americans, nil.

12

The Mad General

[1787-1794]

BY THE FIRST DAYS OF 1794 THE YOUNG UNTRIED PEACE OF PARIS
seemed to be dying in its eleventh year. The British Empire
and the new American Republic were on the edge of war. As
usual, the immediate danger lay along the Canadian boundary in
the West, which had bred two world wars already.

A daring American officer, styled "Mad Anthony** Wayne for his
exploits in the Revolution, was advancing from the Ohio country
perilously near to Canada. At Quebec the Canadian Governor
General, Lord Dorchester, who had once been grave Carleton,
evidently had lost all sense of gravity and was about to lose his
head. The Jeffersonian party in the United States Congress was de-
manding that President Washington retaliate against Britain for
the seizure of American ships at sea. The British government of the
second Pitt had no wish for extra trouble in America, being now at
death grips with revolutionary France on the long road to Waterloo,
but it must maintain its European blockade even against American
shipping.

Known events apparently lay in the hands of distinguished figures
like Washington, Pitt, Jefferson, Dorchester, and Wayne. Unknown
events, in the end more important, were quietly manipulated by un-
known men far beyond the existing North American map, in an
empty land of guess and legend, almost to the rim of the Rockies.

These adventurers, some half crazy, most ignorant, and all poor,
included an American guerrilla fighter turned playwright, a frenzied
Irish governor of North Carolina, a killer from New England, a
handsome young Scotsman from the Hebrides, a farm laborer's son
from Yorkshire, a doomed navigator from Denmark, and a company
of Spanish sailors, long dead. Together, in vain pursuit of an ancient
myth, they were giving the civilized world a new dimension.

178

THE MAD GENERAL

179

Of these things Dorchester knew little or nothing when he rose—
an old man of seventy now, stout, heavy jowled, shaggy and bitterly
disillusioned, the very image of John Bull at bay— to address a
delegation of Miami chiefs. War between Canada and the United
States, he said, was imminent, and then he added his celebrated in-
discretion: "You are witness that on our part we have acted in the
most peaceable manner and borne the language and conduct of the
people of the United States with patience, but I believe that our
patience is almost exhausted."

An angry Pitt repudiated this threat as soon as he heard of it, but
the repudiation could not reach President Washington by sailing
ship for several weeks. Meanwhile the damage had been done. The
American war party exploited Dorchester's words for all they were
worth and more. Jefferson called them an "unwarrantable outrage."

Perhaps not so unwarrantable as they appeared to Jefferson, for
much lay behind them in the West-enough, anyway, to convince
Dorchester that the Canada saved by his hands in 1775 was likely
to be extinguished by his old enemy in 1794.

The so-called West, between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi,
had been a remote suburb of the Revolutionary War, a vacuum
where a few men, mostly Indians, marched and countermarched,
raided, ambushed, and scalped in the old fashion with little ap-
parent effect on the war's main theater by the Atlantic. Yet large
imperial pressures were at work on the frontier.

The Spanish of Louisiana succored American raiding parties with
money and ammunition and provided them with sanctuary on the
Mississippi when they needed it-not because Spain had the
slightest sympathy with the Americans, but because for the moment
they were a useful weapon against England. The proposed Ameri-
can Republic, as the Spaniards confidently expected, would exhaust
itself in revolution, fall apart, and give Spain all the land west of
the Alleghenies. They must be the ultimate boundary of the United
States if, by chance, it survived as a nation. The Americans, there-
fore, must be shored up temporarily until they collapsed later on.

Thus, when young George Rogers Clark, lieutenant colonel of
Virginia and a friend of Jefferson, began his daring western raid in
1778, with only 175 guerrilla fighters, all as tough as their leader, he
was assured of cooperation from the Spanish at St. Louis.

He quickly conquered the Illinois nation, summoned 4,000
Indians of many tribes to meet him at Cahokia, and there, with
oratory as flamboyant as Frontenac's, proposed a general uprising
against the Canadians. The western frontier had produced no abler
strategist than Clark but continental strategy was against him.

All the vital posts of the Great Lakes system were held by the

180 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BOEDER

Canadians. Skillfully directed by Henry Hamilton from Detroit,
Canada's Indian allies stretched their war path all the way to
Kentucky and Tennessee and even entered the main war east of the
Alleghenies. Canada had always been unequaled in Indian warfare,
alliance, and politics. Now it possessed a decisive advantage. It was
defending the Indians' peltry and hunting grounds while the Amer-
icans intended to settle and destroy them.

Alone in the western vacuum, Clark could not resist Hamilton's
march to Vincennes, the key post of the Wabash country, but his
counterstroke, like his oratory, was worthy of Frontenac. From
Kaskaskia he and his little band of whites and Illinois warriors
raced across 180 miles of snow, ice, and mire in February, 1779,^ to
surprise and capture Vincennes from the unsuspecting Canadian
garrison. Clark had accomplished his own private epic and not
much else. It was a brief hour of glory to be followed by the Amer-
ican hero's bitter end in poverty and betrayal.

The Canadians marched next year on St. Louis and were hurled
back. The Americans, with Spanish help, held the Southwest, but
the hard fact of Canadian power remained in the vital region of the
Great Lakes and the Ohio country. Moreover, Clark's false friends,
the Spaniards, were pushing tentatively eastward across the Missis-
sippi; they seized West Florida and awaited the American Repub-
lic's inevitable disintegration.

When peace was arranged at Paris in 1783 Britain agreed to
abandon the western forts and retire behind the new boundary of
the St. Lawrence and the Lakes. The decision had hardly been
made and the boundary fixed before the new government of the
younger Pitt regretted the follies of the peace settlement. Far too
much had been given away to the Americans, quite unnecessarily.
Not only had Britain surrendered the best part of the western peltry
and the whole French transportation system, but it had exposed
itself to another Indian uprising like Pontiac's.

If the English negotiators at Paris had not understood the mean-
ing of the boundary, the Indians knew at once that it meant Amer-
ican settlement and their own destruction. Most of them had fought
for Britain in the Revolution. Now Britain had betrayed them for
their pains. In rising against the American settlers, they probably
would rise against the Canadian colonists as well. Or, if the
Canadians supported the Indians, Britain would be involved in
renewed conflict with the Americans. Britain could not afford
another war of any sort after its recent disaster,

For all these reasons, commercial and political, Pitt's government
thought that perhaps a bargain made in Paris at haste might be

THE MAD GENERAL 181

repealed, or whittled down, at leisure. Interpreted by skillful poli-
ticians, the promise to surrender the forts of Detroit, Mackinac,
Niagara, Oswego, Oswegatchie, and Dutchman's Point "with all
convenient speed" could be strung out indefinitely. Britain was in
no hurry. And it could make out a colorable case for delay, since
the American courts were slow in implementing the other clauses
of the peace treaty, which had promised just compensation for the
Loyalists' losses in the Revolution.

Washington sent von Steuben to Quebec to demand the surrender
of the forts. Governor Haldimand replied that he was powerless
without instructions from London. The soldier's eye of Washington
saw through this transparent evasion, saw that British power be-
strode the West and showed no sign of retreating where it belonged,
north of the St. Lawrence and the Lakes.

Britain hoped at first only to delay its withdrawal for a few more
years. Every additional fur harvest would put money into the
pockets of the Canadian traders. Trouble with the Indians at least
would be postponed. Mor§ important, the possession of the forts
could be used as a formidable bargaining counter in the proposed
trade treaty with the United States, discussed but left in obeyance
at Paris. As the years went by and the Canadian garrisons still held
the forts, beyond the power of the United States to dislodge them,
Britain began to hope that the boundary of 1783 could be swerved
southward, perhaps toward the Ohio, certainly far enough to give
Canada the crucial Grand Portage from Lake Superior to the
Rainy River.

Pitt had good reason to count on American weakness. The loose
confederation of the thirteen sovereign states, yet lacking a central
constitution, showed increasing strains along the Atlantic coast. In
the Southwest to the edge of the Mississippi, the new American
settlements were falling under the influence of the Spanish at New
Orleans. The wayward state of Vermont had proclaimed its inde-
pendence. It wanted to use the Richelieu as a trade artery to the
St. Lawrence. Ethan Allen— his jail sentence in England forgiven—
appeared ready to repent of Ticonderoga and, once more under
Jehovah, might bring his state back into the British Empire. An
officer of the Revolutionary War, Daniel Shays, had conducted a
rebellion in Massachusetts against a local government of property
and privilege. "There are," said Washington, "combustibles in every
state which a spark might set fire to."

Britain was gratified by those words from the man who had
managed the Revolution. Like Madrid, London began to hope that
the flimsy agglomeration of American colonies which somehow had

182 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

won the war might dissolve before a national state could be erected.

All such hopes were false. Britain still did not and perhaps never
would understand the nature of Americans or Canadians, but the
obvious policy for the Micawbers of London was to hold the forts
and wait for something to turn up. Any day now somebody might
ignite the combustibles, A resulting explosion should blow the West
back into the Empire.

Governor Haldimand, that practical Swiss, had invented the
project of an Indian buffer state in the Ohio country, where no
white man would be allowed to settle but Canadians and Americans
could trade freely. Dorchester proposed to expand the boundaries
of this preserve eastward to Lake Champlain. The Pitt government
warmly endorsed such an easy way out of the stalemate.

Pitt soon found that he was not dealing with the quarrelsome
Continental Congress. The Americans had constructed their con-
stitution and nation at Philadelphia. The new nation-state intended
to possess its own territory and was governed by the ablest group
of statesmen in modern times. The United States government could
settle the problem of the Loyalists' compensation and the old excuse
of nonpayment, which had long served London's policy of delay,
could serve no more. President Washington could raise his own
troops, regardless of the individual states, and if necessary capture
the western forts.

Finally Britain was now engaged in the ultimate struggle for
America on the far and little-known Pacific coast. It faced there the
prospect of war with Spain for possession of vague coastal territories
and a newly discovered treasure, the hides of certain curious sea
mammals. War with Spain might ally the Americans with the
Spaniards of Louisiana. Anyway, such a war was no part of Pitt's
program. He had his hands full in Europe. France had begun its
revolution and was about to elevate a disagreeable little artillery-
man into the menace of the age.

Thus complicated, the policy of holding the western forts looked
more and more like a losing proposition for Britain. There was
still another complication. The western Indians were struggling for
their existence against American settlement. Agents of the United
States negotiated with them interminably and made treaties with
a few tribes, but the Indians as a whole repudiated these sur-
renders as invalid. The land, they said, belonged to the Indian race
collectively. Only a Pontiac was lacking to raise another general
Indian war. And an Indian war could hardly fail to involve Britain.

The government of the United States, despairing of negotiation,
decided to use force in the West. Americans had beaten the British

THE MAD GENERAL 183

Empire. An Indian campaign should be a comparatively small
affair.

In 1790 General Josiah Harmar and a small force marched into
the western country to teach the Indians a lesson. The invaders
were hurled back by a sudden assault. When General Arthur St.
Clair advanced from Cincinnati the next year he was ambushed
and most of his little army was destroyed in a minor repetition of
Braddock's fatal mistake.

Encouraged by these victories, the Indians increased their terri-
torial demands to include most of the present state of Ohio. The
Iroquois under Brant attempted to arrange a settlement but failed
at a great convention in Sandusky, The Americans blamed Britain
for stirring up the tribes. That no doubt was true of the Canadian
fur traders, but Britain wanted a settlement genuinely enough to
avoid any chance of war with the United States, especially be-
cause it found itself, in January, 1793, at war with France.

War with the Americans was difficult to avoid once the British
Navy began to seize American ships in the blockade of Europe.
That parting in friendship, for which Britain had paid such a high
price at Paris, had turned decidedly sour.

Dorchester suffered other troubles at Quebec, troubles deeply
rooted in the split racial stuff of Canada. The French-Canadian
habitant had yet to realize that the Revolution in his motherland
was anticlerical and atheistic. In its first stages it promised the
emancipation of the common man. And the Revolution, for all its
distractions at home, found time and means, with American assist-
ance, to incite the Quebec habitant against Britain and Britain's
sorely tried old governor.

A weird character, Edmond Charles Genet, arrived at Charleston
in the spring of '93 as France's minister to the United States, aroused
the slaveowning planters of the South to passionate defense of the
Rights of Man (liberty caps designed in Paris becoming an over-
night fashion), proceeded in triumph to Philadelphia, and explained
that the French Revolution was the sequel and blood brother, of
the American. He then organized an underground among the
French Canadians. They were guaranteed a new birth of freedom,
the end of church tithes, abolition of seigneurial taxes or anything
else they could desire if they would only join the Americans in
driving the British out of Canada.

A proclamation from "The Free French to their Canadian
Brothers" was furtively distributed and even read at the doors of
country churches. The old ghosts of Wolfe's conquest walked again
beside the St. Lawrence. As in 1775, Dorchester found the French

184 THE STRUGGLE FOB THE BORDER

Canadians bitter, bewildered and wavering between stable British
institutions and the boundless promises of the French and Amer-
ican Revolutions combined.

After their betrayal by monarchical France in '59, small wonder
that the habitants wanted to be on the right side of a war between
Britain and a republican France leagued with the Republican
United States. "Nothing/3 Dorchester wrote home, "is too absurd for
them to believe/'

So once again he strengthened the defenses of Quebec, rushed
through his assembly an Alien Act to suspend habeas corpus, and
rounded up suspected French and American agents.

Vermont was the center of these intrigues. It conducted them
with the skill of long experience.

Ethan Allen had tried to capture Canada singlehanded in 75,
had failed in his later scheme to make Vermont a British province
and had died, irreconcilable to the last.

His brother, Ira, now proposed to recoup Ethan's failure with
another invasion of Canada and was in France collecting 20,000
muskets. They were to be used, he explained, in the harmless drill
of the Vermont militia. Unfortunately for his plan, and fortunately
for the peace of nations, a British man-of-war captured him and his
muskets in a ship oddly named the Olive Branch, off Ostend. That
was the end of the long adventure begun by Ethan at Ticonderoga.

In any case Washington was tired of the French conspiracy in
America. He knew it might drive his struggling young nation into
the war desired by the Jeffersonian hotheads and firmly opposed
by the Hamiltonian Federalists. Genet had gone too far by arming
French privateers in American harbors and seizing English vessels.
Washington quickly repudiated him. Damning the American Presi-
dent, the Congress and even Jefferson, Genet retired to private life,
but not to France, where his own government also was tired of him.
He became an American citizen. Adet, his successor, pursued the
intrigue more discreetly.

Dorchester, however, saw only that his peasantry were restive
and that a new and well-trained American army was poised on the
edge of the West, apparently ready to capture the forts along the
Lakes, He had every reason for alarm.

After the disasters of Harmar and St. Glair among the western
Indians, Washington at last had found a competent general in
Wayne. To be sure, he was not exactly the sort of man Washington
admired, being, in the President's opinion, "open to flattery, vain,
easily imposed upon and liable to be drawn into scraps," and
"whether sober or a little addicted to the bottle I know not." Any-

THE MAD GENERAL 185

way, he could fight, as he had proved in the Revolution by leading
his troops over the walls of Stony Point. Washington had high
hopes for Mad Anthony. "Time, reflection and good advice and,
above all, a due sense of the importance of the trust which is com-
mitted to him, will correct his foibles or cast a shade over him."
The President's opinion was soon to be justified.

The London government had an even higher opinion of Wash-
ington's new general He was, according to the British ambassador
to the United States, "The most active, vigilant and enterprising
officer in the American services."

At Cincinnati, Wayne drilled, organized, and equipped his army,
despite the irritations of fraudulent contractors and the customary
conspiracies of his second-in-command, the unspeakable James Wil-
kinson, who had long been on Spain's payroll. The new American
force was ready to invade the Indian country of the Ohio in 1793.

The weary and futile negotiations with the western tribes de-
layed him, but Wayne used his time well. An advanced post,
hopefully called Fort Recovery to expunge the former American
defeats, was built at Greenville, north of Cincinnati. There, in the
autumn of '93, Wayne learned that the negotiations had finally
failed. He decided to move northward in the first days of spring.

To Dorchester it appeared probable that Mad Anthony would
never stop until he had captured the Canadian forts. Lieutenant
Governor Simcoe, of Upper Canada, who was building a grubby
little capital at Toronto, now renamed York, regarded himself
almost as an independent sovereign and the chosen savior of all
British America. He bristled with martial indignation, strategic
plans, and undisguised impatience at Dorchester's delays.

These pressures— French intrigue, threats from Vermont, Simcoe's
disobedience, Wayne's northward march, and an abiding distrust
of Americans first learned at the siege of Quebec— cracked Carle-
ton's nerves. He delivered his reckless speech to the Miamis,
ordered Simcoe to occupy Fort Miami, an abandoned post on the
Maumee, fifteen miles south of Lake Erie, and prepared to protect
the approaches to Detroit against Wayne's expected advance.

Even Simcoe, certainly no peacemaker, was a little shocked. The
possession of the Maumee fort, he wrote, "will be construed into
hostility" by the Americans. But he hurried to Detroit and sent a
small body of troops to the Maumee, directly in Wayne's path.

The Indians had twice defeated the Americans. Now they began
to realize that Wayne was no Harmar or St. Clair. Little Turtle,
war chief of the Miamis, warned his people that they now faced a
soldier "who never sleeps, night and day are alike to him. Notwith-

186 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

standing the watchfulness of our young men, we have never been
able to surprise him."

An Indian attack on Fort Recovery failed. When Wayne marched
north, Little Turtle rallied the wavering Miamis for a final defense
of the ancestral hunting grounds. His braves were gathered for
battle at Fallen Timbers, within musket sound of the little Canadian
garrison on the Maumee.

On August 20 Major Campbell, the unhappy Canadian com-
mander, heard the first shots of Wayne's attack. Forty minutes later
the Americans' single bayonet charge had scattered the Indians.
They fled toward the palisades of Fort Miami, but Campbell locked
his gates and preserved his neutrality. Would Mad Anthony also
remain neutral in the heady moment of his triumph?

He was by no means as mad as his reputation. While torn be-
tween his instructions to avoid a clash and the temptation to cap-
ture the fort and drive the Canadians from American soil he paused
on the brink of war with Britain. Since Campbell had closed the
fort to the United States' Indian enemies, there was no excuse for
an American attack. Wayne had been cheated of his great chance.

He camped close to the fort for a week, overawing it from a
convenient hill and burning the adjacent cornfields. If these gestures
were designed to provoke Campbell, they failed. The coolheaded
Canadian sent a messenger to Wayne to ask politely what his in-
tentions might be, Wayne replied that Campbell was lucky not to
be captured already, that the Canadians' presence was a hostile
act against the American Republic, and that they had better go
back to Canada while they had the chance. Campbell was un-
shaken. He said he would defend himself, according to his orders,
and leave the great issues of international politics to the politicians.

For a few more days the two hostile powers of North America,
the larger represented by a victorious army and the smaller by a
helpless corporal's guard, held the prospects of war or peace in
precarious balance around a ramshackle fort in the western wilder-
ness. Then Wayne cooled off and retired, his mission accomplished.

Next year he negotiated the Treaty of Greenville, by which the
whole Indian country was opened to settlement and its original
owners doomed. The Battle of Fallen Timbers had brought the
American Republic to the Mississippi. But Canada still held the
chain of forts along the Great Lakes. The boundary fixed on paper
at Paris had not been applied to the Canadian earth.

Happily, at this dangerous moment the American government
had heard nothing of Campbell's advance to Fort Miami. That news
might well have cast the die for war. Ignorant also of events at

THE MAD GENERAL 187

Fallen Timbers, Washington's government persuaded the Senate to
send Jay off to London in a final attempt at a peaceful settlement.
He was to negotiate about everything— the disputed forts, the
troubles at sea, and the future conduct of trade.

The news of Wayne's victory followed Jay across the Atlantic
and then the news of the Indians' final surrender at Greenville.
Without the Indians, Britain could hardly hope to hold the forts;
it had no excuse for holding them, now that the Americans were
paying their debts to the Loyalists, and to hold them probably
meant war. The British government therefore ended more than ten
years of controversy by promising to retire to the agreed boundary
on June 1, 1796, at latest.

Even then the boundary was not fixed. For Canadian explorers had
discovered, since the Paris conference, that the proposed line from
the Lake of the Woods westward did not reach the Mississippi.
Free navigation of the great river had been promised in the treaty
of 1783 but the river's northernmost sources lay well south of the
boundary. Thet diplomats of London, who had surrendered whole-
sale at Paris, were not quite out of ideas. To let Canadians reach the
navigable water of the Mississippi it was now proposed that the
boundary be curved southward, below the Falls of St. Anthony.

This ingenious afterthought came too late. The United States
refused to alter the Paris line by an inch. Britain had been offered
the 45th Parallel and had refused it. The chance was lost forever.
Canada must live as best it might under the Paris surrender.

Since the boundary could not run as intended from the Lake of
the Woods to the Mississippi, the London conference agreed to
conduct joint surveys with a view to final negotiations later.

Before that work could be completed, the affairs of the continent
would be revolutionized again by the United States' purchase of
Louisiana and the need of a new boundary all the way to the
Pacific.

The principle of boundary arbitration— destined to play a great
part in the future of the two American states—was introduced at
the London conference by the establishment of a joint commission
to survey the unmapped St. Croix River and fix the eastern boundary.

Canada gained in Jay's Treaty free access to the western fur
trade— the issue evaded at Paris— but that freedom was to prove
brief and increasingly fictitious.

Altogether Jay had won a momentous diplomatic victory, capping
the earlier victory of Paris. Because he could get no concessions for
American shipping in the European blockade or in the rich trade
of the West Indies, his treaty was almost defeated in the Senate

188 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

and for a time he became the most unpopular figure in his nation.
The judgment of time would correct the Americans' first false im-
pression.

As it turned out, however, the next war of North America had
been merely postponed and the border exposed to another genera-
tion of struggle. The border remained, as always, in the hands of
frontiersman. Reckless of war and peace, ignorant of government,
knowing nothing but the wilderness and its profits, they were
moving, in continental leapfrog, across the interior to the west-
ern sea.

Their course, though aimed at the Pacific, did not lie straight
west, It swung by a vast arc from the Great Lakes northwestward
to the edge of the arctic, then southwestward to hit the coast not far
south of Alaska. The arc was never described in any neat or single
line, was not planned in advance or, at first, even understood. It
just happened as the fur traders pushed against the points of mini-
mum resistance and maximum profit in any direction, or found some
new peltry which dragged them farther on the long voyage begun
in Champlain's canoes.

That voyage had continued for a century and a half, in war and
peace, in pestilence and disaster, in profit and bankruptcy, by
geographic calculation and blind chance. And always in pursuit
of the irresistible old will-o'-the-wisp, a Northwest Passage.

13

Beyond the Shining Mountains

[1750-1793]

THE ABSENCE OF A NORTHWEST PASSAGE FROM THE AMERICAN
map should have been proved long since to any sensible man
but, in the middle of the eighteenth century^ it was expropri-
ated and revived by Englishmen of the Thirteen Colonies. That
dream of Champlain, Hudson, Drake, and the other early explorers
was too well established and compelling to be abandoned at the
command of mere facts.

Robert Rogers, the resourceful Ranger and the scourge of the
Canadian border in the Seven Years' War, went to Detroit at the
war's end to receive the French surrender of the western forts.
There this Easterner looked beyond the Great Lakes and conceived
his own vision of the farthest West with all the appetite, imagina-
tion, and egomania that would bring him to eminence and finally
to destruction.

He moved to the American South and came under the influence
of Arthur Dobbs, erratic British governor of North Carolina. Dobbs
had long lived, moved, and had his being in one fixed and fallacious
idea which nothing could shake— there was a Northwest Passage,
despite all evidence to the contrary, and it must be found.

Out of old Spanish records, misshapen maps, and forgotten diaries
Dobbs had constructed in his Irish imagination a passage running
from Hudson Bay to the Pacific. He had sent two expeditions to
the bay and when they proved once again that there was no
passage, he refused to believe their reports. The Hudson's Bay Com-
pany, he said, was suppressing the facts and intimidating honest
witnesses for its own purposes of commercial monopoly in the north.
At last, in his old age, he persuaded the Admiralty to offer a reward

189

190 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

of £20,000 for the discovery of the secret. The passage must be
there because Dobbs and six generations of explorers had said so.

He easily convinced Rogers. After fighting briefly in Pontiac's war,
the restless Ranger carried Dobbs's theories to London. There
Rogers was briefly a man of fashion, author of a play called
Ponteach, and the familiar of the great. Failing to secure help from
the government or his rich friends, he accepted the post of governor
at Mackinac and proposed to finance the final push to the Pacific
out of his own pocket.

A new map of America had now emerged, the imagined com-
posite of a hundred rumors, legends, Indian tales, and sheer inven-
tion. It was presented in numerous versions but all agreed on the
general shape of the continent.

The continental spine and watershed ran north from Mexico, just
west of the Mississippi, to a point south of Lake Winnipeg. Thus
had the "shining mountains" of Verendrye's day (probably the
Turtle Hills of southern Manitoba) grown into a nonexistent range,
drained on the east by the Mississippi's tributaries.

West of the central divide the land was flat to the Pacific, except
for a small range along the seashore. Across the western plain and
emptying into the western sea flowed an imaginary river called the
Oregon, the Great River of the West, which had obsessed Cham-
plain and all his successors. The Northwest Passage, north of the
Oregon, began in Hudson Bay and ran southwestward, as a strait of
varying width, depending on the mapmaker. The Oregon entered
this strait on some maps. On others its mouth lay south of the
strait's Pacific entrance.

The Northwest Passage, thus refined and definitely located, was
only the old Strait of Anian, where the sirens had been singing since
Drake's time.

Rogers had heard their song in distant North Carolina, as echoed
by Dobbs, and he intended to travel westward, by what he called
the "Ouragan" River, to hit the passage at its Pacific end. Unfortu-
nately, as all his time was occupied at Mackinac, the Job was turned
over to James Tute and Jonathan Carver, former officers in Rogers's
Rangers.

In 1766-67 Tute and Carver advanced to the western end of
Lake Superior, far short of the French Canadians' westernmost pen-
etration. The expedition was cut short by the ruin of its sponsor.
Rogers had gone bankrupt and would soon be accused of treason.
But Carver produced an important book on western travel and
rightly assumed that the Pacific lay some two thousand miles west
of the Lakes, not just over the prairie horizon.

BEYOND THE SHINING MOUNTAINS 191

Long before, the Americans of the Revolution, now the loyal
English of Montreal, had learned to master the West, mainly be-
cause they had the good sense to use their experienced French-
Canadian servants. The English conqueror had won title to the
western fur. He could never reap the harvest without the voyageurs.

These unique wilderness creatures, in crews of eight to fourteen,
could propel a canoe of thirty-five or forty feet, with a five-foot
beam, to Grand Portage, carrying four tons of trade goods; lug this
cargo in bales of ninety pounds— two bales per man— across the
10-day portage of nine miles; transfer them to the 25-foot craft of
the smaller western waterways; paddle across the prairies in crews
of five to eight; repair the ever-leaking birchbark with thread of
juniper root and cement of pine gum every day; guide it through
white water where the touch of a rock would puncture this paper-
thin hide; and, after six months of ceaseless movement from dawn
to dark at six miles an hour—sometimes a daily log of seventy miles
—could bring back the furs safely to Montreal.

Not always safely. Countless voyageurs, few of them able to swim,
were drowned along the first continental transportation system, with
nothing left to mark their furious passage but the familiar wooden
crosses beside the rapids.

Only the voyageurs knew the canoe, the wilderness, and the
Indians by a century and a half of experience. Only they possessed
the complex, far-flung, and brittle organization which could conduct
the trade. Their peculiarities therefore— their aversion to cleanli-
ness, their occasional debauches, their Indian concubines, their
appalling superstitions and ridiculous ritual at every great portage,
their unceasing chatter and paddle songs— must be endured. No one
else could do their work and no Englishman would willingly at-
tempt it for perhaps two hundred shillings per season and a diet
of dried corn, buffalo grease, wild rice, frozen fish, and West
Indies rum.

The intricate techniques of the fur trade, America's first large-
scale industry, thus remained unchanged after the conquest of
Canada, but both private management and state regulation had
changed. In fact, regulation, as enforced by the French government,
largely disappeared when the English traders of Montreal applied
free enterprise to the West, with oceans of rum, price cutting,
chiseling, violence, and finally massacre.

It was not a pretty business, it was frowned on by title sedentary
Hudson's Bay Company, but in the hands of the Pedlars from Mon-
treal it was making money, it was opening up the far West, every
year it was moving closer to the Rockies, and, in defiance of politics

192 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

and geography, in the most unlikely places and by the most unlikely
methods, was building the future boundary of America.

By the seventies the English Pedlars and their Canadian voy-
ageurs were following the footsteps of V6rendrye's sons up the two
Saskatchewan Rivers and, like them, siphoning off the best furs
before they could reach the bay, where the Gentlemen Adventurers
of England still drowsed in their century-old slumber.

Even the Hudson's Bay Company awoke at last. It sent Samuel
Hearne inland, to build posts and drum up Indian business. Ulti-
mately that insatiable explorer, among the most daring of his
breed, reached the Coppermine River, on the arctic shore, and there
witnessed one of America's notable atrocities. Deaf to Hearne's
protests and tears, his Indian guides butcherfed a village of sleeping
Eskimos, a young girl dying at his feet and "twining around their
spears like an eel" He had proved pretty conclusively, by reaching
the arctic, that no Northwest Passage divided the continent.

For all its money and political power in London, the company
could never keep up with the Pedlars because the Pedlars' business
was carried by the incomparable uoyageurs, The company's im-
ported Orkneymen knew the sea but, in their newly invented York
boats, rowed by clumsy oars, were no match for the Canadians'
paddle and birchbark.

Soon the Pedlars broke out of the plains into the northern forests
and lakes, until their round trip between Montreal and the trade
posts took two full seasons. The drive to the Pacific surged with
quickening fury across a flat prairie land of infinite weariness; of
sluggish, labyrinthine rivers, of swamps, gullies, endless horizons,
gaudy sunsets, and shattering dawns; of teeming buffalo, deer,
grizzly bear and fish, of waterfowl darkening the sky; of searing
heat, ferocious wind, and man-killing blizzard; of black flies, mos-
quitoes and daily torture on the portage; of Indians in filthy hide
wigwams practicing barbarities, sexual rites, emasculations and
murder by bullet, arrow, knife, bare hands or teeth, all minutely
recorded in many a trader's diary but unprintable; of loneliness,
pestilence, and sudden death; of Indian ghosts, demons, and the
windigo wailing under the winter moon; of one reliable medicine,
cure-all, political weapon, and legal coinage called rum.

-Yet civilization of a sort and a crude culture unlike any seen
before in the world were sprouting like wild weeds from the prairie
earth. They lived in uncounted little trade posts from the Great
Lakes to the foothills of the Rockies, in educated Englishmen and
Scots who might cohabit with squaws but would snowshoe a hun-
dred miles to the nearest white neighbor for the chance of com-

BEYOND THE SHINING MOUNTAINS 193

pany, a year-old newspaper, or a tattered book. They lived most
distinctly in a new race, bred of French Canadians and Indians and
now appearing as the Metis. These buffalo hunters would contrive,
in due time, two rebellions, their own brief republic, and extraordi-
nary political consequences still unsettled in the twentieth
century.

The Indian, his life revolutionized by the spread of the Spanish
horse out of Mexico, the trader in his sod shanty, busy all summer
with the trappers, laboring all winter to cut wood for next year's
fires, finding occasional release from dead monotony in dances,
shooting matches, drinking parties, and brutal fights, could not place
themselves in continental space, in time, or in international politics.
They lived—that was achievement enough. But, living, the white
man and his voyageurs had carried their civilization, or some frag-
ments of it, farther west than it had ever gone before, north of
Mexico.

They had outflanked Louisiana and left the Americans half a
continent behind. They had grasped all but the last contents of a
sea-to-sea nation while their rivals were still poised on the east bank
of the Mississippi. They had added to the two basic ingredients of
the Canadian chemistry—the original French and the United Em-
pire Loyalists— a third element, the prairie creature, forever dis-
tinguishable from his fellows. They had built a new world on fur,
never suspecting that their neglected earth could grow wheat, that
the rim of Pre-Cambrian rock around it contained even more
precious treasure, or that beneath the prairies lay oil, civilization's
future fuel. They had produced a special breed which might accom-
plish the final leap to the sea and hold what it found there for
Canada.

Their business had become as costly as it was barbarous. They
were busily cutting the throat of the Hudson's Bay Company and
their own by excess of private enterprise. Even the superior furs of
the far West, bringing extra prices in Europe, even the discovery of
a cheap, convenient, and nonperishable diet called pemmican, of
sun-dried and pulverized buffalo meat mixed with melted fat and
often with wild berries, could not support the cost of hauling trade
goods and furs across three-quarters of the continent when the indi-
vidual trader continually raised his buying prices to the Indians and
reduced his selling prices to the Montreal merchants. So the Pedlars
began to experiment with combines.

The first successful combine was founded by Thomas and Joseph
Frobisher, Alexander Henry, and Peter Pond, just before the Ameri-
can Revolution. Unaware of events at Philadelphia, these men from

194 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

the Thirteen Colonies, who considered themselves still British,
pooled their resources and struck beyond all their competitors, from
the upper Saskatchewan to the Churchill, to Lake Isle-a-la-Crosse,
Methye Portage, the Clearwater River, and into the Athabaska.

Pond reached this Ultima Thule in 1778 and found there more
and better furs than he had ever imagined. Athabaska soon became
the fur traders* paradise. Once the Pedlars had formed their final
combine, the powerful North West Company, its partners of the
Athabaska Department were established as an elite, with extra
profits, a private base at Rainy Lake, Gargantuan summer revels,
and then the hurried return to the northwest before the rivers froze.
From Lake Athabaska they pushed on to Slave Lake, Great Slave
Lake, and the Peace River. They had touched the halfway point on
the north-south arc and the last barrier between known America
and the Pacific.

Pond, a clever, pushing, uneducated, and unscrupulous Yankee,
with a quenchless thirst for geography, now became, without know-
ing it, one of America's most important figures. Only the fur traders
and Indians had heard of him, he was alone in his distant post, far
outside the knowledge of statesmen who pretended to shape the
continent's future, and he was slowly discovering its real shape.

Some wandering Indians told him of another great river, perhaps
the Great River of legend, which fell out of a high mountain range
into the western sea. Brooding on these stories and many others in
his hut beside Lake Athabaska, Pond revised his maps, drew new
ones of his own invention, came to believe in his wild guesses, and
resolved to follow them to the unknown.

He was too old for that at fifty. Besides, he had laterly incurred
the displeasure of his more respectable partners by his alleged part
in two killings. Just when his unequaled experience would have
been most valuable he was compelled to leave the West. But he had
with him at Lake Athabaska a young Scot, Alexander Mackenzie,
whom he had long plied with his own geographical lore.

Though Mackenzie, a gentleman of education and social back-
ground, regarded his ignorant boss with contempt, he listened.
When Pond retired, Mackenzie was ready to attempt the last bound
to the Pacific— in the wrong direction.

Mackenzie had startling news to ponder at the last outpost of the
moccasin telegraph. English sailors, said the long-delayed dispatches
from London, had beaten the Canadian voyageurs to the coast and
discovered the sea otter. Now that the value of a doomed creature
was realized, an incidental contest for the Pacific coast of America
had opened with five contenders— Spain, Russia, Britain, the newly-

BEYOND THE SHINING MOUNTAINS 195

formed United States, and Canada. The great empires might regard
the coast as no more than an extra dividend on their world-wide
investments, It was essential to the United States and Canada. With-
out it they could not possess the continent, probably could not
amass enough power to survive.

Spain long ago had solemnly declared the Pacific a "closed sea"
from which all other nations were excluded. Since Drake had rioted
up the west coast of South America in 1579, looting Spanish gal-
leons until his Golden Hind was half sunk under its cargo of stolen
treasure, Spain had been left undisturbed on its private lake.

In the seventies of the eighteenth century its energetic new king,
Charles III, began to worry about the Northwest Passage— a splen-
did vision to others, to him a menace. If there was such a passage,
what was to prevent enemy ships from using it to pass from the
Atlantic to the Pacific, and then to descend upon the coast of
California, upon Mexico itself, upon the silver mines of New
Mexico?

King Charles was not needlessly disturbed. Spain had felt the
presence of a strong and unexpected competitor in the Pacific.

Czar Peter of Russia, called the Great, had studied the methods
of modern sea power as a carpenter in the shipyards of Holland, he
had looked for additional territory only to find most of the known
world already parceled out among the Western powers and he saw
no chance of extending his own empire—already vast enough to
satisfy anyone but a Russian— except on the Pacific.

As all the legends agreed, the undiscovered continent of Gama-
land lay between Asia and America. It must become Russian. To
claim it, Peter chose Vitus Bering, a competent Danish navigator,
and ordered him across Siberia in 1725. Bering had barely started
this prodigious journey when Peter died, a remorseful maniac
screaming in his palace at the ghosts of his victims.

Bering struggled for three years overland to Kamchatka and built
ships there. He soon proved that there was no Gamaland, found his
strait into the arctic, and came home disgusted. The Russian gov-
ernment ordered him back again. Surely the Pacific must contain a
Gamaland somewhere, or at least some real estate which the land-
poor czars could use.

For the second time Bering marched across the 6,000 miles of
Asia, with 4,000 pack horses, 600 companions, and the weirdest col-
lection of botanists, artists, monks, physicians, soldiers, and assorted
lunatics ever gathered in one company. This menagerie of freaks
built two ships in Kamchatka, explored the Alaska coast, and added
it to the Russian Empire. One ship returned safely. The other, com-

196 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

manded by Bering— now half crazed by the lunacies of the govern-
ment's experts, dying of scurvy, and helpless in his bunk— was
pounded to pieces on a reef. Some of the crew reached a nearby
island, dug pits against the cold, and survived the winter. In one
of those icy holes Bering died.

Next year a few survivors somehow reached the Russian coast
by raft. Their nakedness was covered with the thickly furred hides
of animals. Where had this superb fur come from? It had come
from an animal about six feet long, with a catlike face and a short
beaver's tail, which swarmed in myriads around the rocks and kelp
beds of the Aleutian Islands, and was so stupid that any man could
kill it with a club. The merchants of Russia and China would pay
almost any price for this creature's pelt. It was ebony-black on the
surface, gray close to the skin, and of incomparable richness. Such
was the sea otter, the beaver of the Pacific and, like the beaver, it
was fated to set the empires of the world in violent motion.

Russia plunged into the sea otter business, using vodka instead
of rum to trade with the Aleutian natives; slaughtering them whole-
sale with their animals in one of history's most repulsive crimes;
suffering massacre in return; extending its empire to America along
the coast of Alaska; unconsciously adding a final complication to
the struggle of the Canadian-American boundary; and assuring a
Pacific struggle which would continue, with few interruptions, from
the time of Peter the Great to that of Molotov, the Hammer.

With Russia in the north Pacific, where it had no right to be,
Spain could afford to rest no longer in the sunny harbors of Mexico.
Its navigators were ordered to follow the coastline northward
wherever it might lead, find the Northwest Passage, and arrange to
hold its Pacific entrance. That base should keep England out of the
Spanish lake. It might keep the Russians harmless in the far
north.

Juan Perez reached the Queen Charlotte Islands in 1773 and,
turning back, anchored in a wooded inlet, soon to bear the name of
Nootka Sound, seat of remarkable adventures a few years later.
Bodega y Cuadra crossed the 58th Parallel in 1775 and claimed
Alaska for Spain. Later the same year Bruno Heceta discovered the
mouth of a river which later navigators would christen the Colum-
bia. It was not quite the Great River of the old myth, but it was a
great river nevertheless and pregnant with the future politics of
America.

Spain could now claim, by right of discovery, the entire coast
from Cape Horn to Alaska. To claim it was a very different thing
from holding it. In London a British Admiralty had no intention

BEYOND THE SHINING MOUNTAINS - 197

of being excluded from the Spanish lake. The job of repealing the
Spanish title was given to the ablest navigator of the age, one with
few equals in any age.

James Cook was born in the year of Bering's first voyage, son of a
Yorkshire farm hand. He was apprenticed to a haberdasher, went
to sea in a merchant ship, joined the Royal Navy, and worked his
way up by sheer merit against a frozen caste system. At thirty-one
he sounded the St. Lawrence channel for Wolfe's fleet.

Attracting the navy's attention by his studies of mathematics and
astronomy, he was assigned to explore the South Pacific and dis-
cover the great unknown continent supposed to exist there. Two
voyages took him around the coasts of Australia and New Zealand,
among many of the southern islands, and into the antarctic. He was
now established as Britain's chief authority on the Pacific, but the
rank of captain was considered sufficient reward for a man of hum-
ble birth.

The Admiralty became interested again in the Northwest Passage
after the Russians had found the sea otter and the Spaniards had
sailed almost to the arctic. The passage, if it existed, would offer
Britain a short cut to its new possessions in India.

When Cook was asked who could best lead an expedition to the
Pacific coast of America, he replied, with unquestionable truth, that
he was himself the man. The Admiralty agreed and passed a special
regulation permitting him, though a servant of the King, to win the
standing reward of £20,000 if he found Drake's Strait of Anian.

Cook started from England for the Cape of Good Hope in the
Piesolution on July 12, 1776, without knowledge of a certain Dec-
laration signed in Philadelphia eight days before, or any thought of
his own effect on the future of the United States and Canada.

In his forty-ninth year he was an athletic figure with handsome,
chiseled face, a scholar's learning, and an inquisitive mind. Already
he had learned to prevent scurvy by forcing his crews to eat fresh
vegetables, while the navigators of Spain were more damaged by
this malady than by weather. He got on well with strange races,
though in the end he would find a ghastly death among them. He
had recorded his world-wide observations minutely and added a
large installment to the world's store of information. In short,
thou'gh born otherwise, he was the very perfect gentleman of the
British Navy.

On March 7, 1778, still ignorant of affairs on the other side of the
continent, Cook touched the coast of Oregon, Drake's New Albion,
and nosed his way north, poking into many bays and inlets, but
missing many others in Drake's "stinking fogges/' He overlooked the

198 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

strait leading to Puget Sound, which was to prove the most impor-
tant break in the whole coastline, the boundary of the two American
states. He wrote down, indeed, his firm opinion that there could not
possibly be any strait in this vicinity, despite an interesting bend in
the shore and the legends of that discredited old Greek pilot, Juan
de Fuca. The headland at this point, because it might fool a less
experienced seaman, was therefore christened Cape Flattery, monu-
ment to Cook's most notable mistake.

Believing that he was still off the mainland coast, Cook reached
Nootka, only to find that the Spanish had been there five years
ahead of him. A few roving Spaniards could not disturb a stolid
English captain with the whole power of his empire behind him.
He paused at Nootka to examine and record the queer customs of
the natives.

They were a noisy, evil-looking, clever breed, flat-faced and Ori-
ental, quite unlike the Indians he had known along the St. Law-
rence. Hideous in carved wooden masks, colored hats of basket-
work, and robes of fur or plaited cedar bark, they paddled their
dugout canoes around Cook's ship, greeting him with loud incanta-
tions and gestures of friendship. What chiefly interested Cook and
his sailors were their fur robes, richer than any they had ever seen
before.

The sea otter now entered the commerce of England. For kettles,
buttons, candlesticks, rusty nails, or anything made of metal the
Nootka Indians eagerly disrobed and handed their greasy clothes
over to the ship's company. Cook's observant eye noted something
else— the Indians already possessed a few metal objects. Where had
they come from? He guessed, correctly, that they had traveled all
the way across Canada by the trade system of the Montreal Pedlars.

Soon there were too many Indians about and they began to look
hostile under their outer show of friendship. Cook headed up the
coast.

It was unlikely, as he well knew, that the passage would be found.
Hearne's trip to the Coppermine had proved at least that if there
was a channel it must lie far to the north and west. But if there was
even a strait between Asia and America, as Bering reported, it
would lead to the arctic and the arctic might be navigable.

Everything turned out as Cook must have expected. All the prom-
ising curves of the serrated coastline ended in mountain bluffs. The
large inlet to which he gave his name seemed to hold the mouth of
an important river— possibly the Great River— but nothing more.
He followed the shore of Alaska, found Bering's Strait and entered
it. Walls of ice turned him back. He decided to winter in the Sand-

BEYOND THE SHINING MOUNTAINS 199

wich Islands, where he had touched on his outward voyage, and to
attempt the last push into the arctic next summer.

After visiting the Aleutian Islands and talking in sign language to
some drunken Russian fur traders, he landed on Hawaii, his crew
fell into debauch and quarrel with the natives, an outraged warrior's
dagger was driven between his shoulder blades and his body
chopped into small pieces. They were collected by his officers and
buried in his natural home, the sea.

Among all its great sons in that age of greatness—the two Pitts,
Wolfe, Clive, Wellington, Nelson-Britain had lost none greater
than Cook. He had died obscenely on a remote island on the far
side of the world, but not before he had opened the Pacific to his
empire and-strangest result of all-had precipitated the ultimate
contest of Canada and the United States for the western coast of
America.

Cook's successor, Captain James Clerke, faithfully carried out his
leader's plan by penetrating Bering's Strait in 1779. Again the British
ship was obstructed by ice. There could be, then, no passage. The
fable of nearly three centuries had finally been proved false. Clerke
turned about reluctantly, sold his half-rotten sea otter skins from
Nootka to the traders of the Chinese coast, for fabulous prices, and
sailed home to England with the news of Cook's murder.

That news traveled fast and far. It was read by Mackenzie at
Lake Athabaska, by the Spaniards of California, and nowhere more
eagerly than in the United States.

The Americans now owned the fastest fleet in the world. They
knew how to sail it, were at home on every ocean. The sea otter
fitted their book perfectly. Furs from the Pacific coast could be sold
for tea in China, where a large trade already was under way.

But much more than the profits of Yankee merchants was involved
in Cook's discoveries. Britain was on the Pacific coast and might
remain there. If it pushed a weak Spain out of the closed lake, Brit-
ish power would lie directly behind the Spanish power of Louisiana
and athwart the United States* inevitable westward march. The
Amercians must lose no time in joining the drive to the western sea.

On October 1, 1787, two American vessels, the Columbia, Captain
John Kendrick, and the Lady Washington, Captain Robert Gray,
sailed from Boston and stood off the Pacific coast in the following
August. Their commanders observed signs of a great river, perhaps
the Great River, but on landing were driven off by hostile Indians.

A few days later Gray's log noted a wide inlet and expressed the
opinion "that the Straits of Juan de Fuca do exist; for the coast
takes a great bend here." Cook had missed but Gray had seen the

200 THE STRUGGLE FOE THE BORDER

future continental boundary. It meant little to him at the moment,
for he was in search of sea otter.

At Nootka he found that the English had beaten him to the center
of trade. Captain James Meares and William Douglas had settled
down comfortably in a palisaded fort, had even built a 30-ton
schooner called the North-West America, the first ever built in these
regions, and were about to launch it with cannon fire and appro-
priate libation.

The English captains entertained Gray royally but lied like gentle-
men and patriots about the fur trade. There were no furs here-
abouts, they said, and Gray might as well go on to China for a
cargo of tea. Besides, Meares had bought Nootka and the surround-
ing territory from the Indians for two pistols and a hunk of copper.
The English, under Captain William Barkley, had explored Juan de
Fucas Strait. As for the Great River, which Gray had suspected
farther south, it was, said Meares, an illusion. The coast, as Gray
was told politely but firmly, could offer little interest to the late-
coming Americans.

Gray, the skeptical Yankee, was not to be fooled by smooth Eng-
lish manners. He would make his own inquiries. Kendrick, in the
Columbia, now joined his partner and the two American ships re-
mained all winter at Nootka. Trade in fur was struck up with the
Indians, who quickly corrected the Englishmen's depressing story.
In the spring, after examining Juan de Fuca's Strait for themselves,
the Americans prepared to sail for China with a valuable cargo of
sea otter.

At that precise moment Spain made its last grand gesture in the
closed lake. While the English and American captains gaped, in-
credulous, Don Joseph Martinez sailed into Nootka on a mighty
ship, twenty cannons pointed straight at the fort of the interlopers.
The Americans were allowed to depart in peace, being Britain's
supposed enemies, with Martinez's compliments and gifts of Spanish
wine. The English were ejected from Nootka in an international
incident of dangerous possibilities. Their fort was torn down and
replaced by a new one on Hog Island nearby. To make sure that
Britain behaved herself in future, Martinez held one of the English
ships as security— a final outrage which British pride could not
endure.

Spain and Britain seemed to be on the verge of war as Gray's
Columbia returned triumphantly to Boston from a voyage of 50,000
miles. She was back in the Pacific by the summer of '91 and was
joined again by the Lady Washington. Things obviously being too

BEYOND THE SHINING MOUNTAINS 201

hot at Nootka, between Britain and Spain, Gray and Kendrick wisely
avoided the trouble spot. They coasted as far north as the Portland
Canal; then, turning back, built a post called Fort Defence and a
schooner, the Adventure, at Clayoquot Sound, safely south of the
quarreling powers.

So far Spain claimed everything in sight. Its navigators, despite
scurvy, leaky ships, and official negligence, were penetrating the
treacherous inlets of Vancouver Island (yet to be so named), were
looking into Juan de Fuca's Strait and talked of another great river
apparently flowing into these waters. As they arrived one by one,
the British trading ships Argonaut, Iphigenia, and Princess Royal
were seized by the Spaniards at Nootka. Spain was taking no non-
sense from its rival.

Gray and Kendrick had troubles of their own. At Clayoquot they
suddenly discovered that their tiny fort was surrounded by 2,000
warlike Indians, who may have been encouraged by the Spaniards.
The Americans' plight was grave. The Columbia lay dismantled on
the beach. The fort could not be defended.

Gray decided to escape in the night. His sailors waded neck-deep
in the rising tide to launch die Columbia and clean her hull of
barnacles. In the morning she was floated just as an Indian chief
came aboard with offers of sea otter skins. Gray slapped his face
and sailed south. Nothing could daunt the Yankee skipper. He was
determined to find Bruno Heceta's Great River.

The Columbia now moved toward this target, sighted by Gray
on his previous voyage, and off the Oregon coast encountered two
British ships, the Discovery and the Chatham. They were com-
manded by Captain George Vancouver, one of Cook's former mid-
shipmen and now a staid man with a long, horsy face and a strong
belief in his own talents. He had come to accept the ceremonial sur-
render of Nootka from a Spanish government unwilling to risk a
war with Britain.

Vancouver sent one of his officers, Lieutenant Puget, aboard the
Columbia. Gray said candidly that he had seen the indications of a
river hereabouts, but Vancouver doubted the report It was the
same old story, first told by the Spaniards. Captain Meares had
checked it and concluded that "we can now with safety assert that
no such river . . . exists as laid down in the Spanish charts." The
word of Meares, an English gentlemen, was good enough for Van-
couver.

In any case Vancouver had studied the shore for himself, had
seen the evidence of a few minor streams falling into an inlet, and

202 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

had considered "this opening not worthy of more attention." So he
sailed north and left the hopeful Yankee to pursue his illusion. ^

Gray was delayed by a brief shooting scrape with some Indians
in a bay thenceforth known as Gray's Harbor, but soon sighted the
breakers of a huge river bar. This, though he could not guess it, was
a decisive moment in American history. Before him lay a mighty
river, perhaps the river of the old continental dream. Could he
reach it across its turbulent bar? He decided to take the chance. On
May 12, 1792, he drove through the breakers and entered fresh
water. The Columbia had been discovered and claimed for the
United States.

Between it and the distant Republic lay no one knew what, west
of the known barrier of Louisiana. But the American government
had a claim to both coasts and, if the Republic could endure, would
surely join them one way or another. The future anatomy of the
nation had appeared. It would not be fleshed without years of
diplomacy and war with Canada.

Having missed the first great river of the coast, Vancouver pro-
ceeded northward to miss the second. He poked into Juan de Fuca's
Strait, explored Puget Sound, and turned into the Strait of Georgia,
where the Fraser enters the sea with a vast gout of brown water,
visible for miles. A Spaniard named Narvaez, in a leaky schooner,
with a crew of thirty starving Mexican peons, is said to have located
the Fraser's mouth a few months earlier. Vancouver passed it, un-
noticed, in another of Drake's stinking fogs.

Farther north he met two Spanish ships, whose commanders told
him that Don Bodega y Cuadra awaited him at Nootka for the sur-
render of Spain's possessions there. The British ship completed the
circumnavigation of the island which bears Vancouver's name and
arrived in Nootka at the end of summer.

Spain's surrender of the north Pacific coast was carried out with
Latin glamour. Cuadra's guns thundered a welcome to Vancouver.
The British officers were entertained at breakfast and in return
gave an elaborate dinner to the Spaniards. The fumes of celebration
had no sooner cleared than Cuadra explained that he was sur-
rendering only his fort. Vancouver claimed the whole contiguous
countryside. The two rivals, bearing the load of empire lightly,
agreed to disagree. Both left Nootka, Cuadra for California, Van-
couver for the unlikely river mentioned by the deluded Yankee,
Gray.

The river was there, all right. Vancouver saw it for himself and
had little difficulty in concluding that white men had never seen it
before. "No other civilized nation or state," he wrote, "had ever

BEYOND THE SHINING MOUNTAINS 203

entered this river ... it does not appear that Mr. Gray either saw
or was ever within five leagues of the entrance." Therefore, the
Columbia region belonged to Britain, its discoverer. As usual, the
British underestimated the Yankees. For which, not long hence,
the price would be paid by Canada, as usual.

While Spain thus claimed everything south of the Columbia,
Russia the far north, Britain and the United States the intervening
coast, Canada was about to cut its own way to the Pacific, the most
improbable and dangerous way of all.

At his desolate post in the Athabaska country young Alexander
Mackenzie dreamed Pond's dream of an overland dash to the sea.
His dreams, as he wrote home to Scotland, sometimes terrified him.
A Scot from the Hebrides, he wore a cold, deceptive surface. His
face was stolid and strikingly handsome, his hair curly, his cheeks
bristling with sideburns, his chin deeply cleft. Only his piercing
eyes revealed an inner Scottish fire.

Someone, sometime, must paddle or walk across the continent.
Now that Pond was gone, Mackenzie resolved to be that man.

His motives were ostensibly commercial. The North West Com-
pany was stretched too thin from Montreal to the edge of the
Rockies, it had beaten all its competitors westward but under its
high costs of transportation it was going broke. It must reach the
far western fur country by a short cut to the Pacific and, incident-
ally, take its share of the sea otter.

These economic calculations could not explain the quiet passion
of the young Scot, Driven by his private demon, he must be the
vessel chosen by fortune to carry the white man's burden to
the sea.

Pond's instructions, before his departure from Athabaska, were
beautifully clear. Mackenzie was to follow a river emptying out of
Great Slave Lake. It would lead him to the Pacific coast after curv-
ing around the northernmost flank of the Rockies. It was, in fact,
the Great River of the myth. On reaching the coast, Mackenzie,
by means of his own devising— for this was no concern of Pond's—
was to cross the ocean and walk through Russia to England.

The assignment was even more insane than most in those days
of splendid geographical lunacy, but Mackenzie's demon compelled
him to follow it.

On June 3, 1789, when he was twenty-five years old, he started
down Pond's Great River. His canoe carried, besides himself, five
French-Canadian voyageurs, an Indian, and two squaws. A second
canoe was loaded with supplies and manned by Indians. This un-
promising expedition descended the Slave River out of Lake Atha-

204 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

baska to Great Slave Lake and there was swept by a mighty current
upon the boundless realm of Pond's fantasy.

The unknown river, on which no white man had floated before,
took an encouraging westward twist and then seemed to flow
straight north. This was disturbing to Mackenzie, but doubtless the
current would turn west in good time as Pond had' promised, Day
after day Mackenzie watched its course with increasing alarm.
Always it lay northward. Now he noted to his horror a range of
high mountains on his left. Was there a gap in them? He must find
out soon, for the northern summer would be brief.

He pushed on furiously. His crew saw for the first time the ve-
hement flame burning within the young Scot. The voyageurs strained
at their paddles to complete this mad journey and escape the terri-
fying loneliness of the barrens.

No gap appeared in the mountains. Ahead lay only endless
desolation.

On June 12 the canoes burst into the Arctic Ocean. Mackenzie
had traversed the river now bearing his own name. It was another
of America's great rivers, by any reckoning, but not the Great River,
not the route to the Pacific. He named it Disappointment and, after
three days spent in observing the arctic tides, turned back, tanta-
lized, baffled, and heartbroken.

On his way south he met Indians who informed him that just
west of the mountains a river ran to the sea, only a short distance
away, that along this river lived giants with wings, and that its
mouth was occupied by white men in a large fort.

Mackenzie's dream soared again. It would take him some time
to explore the real western river. Meanwhile he reported the Dis-
appointment to his partners of the North West Company. They
were not impressed by Mackenzie's worthless northern detour, end-
ing nowhere. Their only interest lay in fur and a short cut to the
Pacific.

He was embittered but more determined than ever. Neither the
company nor the Rockies could stop him.

Thinking these things over in his Athabaska post, he realized his
deficiencies as an explorer. What he needed, after his first mistakes,
was more education and some accurate instruments. With Scottish
thoroughness this painstaking young man paddled all the way to
Montreal, sailed for England, and spent a winter studying astronomy
and navigation.

London hardly noticed the youngster who had added a giant to
the world's river system and carried Britain's flag to the arctic.
Everybody was talking of Cook's murder, Vancouver's new expedi-

BEYOND THE SHINING MOUNTAINS 205

tion to the Pacific, and the chances of war with Spain. Mackenzie
cared little for this neglect. His demon was still beside him.

The spring of 1792 found him back at his post and ready for the
last adventure. He planned carefully, as always- Since the leap
across the Rockies might be too long for one year, he paddled out
of Lake Athabaska in October and up the Peace River to its junction
with the Smoky. There he wintered.

Seven o'clock in the evening of Thursday, May 9, 1793, was a
notable hour in the record of North America and, like most notable
hours, overlooked until long afterwards.

A canoe "twenty-five feet long within, exclusive of the curves of
stem and stern, twenty-six inches hold, and four feet, nine inches
beam, at the same time ... so light that two men might carry
her on a good road three or four miles without resting'* (so reads
Mackenzie's meticulous record) glided into the current of the Peace.
The watchers on shore "shed tears on the reflection of those dangers
which we might encounter." Mackenzie, Alexander McKay as his
lieutenant, two veterans of the arctic voyage, four voyageurs, two
Indian hunters, and a dog faded into the sunset. The single canoe
was aimed westward at the Rockies and the Pacific. Its commander
had passed his point of no return.

The ten men and their dog soon entered the outer defiles of the
mountains and the demented waters of Peace River Canyon. Mac-
kenzie leaped ashore, a rope fastened to his shoulders. He tried to
haul the canoe through this caldron but the rope broke, the canoe
danced into the rapids and for a moment everything seemed lost.
Then a freakish current carried the light craft to the shore, where
the voyageurs pulled it out upon the rocks.

These experienced men had seen no water like the Peace. They
would go no farther. A "regale" of rum made them think better of
it. The canoe was carried over a nine-mile portage at a speed of
some two miles a day. Calmer water above led through a dark
jungle of spruce and jackpine to the wide junction of the Finlay
and the Parsnip. Here some Indians told Mackenzie of a western
river flowing to the "stinking waters," and to white men who wore
armor "from head to heel" and sailed in "huge canoes with sails
like the clouds."

Where lay that river? Should Mackenzie turn north on the Finlay
or south on the Parsnip? It was a terrible decision for the young
Scot. By lucky guess he turned south, ascended the Parsnip, reached
a rise at its headwaters and, after a portage of only 817 paces,
crossed from the arctic to the Pacific watershed, embarking on the
Bad River.

206 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BOEDER

The canoe was immediately swamped in fierce rapids but, before
it could sink, was tossed upon a sand bar. Seeing their canoe broken
and all the supplies and ammunition soaked, the voyageurs said
they would go no farther. Mackenzie did not argue with them.
Alone he began to repair the canoe with resin and oilcloth. His
determination impressed his followers. They agreed to take one
more chance.

On June 17 they were carried into a current so wide that Mac-
kenzie took it for the river of his dream. Later it would be called
the Fraser, after another Scot. Nameless now, unknown and appall-
ing in its sheer canyons of clay, it bore north, turned south, and
never seemed to turn west. Was it to be Mackenzie's second Dis-
appointment? Where did it reach the Pacific? Perhaps not north of
Spanish Mexico? He was bewildered, all his newly acquired knowl-
edge of navigation turned upside down.

The Carriers, a ferocious tribe whose widows carried their hus-
bands' cremated ashes on their bodies, at first attacked the white
men with arrows; later, seeing the glitter of trinkets spread invit-
ingly on the riverbank, they gathered to parley. Their chief drew a
map in the sand. By this rough diagram the river seemed to move
forever southward, beyond the Indians' experience, and as they
indicated with alarming gurgles in their throats, plunged through
an impassable canyon they knew not where. However, they said
in sign language, there was an easy trail straight west to the sea.

Again a moment of terrible decision for Mackenzie. To follow the
river or abandon it and strike overland on the word of a few gar-
rulous natives? As before, Mackenzie's guess was lucky.

He called his crew together and "after passing a warm eulogium
on their fortitude, patience and perseverance, I stated the difficul-
ties that threatened our continuing to navigate the river. ... I then
proceeded for the foregoing reasons to propose a shorter route, by
trying the overland road to the sea. ... I declared my resolution
not to attempt it unless they would engage, if we could not after
all proceed overland, to return with me, and continue our voyage
to the discharge of the waters, whatever the distance might be. At
all events, I declared in the most solemn manner that I would not
abandon my design of reaching the sea, if I made the attempt alone,
and that I did not despair of returning in safety to my friends."

If necessary, he would march to the Pacific accompanied only by
his demon. North American exploration had produced few equals of
that scene on the Eraser's bank— the alternative perils of river or
wilderness, the doubtful crew, the young Scot of quiet fury who
would reach the sea or perish.

BEYOND THE SHINING MOUNTAINS 207

The voyageurs discussed their commander's ultimatum around
their campfire. Reluctantly they agreed to follow him.

A Carrier guided the company westward up the Blackwater to
the last portage of the continent. Now they struggled through a
thick coastal forest, soaked with rain, hungry, and hardly able to
walk in their weakness. The guide attempted to desert and Mac-
kenzie had to sleep beside this verminous creature, stinking of
fish oil.

Still, after two weeks* march, there was no sign of the sea. In the
middle of July the exhausted travelers beheld the Dean River,
forded it and reached the Bella Coola. Here they found Indians
with white men's goods. The sea could be only a few miles distant.

Mackenzie hired dugout canoes from the Indians and, with his
companions, paddled down the river. Suddenly they smelled the
welcome flavor of salt water. They entered it in North Bentinck Arm,
pushed westward into Burke Channel, and on July 22 looked out
upon the glittering waters of the Pacific.

Mackenzie mixed Indian red ocher and bear's grease to make a
crude paint. With his own hand he wrote his testimony in neat
letters across a slab of sea rock: "Alexander Mackenzie, from Can-
ada, by land, the twenty-second day of July, one thousand seven
hundred and ninety-three. Lat. 52° 20' 48" N."

That was all. No flourishes. No postures. Only the cold fact. But
what a fact! The first white man had paddled and walked across
the whole bulk of the continent. Canada had reached the Pacific.
And though Mackenzie retraced his steps, almost losing his life in
an Indian ambush, and retired to his native Scotland, his lifework
done, though his words upon the sea rocks were soon expunged by
wind and weather, Canada was on the Pacific to stay. If a Canadian
nation could be built, it would be transcontinental. It would share
America, east and west, with the United States.

14

Race to the Sea

[1793-1808]

MACKENZIE LIVED THE LEISUBELY BUT SHORT LIFE OF A

Scottish gentleman, nothing could repress the forces un-
loosed by his western adventure. The resulting race across
America engaged a new generation of adventurers, among them
two daring young Americans, a heroic Indian squaw and her suck-
ling infant, a Canadian of homely face and dumb, plodding courage,
a philosopher, inventor, and statesman from Virginia, an emperor
from Corsica, a French prince accounted the most devious intellect
of the age, and a host of nameless men whose canoes and moccasins
must now fix the final boundary of a continent and split its riches.

A moment of continental decision, for which all the past had been
only a prelude, was now approaching. The race moved with sudden
momentum by two separate courses—from the Mississippi to the
mouth of the Columbia, where no white man had walked before;
and from Montreal to the Pacific, in Mackenzie's footsteps and by an
unsuspected new river.

It was a race between an American republic, constitutionally
whole but geographically scarce half made up, and a loose congeries
of British colonies known as Canada but a lifetime distant from
nationhood. A blind, groping, and bungled race for the most part,
neither competitor knowing the presence of the other, yet always
sure of its objectives, the highest stakes in the world. Such a race
could not long move in peace. Soon it must quicken into war, a war
designed to extinguish the northern competitor forever.

In British and Canadian eyes the river discovered by Mackenzie
formed the natural boundary between Canada and the United
States. It was the same river, no doubt, which Vancouver had
sighted, which Gray, on Vancouver's testimony, had only pretended

208

RACE TO THE SEA 209

to enter. It was, of course, the Columbia. By a tragic mistake— so
thought the North West Company partners in Montreal and the
government in London— Mackenzie had failed to descend the Co-
lumbia to the sea and thus to anchor the boundary before the
Americans could infringe it.

Fortunately the Americans seemed locked behind the Mississippi
by Spanish Louisiana. Canada could take its time in completing the
job begun by Mackenzie's mismanaged expedition. The British and
Canadians had not reckoned on Napoleon Bonaparte and Thomas
Jefferson.

Having rescued the French Revolution from the democrats and
amateurs, Napoleon had turned his attention to America. American
democrats and amateurs were as repulsive to him as the French
variety, but they possessed real estate of value. Besides, France and
the United States had been getting on badly for some time now.

During the first stages of the wars between France and Britain
it was Britain which had mainly angered the Americans by seizing
neutral ships in the blockade of Europe. Jay's Treaty had eased
these tensions and, therefore, angered France. From 1798 onward
France was the chief violator of neutral rights on the Atlantic. If
the United States must fight someone to keep its commerce afloat,
France seemed to be the obvious enemy. The two nations already
lived in a state of undeclared war.

Jefferson, the great theorist of government, confronted some hard
facts of a highly practical nature on taking office in 1801. The United
States' overseas commerce was being despoiled in the quarrels of
Europe. The Canadians clung stubbornly to the bulk of the western
fur trade— were, indeed, the only white men who seemed able to
penetrate the peltry. The Spaniards still held the line of Louisiana,
sat astride the Mississippi and thus, from New Orleans, controlled
the water route to the American interior. And now, without warning,
came the news that Spain had ceded Louisiana to France, the pres-
ent aggressor of the Old World, the potential aggressor of the New.

Jefferson instantly understood the meaning of that news. "The day
that France takes possession of New Orleans," he cried, "fixes the
date which is to restrain the United States forever within her low-
water mark. . . . From that moment we must marry ourselves to
the British fleet and nation."

It would take the United States more than a century to contract
an uneasy marriage by gradual and secret stages. Meanwhile Napo-
leon's ambitions were not confined to New Orleans or the Missis-
sippi. He, too, had glimpsed the dream of America and a new
French empire to replace that lost to Wolfe at Quebec. The heir to

210 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

the French Revolution must revive and extend the project begun
by La Salle and abandoned by the blundering French kings, France
was back on its old lifeline between the Gulf of Mexico and the St.
Lawrence. As Jefferson well knew, it might become the deathline
of the United States.

Napoleon approached America by way of Haiti, where France's
Negro slaves had rebelled. The crack French Army sent out to sub-
due them would be available shortly for more promising work in
Louisiana. Napoleon's genius and his seasoned troops— 10,000 of
them, twice as many as all the forces of the United States and
Canada combined— might carry the American empire of France west-
ward from the Mississippi, or northward to Canada, or eastward
against Jefferson's Republic. No one could tell where the ubiquitous
tyrant of Europe would stop.

The United States had reached the first international crisis of its
brief national life. This, then, was no time for theories, constitu-
tional niceties, or any hobgoblins of consistency. Jefferson, the
theorist and constitutionalist, prepared, if necessary, to stretch the
American Constitution out of joint by purchasing New Orleans, and
possibly the Floridas, from their new owners without the approval
of the Congress.

Robert R. Livingston, the American ambassador to Paris, was a
man of large ideas. Going far beyond Jefferson's instructions, he in-
quired blandly of Prince Talleyrand, the French foreign minister,
if Louisiana, at least north of the Arkansas River, was for sale. Tal-
leyrand, whose poker face deceived everyone, sometimes even him-
self, was not ready to answer. At this point Jefferson's friend, James
Monroe, arrived in Paris with the President's secret assurance that
"Something sensible has become necessary ... on the event of
this mission depend the destinies of the Republic."

The Republic now encountered an unbelievable break of luck,
not the first nor the last. Monroe had reached Paris at precisely the
right moment. At any other his mission might well have failed and
the destinies of the Republic thereby been compressed within the
southeastern quarter of America.

He found Napoleon distracted by the war with Britain and dis-
gusted by the news from America. His dream of a new dominion in
Louisiana had turned to nightmare in the swamps of Haiti. His
armies were destroyed by weather, disease, and hordes of furious
Negro slaves. He was damning "sugar, coffee and colonies." He had
written off the New World. And, brooding in his bathtub, he de-
cided to sell France's Mississippi empire.

Ushered into the presence of Talleyrand, that indestructible

RACE TO THE SEA 211

cynic who would survive the ruin of his master and nation, Monroe
was amazed by what he found. He had proposed the purchase of
New Orleans and, if possible, the Floridas. Talleyrand now asked
what the United States would pay for the whole of Louisiana. Then,
in perhaps the outstanding understatement of his career, he sug-
gested that this territory might be worth $60,000,000.

Talleyrand was dealing with seasoned American horse traders
from away back. As horse traders they at once called the price
ridiculously high and the empire unattractive. When they left in
April, 1803, they had beaten the toughest horse trader of Europe
down to $15,000,000. With incidental interest charges, the price
came to $27,267,622, or about four cents per acre.

The Republic now owned— except for the Floridas, to be acquired
shortly— everything from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific, north of
the ill-defined Mexican boundary and as far north in Canada as it
could exert its power. Events would soon show that it intended,
later on, to possess Canada entire.

Jefferson's speculation in real estate alarmed Spain more than
Canada. The Spanish government protested that it had given
Louisiana to France in the first place to "interpose a strong dyke"
between Spanish Mexico and the United States. Now Napoleon had
broken his pledge by alienating the Mississippi colony. The door
to the whole West was open to the insatiable Americans. Spain was
quite right. Jefferson's purpose had been to open that door.

The proposed marriage to the British fleet and nation was indefi-
nitely postponed, though never quite abandoned. Napoleon for his
part was satisfied that the United States, secured on its west flank,
would soon fight Britain and Canada. Anyway, a republic would
fall apart sooner or later.

These questions could wait. For the present Jefferson, the con-
stitutionalist, was explaining, with little difficulty, his rather loose
interpretation of the presidential power. If he had stretched or
broken the Constitution by the Louisiana Purchase, he had com-
pleted a bargain without parallel. He had bought something like a
quarter of a continent for a song. But no one knew quite what he
had bought.

Jefferson had formed his own shrewd ideas after reading Mac-
kenzie's alarming book, published in 1801. Mackenzie insisted that
the Canadian-American boundary should be pushed south to the
45th Parallel, at least in the far West, to embrace the Columbia.
This, said Jefferson, would never do. He had constructed on paper
an entirely new division of the continent.

It was now known that the Northwest Angle of the Lake of the

212 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

Woods did not lie on the 49th Parallel, as the 1783 settlement sup-
posed. It lay some distance to the north. No matter— Jefferson was
determined that the boundary must start at the angle,* continue to
the 49th Parallel, and then westward hy that line to his newly pur-
chased Louisiana. He did not know the extent of those lands. No
one did. To make sure they extended far enough north, he construed
their sweep as including the whole drainage basin of the Missouri
River, wherever it lay, and even if it lay north of 49°. Thus in his
mind the unfixed border between the United States and Canada
would not necessarily follow any straight line of latitude but
would curve northward as required to protect the Republic's vital
interests. As a minimum he intended to hold the lower reaches of
the Columbia. This was, after all, Gray's river, not Vancouver's or
Mackenzie's.

Jefferson's ambitions actually soared far beyond the 49th Parallel
and the Columbia. "However our present interests may restrain us
within our own limits," he wrote, "it is impossible not to look for-
ward to distant times when our rapid multiplication will expand
itself beyond those limits & cover the whole northern if not the
southern continent with a people speaking the same language gov-
erned in similar forms & similar laws."

It was not certain what he meant exactly, for at times he pro-
jected several American republics, but at all events he meant the
end of Canada as a British nation. He had learned many things,
from music to Inalienable Rights. He had not learned the nature
of Canada.

He preferred to keep his intentions obscure, perhaps because
they were not clear even to him. "It may be as well to leave the
boundary of 49° indefinite, as was done on the former occasion."
So it was left for nearly half a century, in which time Jefferson's
theories were to be drastically overhauled by the uncooperative
Canadians and by war.

The first step after the Louisiana Purchase was obviously the ex-
ploration of the new American territory and the acquisition of the
Columbia.

The Spaniards knew remarkably little about the land they had
secured from a French king and given back to an upstart emperor.
How did Spanish California, for example, fit into it? Had Spain
any claim to the Columbia's mouth? What about the confused
status of Vancouver's Island after the absurd Nootka affair?

Spanish expeditions westward from the Mississippi had produced
only disordered maps and strange rumors— including Indians de-
scended from Welsh ancestors. That old legend, lately revived, had

RACE TO THE SEA 213

deeply stirred the people of Wales and sent a young Welshman,
John Evans, hurrying to the Mandan country. There he raised the
Spanish flag and preached Christianity to the local Indians. The
ill-starred prophet found no Welshmen and failed to reach the
Pacific by ascending the Missouri, but he painted an exciting pic-
ture of the West which Jefferson now proposed to examine in detail.

The President launched the transcontinental race in a secret mes-
sage to the Congress, dated January 18, 1803, and asking money for
a thorough exploration of the new American West. The Congress
agreed. Jefferson chose for this task his close friend and assistant,
Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark, brother of the famous
Ranger, George Rogers. It proved a perfect choice.

Lewis, then twenty-nine years old, had made himself an expert
soldier, bushman, and administrator. He was a lonely and moody
character of powerful but tortured mind. His life would be short
and closed mysteriously five years hence by suicide or murder.

Clark aged thirty-three, complemented his partner with a happy,
gregarious disposition, the simplicity of the born frontiersman, an
intuitive sense of geography, and a way with the Indians, who
called him the Redheaded Chief. He was accompanied by his faith-
ful Negro slave, York.

The two youthful explorers, among the ablest and certainly the
most systematic ever seen in America, "hoisted Sail and Set out in
high Spirits" up the Missouri on May 14, 1804, confident that the
river would lead them, with an easy overland portage, to the
Pacific. The United States had always lagged far behind French
and British Canada throughout the West but the Lewis and Clark
Expedition was making up for lost time.

Mackenzie, nine men, and a dog had crossed the continent in a
canoe and on foot by a series of wild guesses. The American party—
forty-five men and Clark's shaggy Newfoundland pup—traveled in
a large keelboat, armed with swivel guns, and two pirogues. Slowly,
efficiently, and irresistibly it sailed, rowed, and dragged its boats
through the shifting channel of the Missouri; met and overawed the
terrible Sioux, who had long barred the river; noted tributary rivers
from the north that must provide connection with the "Suskasha-
wan" or "Athebaskay" and hence a ready road into Canada; in-
formed the tribes along the way that Jefferson was now their father;
and reached the Mandan country in the autumn.

Here a lively winter was spent in Indian politics, hunting, feast-
ing, dancing, and the preparation of reports to the President. When
a Frenchman named Toussaint Charbonneau, long a familiar of
the Indians, volunteered to act as interpreter, he was promptly

214 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

hired. He brought with him his Indian wife, Sacajawea, who was
probably seventeen years old and carried at her breast an infant,
Baptiste, aged two months. She soon proved herself one of the most
remarkable women in American history. A daughter of the Snakes,
she had been born west of the mountains and abducted in child-
hood by some wandering raiders from the prairies.

The American cottonwood fort among the Mandans was visited
that winter by many strange tribes. They were urged to make peace
among themselves and establish that kind of stable, ail-American
fur trade route now managed by the Nor Westers in Canada. A few
of these Canadians also appeared and were treated kindly, though
they had trespassed and traded on American territory. It was ex-
plained to them that Louisiana extended to the Qu'Appelle River,
a tributary of the Assiniboine, well beyond 49°, for Lewis had
decided, by a mistaken calculation, that the legal boundary of
Canada ran north of the junction of the Red and Assiniboine, where
Winnipeg now stands.

Lewis and Clark intended to drive the trespassers northward by
American competition. The United States inevitably must possess
the desirable parts of Canada at the proper time. The Americans
constantly sought from the Indians news of the Missouri tributaries
which would carry Manifest Destiny into the rich northern peltries
and outflank the Canadian traders.

In the spring, as a boatload of dispatches, botanical specimens,
furs, and the bones of animals started eastward for Jefferson's in-
formation, the expedition headed west beyond the bounds of white
man's knowledge, still bewildered by a jigsaw puzzle of contradic-
tory Indian maps, still ignorant of that final barrier, the Rockies, and
still hoping to hit a westward-flowing river, probably Mackenzie's,
to take them comfortably to the Pacific.

The keelboat had been abandoned as too large for the upper
Missouri. Thirty-three persons, including Sacajawea's baby, filled
the two pirogues and six awkward cottonwood dugouts. Though
they often waded the cold spring water, the Americans' journey so
far was much simpler than Mackenzie's had been in the raging
canyons and trackless forests of the northwest. Unlike Mackenzie,
they were never short of food in a land of teeming game. Sacajawea
quickly showed herself as strong as any of the men and more useful
than most of them. She tanned buckskin for clothes and moccasins,
dug up edible roots, cooked the food, nursed her child, and unable
to speak a word to anyone but her husband, dreamed of her home
beyond the mountains.

What of those mountains? Were they Indian rumor only? Did

RACE TO THE SEA 215

they stand beside the sea? Were they low and easy of passage like
the familiar Alleghenies?

On a radiant June day Lewis and Clark looked across the plains
to behold a line of glittering peaks and to realize, with a start, that
all the white man's assumptions about western America were false.
They saw but had yet to measure the dimensions of the continental
divide.

The expedition pushed on toward the barricade. It seemed to rise
higher, in unbelievable elevation, as they approached. Soon, like
Mackenzie at the junction of the Finlay and the Parsnip, Lewis and
Clark faced a fork in the Missouri and a moment of irrevocable deci-
sion. Should they follow the muddy north or the clear south branch?
If they chose wrongly they could not hope to reach the ocean that
year. With supplies already running short, they might be forced to
retreat, their work half done.

Clark moved up the south fork and Lewis the north to reconnoiter.
They chose the south because, in its cleanliness, it seemed to flow
out of the mountains. Lewis remained fascinated by the notion that
the north fork rose above the 49th Parallel in Canada and might
lead to the northern trapping grounds. His penetrating prophecy
noted that fur must become "an object of contention between the
great powers of America with rispect to the adjustment of the North-
westwardly boundary of the former/' A satisfactory fur route, with
rivers in the right place, would sever the body of any transcon-
tinental Canadian state.

All their seasoned followers opposed the decision to ascend the
difficult south fork, but the guess of Lewis and Clark, like Macken-
zie's, was right. A little farther on, however, they heard the distant
murmur of the Missouri's falls, boiling in five separate drops out of
the Rockies, and knew they must surmount an almost impossible
obstruction. They left their boats behind, built crude wagons, and
dragged their canoes around the steaming falls by an 18-mile
portage.

That work took them a full month, in an agony of heat, mos-
quitoes, piercing cactus, and mud. Ahead loomed the daunting line
of the mountains, growing in height and bulk at every step. Beyond
them, what? Lewis and Clark knew only that there could be no re-
turn to the East that year. They would be lucky to reach the coast
before winter. And winter in the mountains would probably destroy
them.

At the Missouri's headwaters they entered a ramifying chaos of
tributaries. Which one would carry them to the Columbia over that
easy, one-day portage promised by the Indians? They stuck to the

216 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

Missouri, poling through a hideous gorge, the Gate of the Rockies,
and inching toward the divide.

Now they were in Sacajawea's country, the hunting grounds of
the Snakes, but none of those Indians, or their expected horses,
could be found. The Missouri, which had carried the expedition
from the Mississippi, split into three channels. Again the awful
choice.

They chose the north fork and christened it the Jefferson in tribute
to their sponsor. On August 12, a memorable day in the life of the
young nation, Lewis saw a tiny trickle of water flowing westward.
It was Columbia water. The Republic had crossed the divide.

A few days later they met a band of Snakes who, by an incredible
coincidence, were headed by Sacajawea's brother. The brave and
his sister embraced in tears.

The Snakes provided horses and the expedition's speed increased.
But autumn was at hand. Could the coast be reached before winter
engulfed the travelers? Their only hope was to press on and escape
this mountain labyrinth.

An easy, one-day portage had turned into a terrifying welter of
cliffs, canyons, and narrow ledges. The pack horses slipped and
rolled into the dizzy ravines. Autumn gales brought drenching rain,
sleet, frost, and eight inches of snow. Yet among those exhausted
men the young squaw carried her baby, fed it from her breast, and
uttered no word of complaint.

Thus suffering Mackenzie's full miseries for the first time, the
Americans somehow rounded a semicircle from the headwaters of
the Missouri southward and then north through the Bitterroot Val-
ley to turn west by the Lolo Pass. At last, guided by an aged Indian
named Toby, they hit the upper Clearwater in mid-September.

They were weak from dysentery. Their food was almost gone. No
game could be found. They began to shoot coyotes and eat their
horses. But the worst was over. When some Indians of the intelli-
gent Nez Perce nation brought them dried salmon, they knew they
could not be far from the ocean.

After a pause to build dugouts of pine, they embarked on the
Clearwater. It bore them quickly to die Snake and then into the
Columbia, amid a coastal jungle, a smell of salt water, and a horde
of strange Indians in painted wooden canoes. By November they
were camped just south of the Columbia's mouth on the sandy
shore of the Pacific. They called their fort Clatsop. It sheltered them
through an interminable winter of rain, gale, and loneliness.

Lewis and Clark had spanned a continent and roughly described
the bounds of the Republic, but they remained insatiable for in-

ZXPLOBATIOZC ROUTES IK THE WEST

218 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

formation. Starting homeward on March 23, 1806, they split the
expedition into two parties to travel by different routes through the
mountains. Clark hacked out a canoe and rode the Yellowstone.
Lewis moved north, following his obsession, a river to the Canadian
north. The Marias, one of the four streams which, he hoped, would
lead to the Saskatchewan or Athabaska, soon petered out. He drove
off a night raid by the Blackfeet, but was wounded in the thigh by
one of his own men while hunting deer.

In August the two parties met at their rendezvous on the Missouri
and drifted easily down to the Mississippi. One man had died and
one deserted. No North American explorers had gone farther than
Lewis and Clark, none had succeeded better, and none had ever
amassed in one expedition a comparable store of knowledge. Two
young soldiers, a band of frontiersmen, a squaw and her infant, and
a Newfoundland dog had confirmed the bargain of Louisiana,
stretched the Republic from sea to sea, beaten the Canadians to the
Columbia mouth, and roughed out the ultimate cleavage of the
continent.

There was much work yet to be done. The United States had not
penetrated the western peltry north of 49 ° . The attempt to conquer
all of Canada by arms was not yet conceived. Moreover, if the
Columbia mouth had been reached, and if Gray's original discovery
had established American rights there, the Canadians, under Mac-
kenzie's successors, were now reported— quite erroneously— again on
the river's upper reaches.

The Spaniards, Cook, Gray, and Vancouver had begun the strug-
gle for Oregon. Lewis and Clark had merely touched it and, after
one winter, departed. The Canadians would possess it And even
while Lewis and Clark were toiling through the Rockies a Cana-
dian named Simon Fraser had reached an unknown river to revolu-
tionize the map of America once more.

15

The Black Canyon

[1808]

F BASER, NOW CONTENDING WITH LEWIS AND CLAKK IN THE CON-
tinental race, was as much American by descent as his rivals.
His grandparents had come from Culbochie, Scotland, and
settled at Bennington, Vermont. By an interesting conjunction, this
opponent of American expansion in the West was born in 1776 when
Jefferson was writing the Declaration of Independence. The states-
man and the explorer, unknown to each other, were to engage in a
continental competition throughout their lives.

The Frasers chose the losing side of the Revolution. Simon's father
was a captain in Burgoyne's doomed army, was captured by the
revolutionists and apparently died as their prisoner in Albany. ( The
son always believed, however, that he had perished at sea on a
ship carrying away the British soldiers after the war.) The widow,
left destitute with four sons and five daughters, was caught up in
the Loyalist migration to Canada and settled at St. Andrews, near
the Ottawa River.

There was nothing to distinguish this family of refugees from
many others, except the character of Simon. His mother, evidently
suspecting his qualities, managed to send him to school briefly in
Montreal. In 1792— as Mackenzie was preparing to descend the
river that would bear Eraser's name— the youth of sixteen was arti-
cled as a clerk to the North West Company. That irrepressible
organization had always owned more talent than money. Its choice
of men amounted to something like genius. The talents of young
Fraser, therefore, were quickly noted. By 1802 he was a "bourgeois,"
or full partner, and the company had picked him as Mackenzie's
successor in the West.
Apart from their courage and their hunger for the wilderness, the

219

220 THE STRUGGLE FOB THE BORDER

two men were as unlike as men could be. Mackenzie was hand-
some, educated, refined, and imaginative; Fraser homely, with a
bullet head, sloping forehead, lank hair, grizzled eyebrows, harsh,
protuberant chin-a cold man and stubborn, hiding with difficulty
a fierce inner pride and an envy of his famous predecessor. In short,
the kind of laborious, systematic, and glum Scot who largely con-
trolled the Canadian West already, was building a nation and soon
would dominate its government.

While bitterly disappointed by Mackenzie's failure to descend
his river, supposedly the Columbia, the North West Company was
slow to repair this blunder, There seemed to be no immediate hurry.
The Americans had never been a match for the Canadians in the
continental race. Not until 1805, when Lewis and Clark were near-
ing the Pacific coast, did Fraser start on his march across Canada. •
He had heard nothing of the American expedition. So far as he was
aware, he faced no competition in the race.

Following Mackenzie's trail, he pushed up the Peace and the
Parsnip and, in the autumn, built a post at a lake named for his
friend, Archibald Norman McLeod. It was the first Canadian post
west of the Rockies, There he left his lieutenant, James McDongall,
for the winter and turned back to his base camp on the Peace,
Rocky Mountain Portage.

When Fraser returned to Fort McLeod in the spring of 1808 he
found that McDougall had spent the winter in a thrust to Mac-
kenzie's river and up its first important tributary, the Nechako,
which flowed in from the west just below the big bend.

Fraser decided to pursue McDougall's discoveries before starting
down the main river, It gratified his vanity and perhaps a rooted
inferiority complex to observe that Mackenzie had missed the Ne-
chako entirely and had been careless in some of his observations.

Thus Erasers rather spiteful diary: "Trout Lake is a considerable
large and navigable river in all seasons. It does not appear to have
been noticed by Sir A.M.K. [Mackenzie] as he used to indulge him-
self in a little sleep. Likely he did not see it and I can account for
many other omissions in no other manner than his being asleep at
the time he pretends to have been very exact; but was I qualified to
make observations and inclined to find fault with him, I could prove
he seldom or ever paid the attention he pretends to have done, and
that many of his remarks were not made of himself but commu-
nicated by his men. ... Sir A.M.K. appears to have been very in-
accurate in the courses or there must have been a vast difference in
the compass he made use of and tie one we had. . . .*

After thus asserting his own superior methods, Fraser abruptly

1HE BLACK CANYON 221

laid aside his diary on July 18, probably being otherwise occupied
in the ascent of the Nechako to the lovely region of mountain lakes
at its source. He christened the first lake Stuart after one of his aides,
built on its shore Fort St. James and, delighted by this verdant
country, named it New Caledonia, for his grandfather's homeland.
Another post was built on a lake to the south which Fraser marked
with his own name. Three centers of trade west of the mountains
now stretched the business of the North West Company from Mon-
treal almost to the Pacific.

Lewis and Clark had twice crossed the continent by now, but
Fraser still saw no reason to hurry. He returned in the autumn to
his post on the Peace and wintered there. Meanwhile, in Montreal,
the North West Company partners had heard of the Americans*
expedition to the Columbia, They wrote Fraser in some panic, urg-
ing him to descend that river without more delay. The necessary
supplies did not reach him, at Fort St. James, until the autumn of
1807, too late for travel that year.

Roused by the news from Montreal, Fraser returned next spring
to Mackenzie's river and, at the mouth of the Nechako, built Fort
George. On May 22, 1808, at five in the morning four canoes floated
into the swirl of the main current. One of America's largest adven-
tures had begun.

Fraser was accompanied by John Stuart and Jules Quesnel as his
lieutenants, nineteen paddlers, and two Indians. The two dozen men
unwittingly were headed into the worst water of the continent.

They wallowed through a dangerous clay canyon, passed the
mouth of a substantial river on their left, named for Quesnel, and
there overlooked one of America's richest hordes of gold. Presently
they saw Indians gathered on both banks and gesticulating wildly.
Fraser decided to confer with them. His broken diary records the
conference of sign language and its bad news:

According to the accounts we received here, the river below is but a
succession of falls and cascades which we would find impossible to pass,
not only on account of the difficulties of the channel but from the extreme
ruggedness and the mountainous character of the surrounding country.
Their opinion, therefore, was that we should discontinue our journey and
remain with them. I remarked that our determination of going was fixed;
they then informed us that at the next camp the Great Chief of the
Atnaugh nation had a slave who had been to the sea and which he might
probably give us as a guide.

It was the same sound advice received near the same point by
Mackenzie, and it had persuaded him to strike westward overland.
Fraser would not leave the river until he had reached the sea. The

222 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

Indians produced the guide next day but his information only added
to the white men's confusion. They spread an oilcloth on the ground
and asked the expert to draw a map of the river's lower channel.

This he readily undertook, but his endeavours soon convinced me that
his stock of knowledge was very slender indeed, for his lines were entirely
directed by an elderly man, a relation of the chief, who stood by him.
We could, however, plainly see in his sketch a confirmation of what had
been told us of the difficulties of navigation and thereby the necessity of
leaving our canoes with as much of our baggage as we could spare in
order to continue our journey by land.

They were south of Mackenzie's turning-off point. No white man
had seen this part of the river. No one could imagine the perils
ahead. And they were on the wrong river. Nevertheless, Fraser de-
cided to descend it.

On June 1 he launched one canoe experimentally upon an "im-
mense body of water, passing through this narrow space in a tur-
bulent manner, forming numerous gulfs and cascades and making
a tremendous noise and of an awful forbidding appearance/' The
canoe split on a rock. Its five paddlers clung to the slippery bank.

Eraser's diary pictures with Scottish phlegm the first of many
accidents:

During this distressing scene we were on shore looking on and anx-
iously concerned; seeing our poor fellows once more safe afforded us as
much satisfaction as to themselves and we hastened to their assistance,
but their situation rendered our approach perilous and difficult The bank
was extremely high and steep and we had to plunge our daggers at inter-
vals into the ground to check our speed, as otherwise we were exposed
to slide into the river. We cut steps in the declivity, fastened a line to
the front of the canoe, with which some of the men ascended in order
to haul it up, while others supported it upon their arms. In this manner
our situation was most precarious; our lives hung, as it were, upon a
thread, as the failure of the line or a false step by any one of the men
might have hurled the whole of us into Eternity. However, we fortu-
nately cleared the bank before dark.

Again the Indians warned Fraser to turn back, or at least to travel
well away from the river, by horse, over the rolling clay plateau.
He refused. "Going to the sea by an indirect way was not the object
of this undertaking; I therefore would not deviate and continued
our route according to our original intention."

Several hard but brief portages and a "desperate undertaking" in
some wild rapids brought him to impassable water. Reluctantly he
cached his canoes and the party continued on foot along the jagged
and almost vertical bank.

THE BLACK CANYON 223

Again, between the dull lines of the diary, one can read this man's
recklessness. When one of his companions became wedged in a
crevice, "Seeing this poor fellow in such an awkward and dangerous
predicament I crawled, not without great risk, to his assistance and
saved his life by causing his load to drop from his back over the
precipice into the river. This carrying place, two miles long, so shat-
tered our shoes that our feet became quite sore and full of blisters."

On June 19 they reached the mouth of a great river flowing in
from the eastward and mingling its emerald-green waters with the
brown of its parent. Fraser named it for his friend, David Thompson,
who, he wrongly supposed, was then exploring its upper waters
among the Rockies. Thompson would be remembered for a river
he never saw.

The junction of these two river valleys provided a natural nexus
of travel and nourished a formidable Indian village called Camchin.
Here Fraser discovered white men's goods. He had touched the
ancient Indian route of commerce between the coast and the interior.
Already the profits of the sea otter business, in barter between
Indian, Spaniard, Briton, American and Russian, were moving far
inland.

The intelligent Indians of Camchin told Fraser that no canoe
could live in the river a few miles beyond this point. As Fraser in-
sisted on embarking again, the Great Chief, or "Little Fellow,"
accompanied him. The Indians' warning was soon proved accurate.

Below Camchin the river suddenly closed into a black canyon.
Its huge body, constricted to a narrow gut, writhed in deafening
paroxysm between sheer walls of stone, churned through endless
slimy chasms, and at the final horror of HelFs Gate rose and fell in
rhythmic pulsation of brown foam.

Not a moment too soon the canoes were dragged ashore. Now
began perhaps the most dreadful march ever undertaken by white
men in the West

The Indians had mastered the canyon long ago. Their trail ran
zigzag up the slippery cliffs, clung to every damp ledge and reached
the ledge above by a clumsy ladder of tree trunks and withes.
Ninety pounds on each man's back, Fraser and his followers crawled
like spiders up this monstrous vinegrowth. The diary again:

Here we were obliged to carry among loose stones in the face of a
steep hill between two precipices. Near the top, where the ascent was
perfectly perpendicular, one of the Indians climbed up to the summit
and by means of a long rope drew us up one after another. This work
took three hours, and then we continued our course up and down the
hills and along the steep declivities of mountains where hanging rocks

224 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

and projecting cliffs, at the edge of the bank of the river, made the pas-
sage so small as to render it, at times, difficult even for one person side-
ways. Many of the natives from the last camp who accompanied us were
of the greatest use on this intricate occasion. They went on boldly with
heavy loads in places where we were obliged to hand our guns from one
to another, and where the greatest precaution was required in order to
pass even singly and free from cumbrance,

I have been for a long period in the Rocky Mountains but have never
seen anything like this country. It is so wild that I cannot find words to
describe our situation at times. We had to pass where no human beings
should venture; yet in those places there is a regular footpath impressed,
or rather indented upon the very rocks by frequent travelling. Besides
this, steps which are formed like a ladder or the shrouds of a ship, by
poles hanging to one another and crossed at certain distances with twigs,
the whole suspended from the top to the foot of the deep precipices and
fastened at both extremities to stones and trees, furnish a safe and con-
venient passage to the natives; but we, who had not had the advantage
of their education and experience, were often in imminent danger when
obliged to follow their example.

On the Indians' fragile web they pursued this river of nightmare
as it turned abruptly westward and bored its way through the last
mountain range of the continent. At last, in final spasm, it burst
from its dark prison and oozed, oily and peaceful, through a rank
coastal forest.

Fraser was able to buy some dugout canoes from the local Indians
and travel comfortably again, But a gnawing suspicion had gripped
this systematic man. His reckoning showed the mouth of the Co-
lumbia far to the south and this river was now moving straight west.

Soon he noted its water flooding and ebbing in regular tides, saw
the first seagulls and felt the tang of salt air. He could deny his
fears no longer— this was not the Columbia. Mackenzie had been
wrong. All the mapmakers of the East had been wrong. The whole
supposed geography of western America was wrong. Mackenzie
had found and Fraser had explored a river unknown before. This
was Fraser's own river, to be known thenceforward by his name.

Where the Fraser threads its flat delta and enters the sea by a
series of separate channels, he measured its latitude on July 2 as 49°
'Very nearly"~about three degrees north of the Columbia. His mis-
sion had failed. "This river is, therefore, not the Columbia, If I had
been convinced of this when I left my canoes I would certainly have
returned.**

That would have been hopeless. He could hardly have reached
the Columbia overland from the Fraser that year, with his dimin-
ished supplies, even if he had known the way. And, unknown to

THE BLACK CANYON 225

him, Lewis and Clark had driven the Republic's stakes into the soil
of Oregon three years earlier.

Fraser could not see the Pacific, for it was hidden by the whale's
back of Vancouver's Island. "I must acknowledge my great dis-
appointment at not seeing the main ocean, having gone so far as to
be almost within view." Yet he had seen enough to alter the entire
prospects of Canada.

If the Americans could hold Oregon, against all reason and ex-
pectation, Fraser had located a natural barrier to their northward
expansion. He had found, in fact, the western Canadian mate to
the St. Lawrence on the east coast. Though he did not suspect it, his
river contained within its sand bars certain yellow flecks which, in
just half a century, would people this region and later join it, by
railway, with the eastern colonies to make a second transcontinental
state.

Fraser turned back with his heartbreak but little time for regret.
Most of the Indians of the canyon had been friendly. A few had
fired arrows at the white men and rolled stones upon them, but the
hostile tribes saw no reason to exert themselves since the strangers
doubtless would perish before they could return. Now, when they
appeared in the lower reaches of the canyon again, they met an
organized and determined attack. Day and night they were harassed
by arrow and stone until Fraser found his men breaking under the
strain, planning to desert, and talking madly of a dash straight east-
ward through the mountains where winter assuredly would annihi-
late them. There had been difficulties enough before. This was the
moment of Fraser's supreme peril and it called from him a supreme
act of leadership:

Considering this scheme as a desperate undertaking I debarked and
endeavoured to persuade the delinquents of their infatuation; but two of
them declared in their own names and in the names of the others that
their plan was fixed and that they saw no other way by which they
could save themselves from immediate destruction than by flying out of
the way of danger; for, said they, continuing by water, surrounded by
hostile nations, who watched every opportunity to attack and torment
them, created in their mind a state of suspicion worse than death. I
remonstrated and threatened by turns, the other gentlemen joined me
in my endeavours to expose the folly of their undertaking and die advan-
tages that would accrue to us all by remaining as we had hitherto been
in perfect union for our common safety. After much debate on both
sides, they yielded and we all shook hands, resolved not to separate
during the voyage.

In that scene— two dozen men, hungry, tattered, maddened by

226 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BOKDER

unseen enemies, and lost on a strange river at the far edge of a
continent— the quality of Fraser shines through the inarticulate
diary. As he had mastered the river, he mastered his followers. They
raised their hands and shouted an oath of loyalty above the thunder
of the canyon: "I solemnly swear before Almighty God that I shall
sooner perish than forsake in distress any of our crew during the
present voyage."

Then they climbed the Indians* crazy ladders again, found their
cached canoes and were back at Fort George, without a single
casualty, on August 5, just thirty-four days from the sea. The down-
ward journey with the current had taken thirty-five. Against ob-
stacles and dangers far worse than any experienced by Lewis and
Clark, the dogged American-Canadian Scot had fulfilled his sched-
ule. But he had missed the Columbia.

The first Canadian to see, or rather to recognize, it was Fraser's
friend, David Thompson. A half-breed, Jaco Finlay, had reached it
from the South Saskatchewan in 1806, by Howse Pass through the
Rockies but one more of many rivers meant nothing to this bold,
ignorant man, who was only a year behind Lewis and Clark, Thomp-
son needed half a dozen more years to catch up to the trail of
Finlay, his servant. The famous surveyor and astronomer of the
North West Company had .been wandering since 1799 among the
swamps, plains, and western foothills of the prairies and even into
Fraser's New Caledonia, never able to find the illusive prize. In
the summer of 18075 as Fraser was awaiting supplies to descend
Mackenzie's river, Thompson was ready for a final attempt

He struck west from the plains into the Rockies, by Finlay's trail,
and discovered a river apparently moving to the Pacific. "May God
give me/' he wrote, "to see where its waters flow into the ocean/'
It led him to a larger stream which flowed northward. This was the
Columbia, but Thompson failed to identify it.

Greatly confused, he wintered on a lake now called Windermere.
By their longitude these waters could be no part of Mackenzie's
river. In the following spring, therefore, Thompson crossed a por-
tage of a mile and found yet another river. Surely it must be the
Columbia. He followed it southward to the rim of the Lewis-Clark
discoveries in the country of the Flathead Indians, who shaped the
skulls of their young with bandages and stones. Then this river, too,
(the Kootenay) turned north. Geography again was out of joint.

The first Canadian to cross the 49th Parallel west of the Rockies,
Thompson penetrated northern Idaho and Montana, reached the
Pend Oreille River and missed its junction with the Columbia by
half a day's travel—a costly mishap. After all these disappointments

THE BLACK CANYON 227

he retreated to the prairies, more puzzled than ever, and apparently
went on to Montreal for instructions.

The North West Company was now thoroughly alarmed. On the
heels of Lewis and Clark other Americans were about to descend
on Oregon. Where Mackenzie and Fraser had failed, Thompson
must find the Columbia without more loitering and claim its mouth.

Since the route into the Rockies from the North Saskatchewan was
held by the hostile Piegans, Thompson struggled up the Athabaska
in the autumn of 1810, nearly lost his life by snow and starvation
but, packing his supplies on four exhausted horses and two dogs,
crossed the divide and finally hit the Columbia toward the end of
January, 1811, at the northern tip of its big bend. There he wintered.

Next spring, for unknown reasons, he ascended the current in-
stead of following it downstream and struck overland to the Spo-
kane River. He rode it to a larger stream. After a dozen years of
futile roving, he had found the prize— apparently too late.

At the mouth of the Snake he planted a pole, raised the Union
Jack, and claimed the surrounding territory for Britain and the
North West Company. But when he paddled on down the Columbia
to the sea on July 15 it was to find there a post of newly cut logs.
John Jacob Astor's Pacific Fur Company, under Jefferson's patron-
age, had built Fort Astoria. Arriving by sea around the Horn, the
Americans had beaten Thompson to the Columbia's mouth by a
scant four months.

He met at Astoria several of his old friends from the North West
Company, veteran traders whom Astor had shrewdly hired to man-
age his fur business. These men greeted Thompson boisterously,
dined him on salmon, duck and partridge, toasted his overland
journey in the wines of Europe. It was a touching reunion, but
Thompson had lost the race.

Still there was reason to believe that Astor's venture might fail.
His men, especially the Canadians, were grumbling already. They
had been dumped on the Oregon shore from a ship, inadequately
provisioned, and deserted. They still waited for reinforcements,
now toiling across the continent on the route of Lewis and Clark.
Such men perhaps could be lured back to the North West Company.

Unknown to them, Astor's concern had recently suffered a major
disaster.

Its ship, the Tonquin, having dropped its party of traders at the
Columbia and lost eight lives by drowning, sailed on up the coast
to Vancouver's Island in search of sea otter pelts. The commander,
Jonathan Thorn, a retired naval officer, was ignorant and contemp-
tuous of Indians. He would not listen to the advice of Alexander

228 THE SIHXJGGLE FOR THE BORDER

Mackay, one of the West's ablest explorers, who had accompanied
Mackenzie to the sea. Mackay was now alarmed to find the Indians
at Clayoquot swarming aboard the Tonquin in pretended friendship
but obviously armed and hostile.

Thorn scoffed at Mackay's warnings. The Indians suddenly at-
tacked the unsuspecting crew, hacked the captain to small pieces,
and threw Mackay overboard among the canoes. The squaws
speared him like a fish. Five men escaped from the deck and de-
fended themselves from the cabin until the Indians withdrew. Four
of the five made off in a lifeboat. The ship's clerk, Lewis, crippled
by a knife wound in the back and perhaps demented, refused to
leave the ship. He waved a welcome to the Clayoquots. As they
swarmed to the deck he crawled below and fired the powder maga-
zine. The Tonquin, Lewis, and the Indians were shattered in the
explosion.

Thompson was ignorant of the murder of his friend, Mackay,
when he started back up the Columbia after a week's rest. A year
later he reached Fort William to report the arrival of the Astorians
on the Columbia. This was shocking news to the Nor* Westers. Their
three great servants, Mackenzie, Fraser and Thompson, all had
failed.

That disappointment was short-lived. The struggle for the great
river of the West soon merged into a war for the whole continent.

16

The Man in Scarlet

[1812-1814]

ON THE MORNING OF OCTOBER 13, 1812, A HANDFUL OF AMER-
lean soldiers looked down from Queenston Heights upon the
zigzag of the Niagara River and, beyond it, the metallic shim-
mer of Lake Ontario. They had invaded Canada easily enough and
seemed likely to stay there, since they were hacked by eight million
people and opposed by a sixteenth as many. The possibility of a
Canadian nation might well have ended that day but for a tiny
speck of red, now seen moving along the river road.

General Isaac Brock, a giant with curly, fair hair, narrow face
and long, knife-blade nose, was galloping alone from Fort George
on his gray charger, Alfred. He wore a tunic of scarlet and gold,
white breeches, and about his waist an Indian sash, bright with
woven arrows, the gift of another warrior named Tecumseh. In such
a costume he would make an easy mark for any American musket
and within two hours he would be dead.

Those two hours would see the future prospects of North America
reversed, and mainly by Brock's single hand. His ride was short,
his own prospects brief. But the giant on the winded horse might
accomplish more in the seven miles between Fort George and
Queenston Heights than most of the Canadians who had crossed
the continent. All the land they had staked out for Canada, all the
work begun by Champlain and carried on by eight generations of
Canadians now lay at the feet of the American invaders and could
be lost by nightfall if Brock arrived too late at the heights.

Ahead he saw only the reddening autumn maples on the river
slope. His simple soldier's mind— and the abler mind of Washington
—could hardly suspect that the heights would soon mean as much
to Canadians as Lexington had meant to the Americans, that if

£29

230 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BOEDER

Canada was to have any birthplace as a nation it would be this hill
beside the Niagara.

So he rode, knowing little of the ultimate continental war now
under way, less of its causes across the Atlantic. In his forty-three
years Brock had learned only his trade and his duty. The Americans
were here again, for the second time, where they had no right to
be. Brock's duty was to dislodge and hurl them back across the
river— a doubtful task, by all sound military calculation impossible,
and the man in scarlet would not live to see its issue.

The causes of the tragic and useless War of 1812 went a long way
back, were so complex and immeasurable that, a century and a half
later, historians would still be debating them.

Partly they expressed the nature of the continent, the same con-
tinental forces that had brought the Kirkes, Phips, Wolfe, and Mont-
gomery to Quebec, the perpetual attempt to make North America,
or most of it, a single state. The British had achieved this unification
in the Seven Years' War and seen it collapse in the American Revolu-
tion. Now the Americans, after the failure of their first feeble Cana-
dian invasion in 1775, were attempting to repeat the strategy of
Britain.

Apparently it would be easy this time. Had not Jefferson, the pur-
chaser of Louisiana, announced that "The acquisition of Canada this
year, as far as the neighborhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter
of marching" across the defenseless border?

Andrew Jackson, a backwoods soldier, judge and duelist, still
smarting from a boyhood British saber cut, summed up the in-
evitable conquest of a neighbor's land in a single complacent
phrase: "How pleasing the prospect that would open up to the
young volunteer while performing a military promenade in a distant
country!"

Henry Clay, speaker of the new House of Representatives and
leader of the western War Hawks, had assured his countrymen that
"It is absurd to suppose that we will not succeed in our enterprise
against the enemy's Provinces. I am not for stopping at Quebec or
anywhere else; but I would take the whole continent from them,
and ask no favors. I wish never to see peace till we do. God has
given us the power and the means. We are to blame if we do not
use them."

And William Eustis, secretary of war, in his total ignorance of
that art, had informed his government officially that "We can take
Canada without soldiers. We have only to send officers into the
Provinces, and the people, disaffected towards their own Govern-
ment, will rally round our standard."

THE MAN IN SCARLET 231

The Americans, therefore, had marched to unify the continent by
the laws of geography and power, to free it of an unnatural division,
to delete, in a matter of weeks at most, an intolerable boundary line,
to repeal for all time the failure of 1775 and the impossible peace
settlement of 1783.

Already the groundwork of this invasion had been laid far to the
south in the Indiana Territory, where two of America's greatest
Indians, Tecumseh and his brother, the Prophet, after years of labor
had successfully revived Pontiac's dream of an Indian confederacy
to save the ancestral hunting grounds from American settlement.
General William Henry Harrison had accused Canada of fomenting
the tribes (which was untrue), had attacked the Prophet's town of
Tippecanoe in Tecurnseh's absence, destroyed the confederacy,
driven Tecumseh to the Great Lakes country, and ended all serious
Indian opposition east of the Mississippi. Now the western War
Hawks of the American Congress, led by Clay and John C. Calhoun,
were determined to finish the job by seizing Canada.

There was much more to the War of 1812 than these old con-
tinental forces. A large part of the American people, indeed, had
rejected the whole theory of continentalism, wanted no part of the
war, and were horrified to find themselves on the side of Napoleon,
the tyrant of Europe, against Britain and their peaceable neighbors
in Canada. New England, fearing the new power of the West and
interested mainly in maritime trade, was talking openly of secession
to escape the War Hawks' adventures and soon would be suspected
of treason. But, as always, America could not escape the quarrels
of Europe and they were the immediate cause of the Republic's
march across the Niagara River.

France had begun the trouble more than a dozen years before
by seizing American ships in the perpetual wars with Britain. Napo-
leon had lost his navy at Trafalgar and Britain could rule the
Atlantic by blockading Europe. Britain's seizure of neutral American
shipping and its abduction of seasoned American sailors, needed
in His Majesty's shorthanded fleet, naturally enraged the United
States, even though American business along the Atlantic coast
was fattening on contraband trade and a ravenous war market.

President Jefferson, who knew nearly everything but war, had
denounced the "ruinous folly of an American navy," had built a
useless collection of gunboats (called "Je&s" by the contemptuous
American sailors), and now could wield only the double-edged
weapon of embargo on American exports, which gravely damaged
the New England exporter but did little harm to Britain. For all his
foresight on land, Jefferson was hopelessly adrift at sea. The com-

232 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

merce of Ms country was soon facing ruin. More serious, the Repub-
lic was split on the issue of war and peace when it needed its united
strength to occupy the Louisiana Purchase and hold the Pacific
coast.

Jefferson's pupil and successor, Madison— a delicate, wizened, and
able man who lacked his great mentor's genius but, said Clay, had
more common sense—ended this impossible state of suspense by
asking the Congress, in a message of June 1, 1812, to declare war
on Britain.

A divided Congress reflected a divided people. The Senate carried
the war declaration by 19 votes to 13; the House of Representatives
by 79 to 49— this on June 23, five days after Britain had repealed the
offending orders in council of the European blockade in a final
gesture of peace that reached Washington by ship too late; this also
at the exact moment when Napoleon's Grand Army was crossing the
frontier of Russia to complete the conquest of the Old World. Odd
it might seem to many Americans of the New, and immoral to some,
that the American Revolution of Inalienable Rights was now strik-
ing Britain, the defender of freedom in Europe, but into this
illogical position the Republic had been forced by the logic of
events.

The parting in bad blood after the American Revolution, the
Americans' lingering distrust of their departed mother, their hunger
for Canadian land and furs, their fear of Indians and British power
on their flank, the endless haggle over the boundary, the wishful
notion that the Canadians only awaited liberation from their over-
seas masters, and finally Britain's outrageous seizure of American
ships and citizens at sea— all this complex of good motives and bad,
of anger and ambition, of deliberate design and sheer accident
produced the final war for control of North America.

Authorized in complacency, the United States' attack on Canada
opened in scandalous mismanagement No nation could have been
less prepared for Jackson's pleasant promenade toward the welcom-
ing arms of Canada. The army, on paper, consisted of 35,000 men
but hardly a quarter of them were trained. Before the war's end the
United States would raise 575,000— as many soldiers as there were
people in Canada— against 125,000 employed by the enemy, but only
56,000 American regulars could be recruited, no general would ever
command more than 7,000 in any battle, and the state militia would
usually go home after a brief term of service.

As they looked to men like Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, Clay, and
Eustis, the odds from the beginning were ridiculously, almost pathet-
ically balanced against Canada. The odds, in fact, were what they

THE MAN IN SCABLET

233

usually had been— about sixteen to one. Eight million Americans
faced half a million Canadians. The Canadian regular soldiers num-
bered 4,000. There was an equal number of British troops in the
colonies. The ill-trained or untrained militia totaled 100,000 In
theory, A few thousand Indians probably could be raised, in chang-
ing and unreliable numbers.

A quarter of the English-speaking Canadians in Upper Canada
were newly arrived immigrants from the United States and their
sympathies lay mainly with their homeland. Two-thirds of all Cana-
dians were of French blood, were only fifty-three years from their
conquest by Britain, and were still restive under their conquerors.
Would these people fight for Britain? No, they would not, But, as
Jefferson failed to understand, they would fight for Canada. And, in
fighting, they would answer the question posed by tlte conquest—
wfiether there could ever be a nation-state north of the St.
Lawrence.

This war, though it would occupy 700,000 men at one time or
another, could be only a diversion from the United States* con-
tinental march; for Canada it was to prove the supreme national
watershed.

And so— lamentable, mismanaged, unnecessary, and futile—it
began with General Henry Dearborn confined to his headquarters
in Greenbush yet promising to "operate with effect, at the same
moment, against Niagara, Kingston and Montreal"; the American
armies of the West based on Detroit under the hopeless command
of General William Hull, who had forgotten what he had learned
in the Revolution; and all Canadian forces under Governor General
Sir George Prevost, a professional British soldier who equaled the
martial idiocy of the prospective invaders. In all that dim galaxy
of talent there was only one general competent in his trade.

Isaac Brock had been born of military folk in 1769, the birth year
of Napoleon and Wellington, had fought well in Europe, and with
Nelson at Copenhagen had learned to turn a blind eye to the signals
of stupid superiors. Appointed lieutenant governor of Upper Canada
in 1811, he had tried desperately to prepare his little colony for
defense but was unable, against die opposition of recent American
immigrants, to get a military appropriation from his Assembly at
York until two months after war had been declared. The United
Empire Loyalist majority finally carried the vote, proclaiming, with
excessive hope, that "By unanimity and dispatch in our councils
and by vigor in operations we may teach the enemy this lesson: That
a country defended by free men, enthusiastically devoted to the
cause of their King and Constitution, can never be conquered."

234 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

As a piece of literature this was a poor substitute for the Declara-
tion of Independence, but as a statement of fact it was just as true.
At all events, it must serve Brock as he learned that Hull had
crossed from Detroit into Canada on July 11 and, in the gasconade
learned as governor of Michigan, had issued to the Canadian people
another declaration, somewhat inferior to the original, in these
terms:

The United States are sufficiently powerful to afford you every security
consistent with their rights and your expectations. I tender you the in-
valuable blessings of Civil, Political and Religious Liberty. . . . The
arrival of an army of Friends must be hailed by you with a cordial wel-
come. You will be emancipated from Tyranny and Oppression and re-
stored to the dignified station of Freemen. ... If contrary to your
interest and the just expectations of my country, you should take part in
the approaching contest you will be considered and treated as enemies
and the horrors and calamities of war will Stalk before you. If the bar-
barous and Savage policy of Great Britain be pursued, and the savages
let loose to murder our Citizens and butcher our women and children,
this war will be a war of extermination. The first stroke with the Toma-
hawk, the first attempt with the Scalping Knife, will be the Signal for
one indiscriminate Scene of desolation. No white man found fighting by
the Side of an Indian will be taken prisoner. Instant destruction will be
his Lot.

This lofty language was designed to impress the Canadians with
their weakness; Hull was not much impressed with his own strength.

He might be incompetent himself but he realized that Eustis, the
Secretary of War, was a fool, that Dearborn had failed to concert
any useful strategy, that the first obvious step was to gain control of
Lakes Erie and Ontario, thus cutting Canada in two, and that noth-
ing of the sort had been attempted. Moreover, the daring Provincial
Marines of Upper Canada had managed to seize, near Detroit, an
American schooner bearing Hull's secret campaign plans. He had
never sought this military command, he was tired of it already, and
the Canadians, against all the promises of the statesmen in Washing-
ton, refused to embrace the invader.

Nevertheless, he ferried 2,500 men from Detroit to the Canadian
village of Sandwich and found only 600 Canadians, most of them
raw militia and Indians, at Fort Maiden nearby. He tried to take
the fort but was stopped by a few Indians under an abler general,
Tecumseh, at a creek appropriately called Riviere aux Canards.
These, then, were the savages who must bring down the full horrors
of the "war of extermination." Poor Hull was in no position to
exterminate even the tiny Canadian force before him.

THE MAN IN SCAKLET 235

Now he learned of a disaster in his rear. On Brock's orders the
garrison at St. Joseph's Island, between Huron and Superior, 45
regulars and 180 French-Canadian voyageurs, with 400 Indians, had
taken the American post of Mackinac without a drop of bloodshed.
This was a small but highly significant affair. It had carried the
Canadians across the border, rallied the Indians as of old, showed
that French Canadians were willing to fight, and given Canada
command of the main lanes of travel to the far West.

The second item of news was equally depressing. Hull had
ordered the evacuation of Fort Dearborn (Chicago) and half of its
garrison of sixty-one had been massacred by Indians, drunk with
the fort's liquor, which should have been destroyed. The tomahawk
and the scalping knife were loose again. Hull forgot his declaration
to the Canadian people and retreated to Detroit, following a month's
wasted promenade.

A few hours after he had pushed his war budget through the
York legislature, Brock hurried by water to Amherstburg, at the
western end of Lake Erie. He arrived just after midnight, August
14, with 300 reinforcements. His operations were small, even in
Canadian terms, but they marked him at once as a soldier of imag-
ination. Studying Hull's captured plans by candlelight, he ordered
an immediate attack on Detroit. Upper Canada, a colony of 100,000
people, proposed to invade a nation of 8,000,000.

Among those at the midnight council was Tecumseh, of whom
Brock remarked later that "a more sagacious or a more gallant
warrior does not, I believe, exist." The great Shawnee was nearly six
feet tall, hard, lithe, and as nervous as a woods animal. His skin was
'light copper, his countenance oval, with bright hazel eyes beaming
cheerfulness, energy and decision. Three small crowns or coronets
were suspended from the lower cartilage of his aquiline nose."

The blond English general and the dark master of wilderness war
met and instantly became as brothers. Tecumseh turned to his thirty
followers and pronounced his verdict: "Ho-o-o-e, this is a man!" The
chief then unrolled a strip of elm bark and, with his much-used
scalping knife, drew a detailed map of the country surrounding
Detroit. On this map a plan of attack was quickly devised.

Next day Brock surveyed his 1,500 troops and demanded Detroit's
surrender. Hull refused. He had 2,500 men altogether but some 500
of them had been foolishly ordered out of the fort into the country,
a march of two or three days. Still Detroit should be easily
defended.

That night Tecumseh— whose name had begun to rally the tribes
—silently crossed the river with 600 followers and encircled Hull's

236 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

fort without alerting him. Brock crossed in the morning with 700
men, half of them raw militia, while his battery of five field guns
pounded Detroit from the Canadian side. He now learned for the
first time that the absent American troops were returning from the
south. He was caught between them and the fort. A lesser general
would have retreated. Brock ordered an instant advance. Resplend-
ent in scarlet, he rode his gray charger, with Tecumseh beside him
on a pony. At this reckless show of strength Hull's martial courage
oozed out He raised a white flag and surrendered not only Detroit
but the territory of Michigan.

As the Union Jack was raised over the fort, Brock presented his
sash and pistols to Tecumseh, who gave a gaudy Indian sash,
spangled with arrows, to his new friend. Brock wore it for the re-
mainder of his short span. Tecumseh bestowed Brock's present on
Roundhead, chief of the Wyandots, "an older and more valiant
chief."

The news from Detroit sobered the politicians at Washington.
Apparently the wrongheaded Canadians had no appetite for libera-
tion and would fight their liberators. The contest was not to be a
mere matter of marching, after all Hull had not launched a war of
liberation. He had conducted a comedy.

Brock moved to Niagara, where he rightly expected the main
American blow to fall, attempted to forestall it with an attack on
Sackets Harbor but found that the wavering Governor General
Prevost had arranged an armistice with Dearborn in the hope that
the war somehow might be called off. Thus protected from Brock,
the Americans rapidly massed along the Niagara and when the
armistice ended on September 7 nearly seven thousand of them
faced 1,700 Canadians across the river.

As a soldier Brock knew the strategy which the enemy must follow
if he was to conquer Canada. Had he the brains to use it?

The essential strategy was as old as the first wars of America.
Britain, lacking an army in Canada, must rely on its old weapon, the
navy, to blockade the United States' commerce. The United States,
lacking a navy, must move by land and move fast before British
reinforcements could cross the Atlantic.

In order of priority the historic American objectives were, or
should be, Quebec, Montreal, Kingston, Niagara, and the Detroit
River. Quebec could not be taken, had never been taken without
naval power, but Montreal was vulnerable by the old Chainplain
corridor. Its capture, or the capture of the Niagara peninsula, would
split Canada, cutting off its French- from its English-speaking
people. Yet the Americans made no serious attempt on Montreal, the

THE MAN IN SCARLET 237

central objective, throughout the war. They aimed at Niagara, a
second-best strategy, but for the most part wasted their strength in
bungling raids on the Canadian perimeter.

Brock could hardly credit the enemy with such ignorance of the
first principles of North American war, an enemy which had re-
cently beaten the British Empire but now found no successors to
Washington, or even to Wayne. Sure of early attack, not knowing
where he must meet it, and outnumbered four to one, Brock waited
impatiently in Fort George, at the mouth of the Niagara River and
directly opposite the American Fort Niagara.

An American council of war decided to attack Fort George and
Queenston Heights, a hill rising 345 feet above the river, seven
miles to the southward, simultaneously. General Smyth, command-
ing above Niagara Falls, refused to participate. Lacking his support,
General Stephen Van Rensselaer proposed to feint at Fort George
and take the heights. On October 10 his attack failed even to cross
the river. The first boats, carrying all the available oars, were seized
by the Canadians. The American Army waited all night in the rain
and returned to camp for breakfast.

Van Rensselaer was in despair. A rich and honorable Federalist,
he had doubted the wisdom of the war, he had no wish for a com-
mand, but had been placed at the head of the New York State
militia by the Democratic Governor Tompkins, so that possible
defeat could not be blamed on the Democratic Party. Fortunately
the American General's cousin, Solomon Van Rensselaer, a trained
soldier, was on his staff. After the opening fiasco, Solomon concen-
trated the army at Lewiston, opposite Queenston, under the cover
of the woods, and prepared another assault. This time, taking no
chances, he resolved to lead the advance himself.

At half past three in the chilly morning of October 13 he landed
at Queenston village with 225 regulars. The rest of the 4,000 Ameri-
can troops were to follow him before dawn. Only 300 Canadians
held Queenston, but they poured a well-aimed volley at the first
invaders and gravely wounded Van Rensselaer, who was carried
back across the river. The Americans had lost their only experienced
leader. His successor, Captain Wool, proved an ingenious substitute.
He abandoned the frontal attack on Queenston and led a party of
300 by an obscure path up the river to approach the heights from
the rear.

Brock, at Fort George, had heard no word of the American land-
ing. He heard only the American guns of Lewiston firing at Queens-
ton. Soon the guns of Fort Niagara started to bombard his own fort.
Which target did the enemy intend to attack? Perhaps both at once?

238 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

Brock could hope to defend only one point. So he waited, husband-
ing his scanty reserves.

A messenger rode into Fort George with the news that the Ameri-
cans had crossed the river in force. Still Brock could not be sure that
the attack was aimed at Queenston. It might be a feint to draw him
out of his fort. He called for his charger, Alfred, and galloped up
the river road.

Ahead, through a drenching rain, he could see the flash of cannon
fire—two Canadian guns against twenty-four American— then the
figure of a horseman approaching hell-for-leather from the south.
Brock did not even slacken his pace as this man, wheeling and
riding beside Alfred, shouted that the Americans were swarming up
the heights. Brock ordered the messenger on to Fort George. He
was to bring all the soldiers to Queenston.

Thus after the comedy of Detroit, after all the distant quarrels of
Europe, the duel at sea, the whole long history of struggle on the
Canadian border, the continental issue was joined at last. And for
Canada the issue that day was nothing less than survival.

On those flaming autumn heights Brock could not hope to win
the war of survival or decide whether North America was to con-
tain one nation or two. Repulsed now, the Americans would surely
return. But, with luck, he might buy time for his people when only
a few more minutes were left to him. If Queenston could be held,
the first American attack broken, Canadians of both races might
be rallied. If Queenston was lost and Canada split, the whole war
doubtless would be lost also. The boundary, which the French had
surrendered under Montcalm, which the Canadians had saved under
Carleton, would be erased forever.

Brock foresaw all the consequences of his seven-mile ride as he
leaned over the neck of Alfred, Tecumseh's sash streaming in the
wind. Would he reach the heights in time?

Alfred, nostrils red and flanks heaving, pounded through Queens-
ton village in the first light of dawn. Brock paused only for a mo-
ment to order the handful of soldiers there to follow him, then
spurred his horse up the heights. At the summit he found eight
Canadian gunners. A single 18-pound gun fired on the Americans
beside the river.

Apparently Brock had arrived in time. He did not know of Wool's
detour around the heights. Suddenly he heard shouts behind him
and beheld 300 Americans charging straight at the gun pit. Defense,
with only eight men, was hopeless. Brock had just told his gunners
to "try a longer fuse." He added in the same breath, "Spike the guns
and follow me!" The gunners drove in their spike and scrambled

THE MAN IN SCARLET 239

down the hill. Brock had no chance to mount. He led his horse
behind him as he ran.

Back at Queenston, he gathered a hundred men and, not daring
to await reinforcements, prepared to retake the heights before the
Americans could dig in. The Canadians were led out of the village
at a run but halted at the foot of the hill. "Take breath, boys/' Brock
cried, "you'll need it presently!" He stroked Alfred's quivering neck
and apologized for pushing him so hard. It was the last farewell
between soldier and horse.

After a moment's pause, Brock drew his sword and started up the
heights on foot, by a curve inland, to take the Americans in the
rear. Wool was ready for him on the crest. A hundred panting Cana-
dians faced a solid American line three times their number. It was
no time to measure the odds. Brock's sword led the charge at the
American center. It gave way and the Canadians leaped into the
gun pit A few yards off, in the woods, a cool American took careful
aim at an easy target. As he fired, Brock dropped without a sound.
An instant later a dead soldier sprawled across his general's body.
Nerves shattered by their leader's death, the Canadians fled. They
carried Brock with them and laid him in a Queenston cottage.

The heights had been lost for the second time. There seemed to
be no chance of retaking them.

Colonel John Macdonell, who succeeded Brock, was a man of the
same mold. He resolved to avenge his dead commander. Two hun-
dred men were collected and Macdonell led them up the heights.
Again the Americans were driven back, the gun recaptured. Again
the Canadian commander fell, mortally wounded. And again the
Americans drove the Canadians down the hill.

Now the Stars and Stripes floated confidently over the gun pit.
Sixteen hundred Americans had crossed the river. Canada's lifeline
apparently was severed. General Van Rensselaer sent mounted mes-
sengers to Albany, announcing the decisive victory, and made ready
to accept the Canadian surrender. In this moment of triumph every-
thing went wrong.

The garrison of Fort George, having silenced the guns of Niagara,
at last had reached Queenston. A party of 150 Canadians, with a
few Indians, was marching down the river from the falls. This out-
numbered force scaled the heights from the south into what should
have been a baited trap. But at the sound of Indian war whoops
the Americans fell into panic. Some of them ran down to the river
and rowed across. Van Rensselaer stamped through his disordered
ranks on the Canadian side, ordering, cursing, pleading. It was no
use. His army melted before his eyes.

240 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BOEDER

The Americans across the river refused to move. They had been
terrified by the rumor of a great British Army approaching from
somewhere and "the name of an Indian, or the sight of the wounded
or the Devil, or something petrified them," as a survivor testi-
fied.

On the heights the gallant Colonel Winfield Scott tried to form a
line as the Canadians from Queenston and Niagara Falls joined in a
bayonet charge. The line broke and plunged downward to the
river. A few men managed to swim the current The remainder
waited for their comrades on the far side to rescue them. When no
rescue came, they surrendered. Scott raised a white handkerchief
on his sword point.

The Army of the United States, in its first serious promenade, had
lost about a hundred dead, 200 wounded, and 1,000 prisoners.
Canada's casualties, though only 150 all told, included its greatest
soldier, now lying in a Queenston cottage. He had not died in vain.
Canada held the heights. The Americans had been driven back
across the boundary.

Such a skirmish was a small incident in the affairs of the Republic.
It was the turning point of Canadian history. For in death Brock
was stronger than in life. The embryo nation of Canada had lacked,
until that morning at Queenston, the essential nutriment of its
growth— a myth shared by all its people. Now it had the myth, car-
ried by a scarlet figure on a gray horse. Brock had proved that even
at hopeless odds Canada could fight and win. If it fought on, it
might yet be a nation in fact. Such was the legacy left by the
young General, who had died in apparent defeat before he could
see his victory.

The Republic must pay more than brief humiliation and a few
casualties as the price of rout on Queenston Heights. The larger
and longer price was its neighbor's hatred, first lighted in the
Loyalists, now corroborated, inflamed, and deepened by invasion.
Perhaps that mattered little to a nation which no foreign hatred
could ever quench. It meant more to Canada, not yet a nation, than
any foreigner would ever understand. To North America it meant
that the continental boundary was permanent— if the Canadians
could hold it. The Americans had assaulted the boundary and by
their assault confirmed it in the mind of Canada.

One little victory at Queenston transformed the Canadian mind
but of itself it could have no great effect on the course of the war.
The victors must endure the grinding attrition of a long, one-sided
struggle, for the losers must surely have learned from their blunders
at Detroit and Niagara, must reorganize their forces, revive the

THE MAN IN SCAELET 241

historic strategy of invasion, and crush Canada in the end. Strangely
enough, they did nothing of the sort.

General Smyth, succeeding Van Rensselaer, blustered on the safe
side of the river, launched a few futile raids, planned a great at-
tack, canceled it, and in reply to protests from the Committee of
Patriotic Citizens observed that "The affair at Queenston is a cau-
tion against relying on crowds who go to the banks of the Niagara
to look at a battle as on a theatrical performance." Dearborn sent
a small raiding party to St. Regis, on the St. Lawrence, west of
Montreal. The Americans were soon sent scurrying home. So the
American Army hibernated at Plattsburg, on Lake Champlain.

By land 1812 had been a year of unbroken disaster for the
United States, the result of military incompetence in the field and
divided councils at home. Madison's government evidently had
bitten off more than it could chew. Its first sensible act of the war
was to dismiss Eustis and Hull. American troops, under new com-
manders, should conquer Canada handily in 1813.

By sea the unequaled American sailors had preyed like darting
hawks upon Britain's far-flung commerce. They lacked heavy war-
ships of the line, but a score of their "damned frigates," as Welling-
ton was calling them, and 526 privateers had begun to accumulate
their amazing tally of 1,344 prizes. The Republic was teaching its
maritime mother the art of naval war,

Britain needed its navy on the coasts of Europe. In any case, it
was playing a shrewd game. Since New England was against the
war, Britain refrained from interfering too much with its commerce
or raiding its coast, in the hope that the family quarrel of the Re-
public would ripen. At the proper moment the navy could contain
the whole American littoral and even invade it.

Canada had no navy and only forty-four privateers, the famous
Bluenose schooners of the Atlantic colonies. They managed to cap-
ture 200 American ships before the war was over.

It was not at sea, but on the fresh waters of the Great Lakes, that
the major naval battles would be fought. It was on land that Canada
could be conquered despite Britain's sea power.

The new American commander in the West, General William
Henry Harrison, who had established his reputation at Tippecanoe,
soon found that the Canadians were harder to fight than Indians.
His winter advance on the American post of Frenchtown, at the
west end of Lake Erie, previously captured by the Canadians and
now held by a garrison of fifty whites and a hundred Indians, added
another item to the lenghtening list of failure. A Canadian force of
1,000, half whites, and half Indians, crossed the Detroit River on

242 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

the ice, drove off the Americans, and captured General Winchester.
There followed an old-time Indian butchery. In the same winter
500 Canadians crossed the St. Lawrence from Prescott and burned
the American fort at Ogdensburg.

In the spring of 1813 the war began at last to go against Canada.
A Canadian siege of Fort Meigs (Toledo) collapsed when the
militia were ordered home to plow their fields and feed Upper
Canada. A summer attack on Fort Stephenson, on Lake Erie, also
failed. Meanwhile Dearborn, who should have been taking Mont-
real, managed a successful amphibious expedition out of Sackets
Harbor against York and found the Canadian defenses there in total
confusion, many new guns not even mounted. The Canadians
fought a brief battle and retreated. A few minutes later 200
Americans were killed by an exploding battery which the Amer-
icans took for a time bomb. In revenge they burned the parliament
buildings and looted a few houses. Some stolen books and silver
plate were later restored by the scrupulous American naval com-
mander, Commodore Chauncey.

From York, Dearborn and Chauncey, with 6,000 troops, moved
on Fort George. The Canadian garrison of 1,400 retreated north-
ward along the shore of Lake Ontario to avoid annihilation. The
United States had repealed the defeat of Queenston. It had seized
the Niagara frontier. One more stroke could divide Upper from
Lower Canada. That lethal stroke was never executed.

While the Canadian fleet on Lake Ontario raided Sackets Harbor
and might have destroyed it if the egregious Prevost had not
ordered a sudden retreat, the Americans under Dearborn pursued
the Canadians from Fort George along the lake shore and camped,
on June 5, at Stoney Creek to prepare for a decisive battle. The
pause proved ruinous.

A small Canadian force under Colonel Harvey raided the dozing
American camp at night and drove the invaders back to Fort
George. The Canadians advanced cautiously to Beaver Darns, be-
hind Queenston Heights, their Indians continuing to harass the
Americans into exasperation. Six hundred picked men were ordered
to take Beaver Dams and end the nuisance; at which moment a
new Canadian heroine, successor to Madeleine de Vercheres,
emerged with a cow and a milk pail.

Laura Secord was the wife of a Canadian who had been wounded
at Queenston,. A poor woman, of little learning, she possessed the
hard common sense and tough fiber of the wilderness.

As she set out to milk her cow one morning, she overheard the
talk of some American soldiers near Fort George. They spoke of a

THE MAN IN SCARLET 243

surprise attack on Beaver Dams. Laura knew at once that somehow
she must carry the news to her countrymen. It would not be easy
to pass the American sentries but the cow solved that problem.
Quietly prodded by its owner, it roamed into the forest. The sen-
tries paid no attention as Laura followed it. Once concealed among
the trees, she dropped her milk pail and started on a walk of twenty
miles to the Canadian camp—twenty miles of thick brambles, swol-
len creeks, and stifling heat.

She was exhausted and her clothes in ribbons when she fell into
the hands of Canadian scouts, only to find that they knew already
of the impending American attack. But, like Brock, she had created
a Canadian legend.

The Americans advanced, according to plan, on Beaver Dams and
were mowed down by an Indian ambush. Such was their fear of
massacre and torture that they surrenderd to white soldiers who had
not fired a single shot. Thus ended, for the time being, the threat
to the Canadian lifeline. The Republic had been repulsed by its
own blunders, by Indian war whoops, a weak ambush, a brave
farm wife, and a nameless milk cow.

American strategy of a sort was concerted outside the Niagara
theater. The infamous General Wilkinson had been rewarded for
his treason in the Mississippi country by command of the troops at
Sackets Harbor. He was to take Kingston, descend the St. Lawrence,
and join a force from Lake Champlain for the long-postponed at-
tack on Montreal. The Canadians foresaw this danger and thwarted
it by a lightning raid which drove the Americans out of Plattsburg
and prevented any thrust at Montreal until the autumn.

On Lake Erie the Republic at last had found a naval commander
to redeem its generals' fiasco on land. Captain Oliver Perry, aged
twenty-eight, was hastily building a flotilla at Presque Isle in the
hope of dominating the lake and opening the way to the recapture
of Detroit and an invasion from the west. He fitted out nine trim
vessels but this formidable fleet was bottled up in shallow water
by the six Canadian warships based on Amherstburg under Captain
Robert Barclay, a veteran of Trafalgar who, like Nelson, had lost
an arm in battle.

While Barclay was absent, scouring the lake for provisions, Perry
deftly floated his new ships over the seven-foot harbor bar with the
use of air tanks. Barclay was taken completely by surprise. He saw
that he must fight these superior forces at once, since the Canadians
at Amherstburg, with Tecumseh's Indians, were close to starvation.
They could not be fed if Perry controlled the lake. Barclay, there-
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246 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

equipped, armed with clumsy guns from the Amherstburg fort and
manned, mostly by soldiers and landlubbers. Tecumseh watched the
fleet sail on the night of September 9, promising his braves that
uour father with one arm" would soon sink the Americans.

The largest battle ever fought in the fresh water of America was
joined next day at Put in Bay. Two miniature fleets were maneu-
vered by trained commanders in the classic pattern of naval war.
They raked each other with deadly broadsides until Perry's flagship,
the Lawrence, was disabled. Nothing could stop this unsinkable
young man. He was rowed to the Niagara and continued the fight.

The Detroit, equally damaged, had run foul of the Queen Char-
lotte and offered a helpless target. As Perry bore down in the
Lawrence, with the dash of a Nelson against one of Nelson's officers,
Barclay lay in his bunk, his remaining arm crippled, his shoulder
shattered, and his thigh broken. Perry's final broadside, at point-
blank range, mauled the other Canadian ships, reduced the Detroit
to a helpless hulk, killed or wounded all her officers, and put three-
fourths of her crew out of action. Barclay perforce struck his flag
and offered his sword to his enemy, who gallantly refused to accept
it. Young Perry, almost singlehanded, had won control of Lake Erie
and would hold it for the rest of the war. It was no fault of his that
the victory of Put in Bay could not be exploited by his superiors.

Colonel Proctor, an indifferent and hesitant commander, now
found himself in desperate straits at Amherstburg. There was no
food for his garrison. With control of the lake, the Americans could
certainly launch a powerful invasion by land. The Canadians would
be lucky to make good their escape.

Nevertheless, Tecumseh, in the last oration of his life, announced
that "we wish to remain here and fight our enemy." Turning to
Proctor, he added: "Father, you have the arms and ammunition.
... If you intend to retreat, give them to us and you may go, and
welcome. Our lives are in the hands of the Great Spirit. We are
determined to defend our lands and, if it be His will, to leave our
bones upon them."

That wish would soon be granted. Tecumseh was near the end
of his long trail. If he must die, the old dream of an Indian
confederacy, the Iroquois* dream and Pontiac's, would die with
him.

Proctor burned Amherstburg and moved inland, after promising
Tecumseh to make a stand on the Thames. Tecumseh decided to
follow, reluctantly and with little hope. He had trusted Brock. He
was too wise to trust Proctor. Beside the flames of Amherstburg the
chief said to Blue Jacket, his old friend of many battles; "We are

THE MAN IN SCARLET 247

now going to follow the British and I feel well assured we shall
never return."

The garrisons of Amherstburg and Detroit (also abandoned and
burned) retreated slowly eastward up the Thames, Harrison and
4,000 Americans close on their heels. The race ended at Moravian-
town where Proctor decided, faintheartedly, to make a stand.

Tecumseh made up his mind to die if his white allies fled. He
had beheld in dreams his death and the end of that greater dream.
"Brother warriors," he told his fellows, "we are now about to enter
an engagement from which I shall never come out. My body will
remain on the field of battle." He handed his sword to the Potawa-
tomi chief, Shaubena. "When my son becomes a noted warrior," he
said, "give him this."

Proctor ranged his 400 exhausted and hungry soldiers between
the Thames on the left and a swamp on the right. Tecumseh placed
his 1,000 Indians behind the swamp for an enfilading attack on the
Americans* left. Dressed in buckskin, his head draped in a scarlet
handkerchief and surmounted by a white feather, a silver tomahawk
in his belt, he visited Proctor to say good-bye. "Father," he said,
"have a big heart." But Proctor, on horseback, had placed himself
well to the rear of his troops and, as Tecumseh noticed, seemed
ready for quick flight.

Harrison's first wild cavalry charge broke and demoralized the
Canadian line. Only fifty men escaped through the woods. The rest
were killed or captured. Proctor and his staff galloped off before
the enemy could reach them.

Tecumseh had waited in silence behind the swamp until the
cavalry were within easy range. Then his volley annihilated the
first line. He had picked out the American commander, Colonel
Johnson, as his own target and ran at him, the silver tomahawk
raised high for the throw. Johnson reeled from his wounds but
fired his pistol as he fell, unconscious, to the ground. The pistol had
been well aimed. A few yards from Johnson lay Tecumseh, the
tomahawk beside his body. The Indians saw their chiefs end, re-
membered his presentiment of defeat, and bolted.

Harrison camped that night on the battlefield of the Republic's
first decisive victory by land. His work of Tippecanoe was com-
plete but he never saw his old enemy again. While the Americans
slept, Tecumseh's warriors crept into the camp, carried his body
into the woods and buried it without a stone to mark the grave of
the last great chief in eastern America, where the Indians would
never rise again.

The victory of Moraviantown was too far from the center of

248 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

events to matter much. By the last days of October, however, Wil-
kinson, with 75OQO men, was ready to advance from Sackets Harbor
on the essential objective of Montreal. He was to be joined by Gen-
eral Hampton and an equal force from Lake Champlain, These
converging armies posed for Canada the supreme question of its
existence—would the French Canadians fight? The Americans
doubted it, as they had doubted at Quebec in 1775.

Marching confidently down the Chateauguay toward the St. Law-
rence and expecting no serious resistance, Hampton stumbled upon
the fearless Charles de Salaherry and his French Canadians, who
proposed to fight at La Fourche, only thirty-five miles southwest of
Montreal. They were opportunely joined by another French-Cana-
dian detachment under "Red George" Macdonell. It had arrived
by river boat and a forced night march from Kingston. De Sala-
berry now had 1,600 men, nearly all of the French race and all well
trained, to oppose Hampton's 7,000.

The Canadian commander was not only a brave man but an in-
stinctive strategist. He disposed his left on a narrow stream, his
right on the adjoining woods, and waited. Hampton planned to
crush him from front and rear. Five thousand Americans would
attack frontally while 1,500 waded the stream in the darkness be-
hind the Canadians. It was a good plan but failed to work. At dawn
the two American forces, separated and out of communication, each
expected the other to begin the assault. De Salaberry climbed a
dead tree and imediately saw his chance.

He left a handful of men to distract the main American force and
wheeled suddenly on the lost Americans at his back, while his
little band of Indians whooped and his bugles blared on all sides.
The Americans, panic-stricken at this sudden show of strength,
stampeded into the woods and shot at one another. Hampton halted
his attack and retreated.

His defeat was perhaps of no great concern to the United States,
being one of many, but CMteauguay was vital to Canada, for it
had complemented Queenston by proving that the two Canadian
races could stand together in defense of their country. The French
Canadians already had established many myths of their own. Now
they shared the joint myth of a united Canada. Grave Carleton's
work at Quebec had survived its test. The opposite American myth
of a divided people only awaiting liberation should have died at
CMteauguay yet would persist half a century longer, with strange
results.

Wilkinson learned that lesson the hard way as he moved down
the St. Lawrence to join Hampton. He was harassed by Canadian

THE MAN IN SCAKLET 249

patrols of both races and stopped cold by a stubborn skirmish at
Chrysler's Farm. Hampton having limped back to Lake Champlain,
Wilkinson, though still vastly outnumbering the Canadians, aban-
doned the attack on Montreal. Canada's center was safe. The Amer-
icans also withdrew from Fort George across the Niagara in Decem-
ber, after burning the village of Newark and turning 400 women
and children into the snow.

The new Canadian field commander, General Gordon Drummond,
was fresh from the wars of Europe. He closely resembled Brock-
tall, handsome, with a narrow, hard face. Like Brock, he was reck-
less in attack.

Drummond crossed the Niagara River by night, only six days
behind the Americans, and without firing a shot routed the garrison
at Fort Niagara by a single stealthy bayonet charge. Advancing w
the river, he systematically burned Lewiston, Fort Schlosser, Blacl
Rock, and Buffalo.

The year of 1813, which had opened so badly for Canada on
Lake Erie and in the West, ended with the Americans all south of
the border and the Canadians holding the American side of the
Niagara line.

Madison's government had begun to realize that a war against an
overwhelming British Navy, now ruling the Atlantic, and a small
Canadian Army able to move with disconcerting speed, was a highly
questionable investment. The United States may have begun to
suspect the truth, already taught to Britain by the Thirteen Colo-
nies, that a few men fighting for their homes outnumbered a host
of foreign invaders. It had learned that weak American generalship
alone could not explain this long series of defeats, that the United
States, with overwhelming manpower, simply was unable or un-
willing to use it for foreign conquest.

Certainly the theory of contmentalism, of one state between Mex-
ico and the North Pole, was dying in the spring of 1814. But it was
not yet dead. Though already seeking peace, the American govern-
ment resolved on a supreme attempt, to smash the border.

Its spring campaign made a discouraging start The Canadians
raided westward out of Mackinac, captured Prairie du Chien and
even a vessel on the Mississippi. Seven hundred Americans sailed
up the Great Lakes to retake Mackinac but 200 Canadians drove
them back to their boats. Canada thus held Superior, Michigan, and
Huron. It could not dislodge the Americans from Erie, after Perry's
victory, and they raided inland at will.

Since Montreal, the essential target, seemed beyond its reach,
the Republic decided to seize the Niagara frontier again. This

250 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

theater was now held by Drummond's 4,000 troops, strung out on
a weak line from Lake Erie along the Niagara River and Lake On-
tario almost to York. The new American invasion was commanded
by the able General Brown, who had succeeded Wilkinson.

Brown moved out of Buffalo on July 3 with about four thousand
men, crossed the Niagara, defeated 2,000 Canadians near Chippawa
and advanced diagonally across the Niagara peninsula on Drum-
mond's base of Burlington, west of York. He had just passed the
falls when he lurched, without warning, into 1,000 Canadians on
a country crossroad known as Lundy's Lane.

Neither side was prepared for this encounter. The Canadians had
marched southward, up the river, unaware of Brown's approach.
The Americans had marched north, expecting no resistance. The
two forces rounded a curve in the road to behold each other at
short musket range,

Brown hesitated, exaggerating the enemy's probable force. The
Canadians, knowing themselves outnumbered, began an orderly re-
treat. At that moment the massive figure of General Druminond
galloped up the road, in almost exact reproduction of Brock's ride
at Queenston. He ordered his troops to stand until he could bring
up reinforcements from Fort George.

The Americans, under Winfield Scott, attacked in the sweltering
dusk of July 25 and opened one of the most desperate battles ever
fought in America.

Throughout the night 4,000 Americans and 3,000 Canadians reeled
up and down the knoll where Drummond's seven field guns were
captured, recaptured, and captured again by either side until both
armies lay down, helpless, around their silent cannons. It was not
over yet. The Americans suddenly came to life and prepared to de-
liver the knockout blow.

Drummond had lost nearly a third of his force. About twelve
hundred effective Canadians faced twice as many Americans. Can-
ada was beaten unless more reinforcements arrived soon. They ar-
rived, 1,200 of them, after a \veary march from Fort George, just
as the Americans began their final attack.

The struggle around the seven cannons was resumed in the dark-
ness. Again and again the Americans took the knoll and were hurled
back as both sides reeled drunkenly in the carnage of hand-to-hand
fighting. After six hours of this blind slaughter, the Americans
slowly staggered back to Chippawa. The Canadians lay down be-
side their broken guns. In the sudden silence of dawn they heard
the thunder of Niagara Falls.

That was Lundy's Lane. Who had won? Both sides claimed a

THE MAN IN SCARLET 251

victory and both shared a common glory. The retrospective opinion
of professional soldiers was of little importance to Canada. What
mattered was that the American advance had been repulsed, the
Niagara line was safe, and Lundy's Lane had entered, with Queens-
ton and Chateauguay, the new myth of the infant nation.

For the rest of the summer the western war was confined to a
series of desultory raids and counterraids, until 6,000 Americans,
advancing again in the Niagara sector, met 8,000 Canadians under
Drummond at Chippawa and withdrew after a brief skirmish. The
Canadian lifeline still held.

Both sides had built ships furiously on Lake Ontario, though
neither would risk battle. The Canadians took Oswego on May 6
but their small raiding party was destroyed between there and
Sackets Harbor.

The Champlain corridor came to life in March. Wilkinson, as if
he had not tasted enough defeat already, marched down the Riche-
lieu with 4,000 men, was halted by 500 Canadians at La Colle, four
miles inside the Canadian border, and retired once more.

While the land war thus presented the tedious spectacle of ad-
vance, retreat, blunder and heroism, the British Navy had system-
atically sealed up the Atlantic coast, despite the miraculous feats of
the Yankee skippers, and ruined the United States' maritime com-
merce. Quebec and Halifax boomed. The American ports lay idle.

The navy next attacked the Maine shore. Its helpless inhabitants
surrendered a vague territory and the border of 1783. At Halifax
Britain proclaimed its possession of the coast south to the Penobscot.
If this was a temporary gain, won by arms and soon to be sur-
rendered by diplomacy, it showed the Republic's peril against naval
power and cooled the early enthusiasm of the war party, the mere
marchers and promenaders of Washington. They had learned a first
lesson in amphibious warfare.

Britain now undertook to teach a harsher one. An amphibious
expedition launched against Washington, in curious contrast to the
British bungles of the Revolutionary War, was carried through with-
out a hitch on August 24.

The new American capital, still a village on a steaming sandbank,
was defended by Commodore Barney, a brave and resourceful
privateersman, who had taken eleven British ships in ten days, and
by General Winder, who had been captured by the Canadians at
Stoney Creek in the previous year. The government, so eager for
war in 1812, departed hastily at the sight of a British squadron on
the Potomac. Madison and his plump, comely wife regretfully
abandoned the presidential mansion.

252 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

Probably no government in history had so completely botched
the defense of its capital. Barney had 400 sailors, Winder 400 reg-
ular troops and 5,000 militia—this out of a reputed military force
of 93,000 in the Washington area. The British fleet brought 4,000
troops to avenge, as the London government explained, not very
convincingly, the destruction of York.

Barney was compelled to burn his boats and retreat from the
river to join Winder. Some six thousand Americans stood at Blad-
ensburg, north of the town, with Madison and his Cabinet surveying
the scene of expected victory from horseback, at a safe distance. The
British advanced, eight Americans were killed and eleven wounded
in the first volley, and the 5,000 militia promptly fled, leaving the
regulars hopelessly outnumbered but boldly standing their ground.
They were soon overpowered. Among the captives was the wounded
Barney, whom the British rightly treated as a hero.

Britain had captured, with a few shots, the capital of the nation
which had defeated it in the Revolution, but this was a raid only,
a gesture and a lesson. However inexcusable and unnecessary the
lesson might appear, it must have convinced the American Cabinet,
then retreating on horseback, that the old motherland was still the
most powerful state in the world when it could fight Napoleon and
the Republic at the same time—too powerful, perhaps, for such
unseemly gestures.

The questionable work of avenging York was completed with
efficiency. In the evening the government's buildings, among them
the unfinished Capitol, were partially burned, the presidential man-
sion seriously enough to require a complete new coat of paint to
make it the White House. As the raiders departed in good order to
their ships, the flames beside the Potomac wrote Britain's garish
signature upon this exploit— or crime, as the Americans considered
it—and informed the American government of a fact which had
escaped Jefferson and Madison in the first place— that no other
nation could win a war on the Atlantic while Britannia ruled the
waves.

The British also learned something from the raid. Their attack on
Baltimore was quickly repulsed while Francis Scott Key was com-
posing "The Star-Spangled Banner." They sailed on to New Orleans
and found defeat awaiting them in the person of an American gen-
eral known as Old Hickory,

But the war had turned decisively in Britain's favor, especially
now that Napoleon had been banished to Elba and Wellington could
spare trained troops for the defense of Canada.

Canadians soon proved that they could be as reckless as Amer-

THE MAN IN SCARLET 253

leans. Prevost, the fatuous Governor General, had prepared the final
blow of the land war by an advance down the Richelieu and Lake
Champlain, the fatal path of Burgoyne to Saratoga. Prevost had
11,000 troops, the largest army of the war, mostly reinforcements
from Wellington's veterans of Europe. For the first time the odds
were heavily with Canada.

The immediate objective was the American base at Plattsburg
and the proper strategy was obvious enough to anyone but Prevost.
Plattsburg, defended by 1,500 Americans, should have been taken
and the Canadian guns then trained on the American lake flotilla
nearby. Instead, by the highest idiocy of an idiotic war, Prevost
forced his own ill-equipped little fleet into action against the Amer-
ican ships in Plattsburg Bay, promising a simultaneous land attack
on the American fort.

The doomed Canadian ships, under the dauntless young Captain
Downie, sailed into the ambush prepared by the American Com-
modore Macdonough, who soon proved himself as able as Perry.
Prevost made no move on shore. For two hours the fleets fought at
close quarters until one Canadian ship ran aground, another drifted
helplessly into the American line. It was shot down like a sitting
duck, seven of the eleven gunboats scurried away, and Downie
hauled down the flag of his sinking Confiance, Watching this dis-
aster calmly from the shore, Prevost gave his only comprehensible
order of the day. He ordered his idle army to eat its dinner. On
second thoughts, he ordered a general retreat.

The Americans had seen their capital burned, had lost the north-
ern coast of Maine, could not seriously dent the Canadian lifeline
but at least had blocked the Champlain invasion route. Cooler minds
in Washington had realized the futility of the war as early as the
previous winter, after two profitless campaigns. An offer of media-
tion by the Czar of Russia was quickly accepted by Madison in the
autumn of 1813. Britain rejected outside intervention but was ready
to negotiate direct with the Americans. Madison grasped this
chance. The negotiations began early in 1814, while more men died
uselessly on both sides, and were completed by the Treaty of Ghent
on Christmas Eve, a fortnight before General Jackson routed the
British attack on New Orleans.

Again, like that of 1783, the peace, as a French wit remarked, was
the peace that passeth understanding. Britain had predominant
bargaining power. It held Canada. It had bottled up the Atlantic.
It had strangled American trade. It had occupied the northern
coast of Maine. It had burned Washington as a crude reminder of
its power. And as soon as it finished with Napoleon it could bring its

254 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BOKDEE

victorious armies to America. Yet Britain refused to use its power,
It left everything along the Canadian border in status quo, giving
American diplomacy its second great victory.

This had not been Britain's original intention. To rectify the
boundary mistakes of 1783, its secret plans included an Indian
buffer state south of the Great Lakes; British possession of all islands
in Passamaquoddy Bay; a "solid land connection" between New
Brunswick and Lower Canada, carved out of Maine; the cession of
a strip on the American side of the Niagara River; possession of
Mackinac, the key to Lake Michigan and the far West; a border
westward straight from the Lake of the Woods to the Mississippi;
in the far West a border giving Britain possession of the Columbia
and the Oregon country; and finally the prohibition of American
fishing and curing on the shores of the Canadian Atlantic
colonies.

In three respects that plan was quite impossible. The United
States might have been defeated in the war (though defeat was
never admitted) but it would fight again to hold the Niagara line
and Mackinac or to prevent the surrender of the Ohio country west
of the Wabash to the Indians.

Why Britain dropped these and all its other demands has never
been explained, So far as the North American boundary was con-
cerned, the operations of British diplomacy had always been past
understanding, Anyway, the more Britain's position improved in
Europe and America the more it diluted its terms of peace with
the Americans, whose amateur negotiators, as usual, outguessed
and outmaneuvered the professionals of London. In the result it
might almost be said, contrary to the later legend, that the United
States had lost a war and won a conference.

Britain wanted no more trouble with its rebellious child, the
American Republic, and was influenced by the belief that any small
advantage wrung from it by bargaining would cost too high a price
in American resentment. That calculation does not fully account
for the diplomatic defeat of Ghent. It was due mainly to the Duke
of Wellington's sudden intervention, in November, 1814.

The great soldier, who was to prove such a failure in politics,
solemnly advised the British government, at the critical moment,
that it had no leg to stand on by the honorable traditions of wan
To his soldierly mind the thing was simple and obvious— Britain
had not conquered any of the enemy's territory (he forgot the occu-
pation of northern Maine) and had been unable even to clear all
the Americans out of the Lake Erie region. Therefore, Britain could
not demand the cession of any American territory. If Britain wished

THE MAN IN SCAJULET 255

to change the prewar boundary then, in the inflexible code of the
Iron Duke, it must be prepared to carry the war to final victory.

No one in London had any stomach for that solution. If the Duke
said so, all Britain's claims must be surrendered, and they were.

The war had begun ostensibly because the Republic would not
tolerate the seizure of its ships and seamen, because it demanded
freedom of the seas and the right to fish off the Canadian coast,
and also because the American West intended to possess Canada.
No word about these causes of the war was included in the peace
treaty that ended it. The status quo was left undisturbed in every
particular. The Americans might conveniently forget their lost
causes. Canada would never forget its victory.

Actually the Treaty of Ghent was an armistice and the details of
peace were worked out in various subsequent agreements.

Most notable of these, a new experiment in human affairs and
the beginning of permanent peace on the border, was the Rush-
Bagot agreement of 1817, by which the Great Lakes system was
disarmed. Each nation was allowed four naval vessels of 100 tons
on Lakes Champlain and Ontario, and two on the upper lakes. No
mention was made of forts, but they were soon dismantled or turned
into historical museums. Thus ended the long contest of the St.
Lawrence Valley, begun with Champlain's fateful raid on the Iro-
quois. However, the Rush-Bagot agreement, one of humanity's
most hopeful documents, should not be attributed to idealism on
either side. Britain knew that the United States could always main-
tain superior naval forces on the Lakes. The Americans knew that
disarmament would save them much unnecessary expense, now that
they had abandoned the conquest of Canada.

When Britain withdrew its demand for a change in the boundary,
the old line of the 49th Parallel, from the Lake of the Woods to the
Rockies, was accepted, in 1818, as final. Britain also withdrew its
claim for the right to navigate the Mississippi. The Americans lost
the right to fish and cure along the Nova Scotia coast but, as a
generous compromise, were allowed to use certain other Atlantic
shores. This vague arrangement was to trouble the relations be-
tween Canada and its neighbor for nearly a hundred years.

More troublesome and far more important was the boundary in
the far West, left unsettled because agreement was impossible.
Astor s fur company had sold Astoria to the North West Company,
knowing that it would probably be captured in the war, and the
defenseless little trading post was occupied by a British naval de-
tachment As a result, said the American government, Astoria fell
under the provisions of the Ghent Treaty and must be returned to

256 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

its former owners along with all other occupied territory. An Amer-
ican expedition ceremoniously reoccupied it.

That piece of logic was too much for even Britain to swallow.
Since Britain refused to accept the boundary of the 49th Parallel
west o£ the Rockies and claimed the Columbia, since the United
States refused to give up the claims established by Gray, Lewis and
Clark, the whole undefined area called Oregon was to be occupied
jointly for ten years, beginning in 1818.

Canadian fur traders, now reinstalled at Astoria, perhaps guessed
the end of the dispute. The United States had discovered the Co-
lumbia mouth; it had sent Lewis and Clark overland to the Pacific;
it intended to own everything south of Fuca's strait, especially the
valuable harbors of Puget Sound, and in due time would have the
power to enforce its claims. The practical question was whether
Canada could hold its neighbor south of Eraser's newly discovered
river, whether it could remain on the Pacific coast at all

What had the United States gained by three years of promenad-
ing? Albert Gallatin, the brilliant Swiss immigrant boy, who was
now secretary of the treasury, answered that "The war has renewed
the national feelings and character which the Revolution had given
and which were daily lessening. The people are now more Amer-
ican. They feel and act more as a nation. And I hope the perma-
nency of the Union is thereby secured." Anyway, the American
people's eyes were turned from Europe to their own West, A vigor-
ous new nationalism and the long illusion of possible isolation from
Europe's quarrels had begun.

Canada felt the same centripetal forces. It had been sucked into
the war by extraneous affairs on the Atlantic as a loose and sprawl-
ing group of colonies, with only half a million people and fearful
that the French Canadians would not fight. It had fought in unity,
both races cheerfully sharing the cost in money and blood. Against
a nation sixteen times as numerous it had held its border. It could
not have stood alone without the support of British sea power, Brit-
ish regulars, and British generals like Brock and Drunimond; but
without a united people, without the Secords, Tecumsehs, and the
nameless farm boys who had swarmed up Queenston Heights,
reeled through the hot summer night of Lundy's Lane, and beaten
the Americans at Chateauguay, Canada certainly would have been
conquered. That it was not conquered, against the existing odds, is
one of the miracles of war in America, half due to the fury of an
invaded people and half to the follies and divisions of the invaders.
No people could go through such a trial and ever forget it

Who Bad won the war? The history books of Canada and the

THE MAN IN SCABLEf 257

United States would long give opposite versions. Canadians would
think of Queenston Heights, a minor skirmish, as a great battle.
Americans would exaggerate the naval fight of Put in Bay into
something like a second Trafalgar. But so far as Canada was con-
cerned there could be no doubt about the victory. Canada had
survived the full power of the United States, and survival was a
victory almost unimaginable in military calculation, certainly un-
imagined by the American statesmen who launched the war.

Military calculation and legal boundaries could not begin to
reckon the deeper results among the Canadian people. In the dis-
ordered lines of battle the lineaments of a new creature, the Cana-
dian, neither British nor French, had first appeared in America— a
young face yet, blurred in infancy, indistinguishable to foreigners
but slowly setting into harder lines. The original lines, which would
change, were lines of hatred. Canadians had hated republicanism
in the Revolution. After invasion of their soil they hated Americans.
And obviously, if they were to resist an American nation, they must
create one of their own.

It would take them another half century to write a constitution
but in the War of 1812 they had discovered the essential contents
of a nation. Those contents, little noted at the time, had been sup-
plied by the Americans in the first place through the Revolution,
the Loyalist migrations, the attack on Quebec. Now they had been
revealed to all Canadians by the same unwitting instructor. Nothing
henceforth could suppress them.

The boundary fixed at Ghent might be unfair to Canada, yet after
this final test of war it was a durable boundary because the Amer-
icans at last had accepted it— accepted it dimly, still without under-
standing the fact that Canadians were determined to be Canadian.
In what was truly Canada's war of liberation— though not the libera-
tion planned by its neighbor— North America had been permanently
divided, continentalism had died, and after two hundred years of
ceaseless bloodshed a unique experiment in peaceful neighborly
relations had begun.

Brock died young, by a casual bullet, on a little hill beside the
Niagara. He left the kind of myth on which all nations are built.

17

Emperor and King

[1811-1824]

THOMAS DOUGLAS, FIFTH EARL OF SELKIRK, WAS EXPOSED WHILE
young to dangerous notions of romance, which must finally
destroy him.

In 1778, when he was seven years old, his father's manor house
on St. Mary's Isle, off the west coast of Scotland, was invaded by a
privateersman of the American Revolution and already the scourge
of the north Atlantic. John Paul Jones, also a native Scot, planned
to abduct the elder Selkirk as a prize of war. According to local
gossips, Jones also had personal reasons for this visit, believed him-
self to be the Scottish nobleman's natural son, and was determined
to establish his parentage. Unfortunately the intended victim was
absent from home at the time and Jones's crew had to satisfy
themselves with a few bags of household plate. Jones later returned
the loot to its owners and did not trouble them again. But young
Thomas Douglas never forgot his first distant brush with the New
World.

A few years afterward he listened to Robert Burns, enlivened
with hot toddy, shout Highland poems around the family fireplace,
among them "Scots wha hae wf Wallace bled," composed in a
thunder storm the previous night. At college Douglas became a
fast friend of Walter Scott and an admirer of radical economists like
the retired Adam Smith. When he entered the world and assumed
the title Selkirk he was a youth with reddish locks, long, ascetic
face, and heavy-lidded eyes— a romantic, a radical, and an empire
builder.

St. Mary's Isle lay a long way from the West and the quarrels
of the American border. Yet Selkirk had fallen in love vicariously
with the New World on reading the voyages of his fellow country-
man, Alexander Mackenzie. He had drunk deep in the annual was-
sail of the Beaver Club at Montreal, eaten bear, venison and buffalo

258

EMPEROK AND KING 259

tongue and, wielding a poker like a paddle, had knelt on the floor
with the tipsy partners of the North West Company to perform the
sacred canoe ritual to the chorus of a voyageurs song. From then
on the young Earl's life had only one purpose. He must colonize
the Canadian West with the destitute Scottish crofters who lately
had been driven from their farms by greedy landlords.

If his soul was filled with romance, charity, and such stuff as
dreams are made of, Selkirk had a Scottish gift for business. To
support his western settlement he quietly bought in a third of the
Hudson's Bay Company's depressed stock at bargain prices. As
part of the deal the company granted him for ten shillings an area
of 116,000 square miles, stretching from Lake Winnipeg south across
the 49th Parallel to the headwaters of the Mississippi, and from the
Lake of the Woods west to the forks of the Red and Assiniboine.

In 1811 he sent out his first three shiploads of some seventy set-
tlers. They were dumped that autumn on the west shore of Hudson
Bay, wintered there, fell to quarreling, and next spring toiled up
the Hayes River and Lake Winnipeg with bagpipes playing to end
their voyage, in August, 1812, on the muddy bank of the Red River,
hard by the North West Company's Fort Gibraltar. The war with
the United States was just beginning back east but it was no concern
of the Red River settlers, for they faced drought, frost, starvation,
and a local war of their own.

The hunger of two winters drove them south across the unmarked
border to hunt buffalo along the Pembina River. Twice the Nor'
Westers of Fort Gibraltar, fearing settlement as the destroyer of
the fur trade and essential pemmican, raided the settlement, which
answered with a single cannon and cut chain for bullets. The set-
tlers finally were driven at musket point into the northern wilderness
and all their belongings were burned behind them. Reinforced by
Selkirk's second contingent, they returned to build their own Fort
Douglas, to destroy Fort Gibraltar and use its stockade to make
their houses.

After four years of misery and terror, they were reaping a rich
crop despite drought, cold, and locusts on the bottomless black
muck of the Red River valley. They had proved that wheat would
grow in the northern prairie; they had begun, with a few plowed
acres, to convert a buffalo pasture into an unbroken farm between
the Lakes and the Rockies; they had placed the first stable speck of
Canadian population on the empty western border.

But Canada's feeble little thrust into the Red River valley moved
far outside the huge tide of American settlement, now pouring west
over the broken dike of Louisiana. Happily for Canada, after the
War of 1812, this mighty current did not turn north. It headed
straight west and would never stop until it reached the Pacific.

260 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BOBDER

By 1820 two and a half million land-hungry Americans, a quarter
of the Republic's population had settled beyond the Alleghenies.
Gripped by "Ohio fever/' the farmers and townsmen of the Eastern
states still loaded their wagons, piled their goods and cattle on
leaky riverboats and crazy rafts, rowed through the mountains,
swarmed across the plains, and overnight destroyed the old power
balance of the nation.

It was now a nation of three distinct and hostile segments— the
manufacturing North, where Eli Whitney had invented the cotton
gin and discovered mass production in making muskets for the re-
cent war; the South of cotton, soil depletion, and slavery; the West
of free men in debt to the Eastern banks, discontented, seething
with political radicalism and soon to produce the only American
who could save the divided Union.

Already the original Union bora at Philadelphia had become a
museum piece and belonged to the ages.

The South had mortgaged its economic future to Negro labor
and intended to spread its peculiar institution into the virgin West.

In the North the industrial revolution, with its thin upper crust
of newly rich manufacturers, its city slums, its women and children
toiling in the mills, was a travesty of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit
of Happiness as Jefferson conceived them. His dream of a society
controlled by enlightened farmers was sinking into his nightmare of
an urban proletariat. Hamilton's opposite theory of centralized
government by the wise, the rich, and the good was in the saddle,
but it too was challenged and terrified by the growing frontier pop-
ulation and dangerous egalitarian instincts of the West. And the
issue of slavery challenged the existence of the Union itself while
a gangling backwoods boy named Lincoln, who would test whether
such a union could long endure, was helping his shiftless father to
hack down the forest of Indiana.

Thus the War of 1812 was hardly finished before Canada faced
a gigantic new neighbor, appalling in his energy, ambition, and
wealth. He had joined the old lands and the new by carving the
Erie Canal from Lake Erie to the Hudson; he was shuttling farm
stuffs eastward and manufactures westward, spawning the metrop-
olis of New York, assaulting the nostrils of Old Man River with the
smoke of steamboats, soon laying roads of steel, and everywhere
bursting in ceaseless explosion through all the known boundaries
of human experience.

He was too busy with his own affairs to burst the political bound-
ary of the 49th Parallel However, in 1823 the Republic had pro-
claimed the Monroe Doctrine (an Americanized British invention,
backed by the implicit power of the British Navy) and forbidden

EMPEROR AND KING 261

European nations to colonize the Western Hemisphere, but the
doctrine apparently did not compel the Canadian colonies to break
their ties with Britain. The next year produced Henry Clay's Ameri-
can system of protective tariffs and economic self -containment, the
organ voice of Daniel Webster fulminating against the "Tariff
Abomination" and defending it with equal eloquence four years
later. This restraint on trade across the border hardly touched
Canada yet because its markets, protected by tariff preference and
Navigation Acts, still lay in Britain, the American system, never-
theless, was the beginning of a tariff struggle on the North American
boundary still under way in the middle of the twentieth century.

Finally, when the election of 1828 swept a lank and grizzled West-
erner into the White House and even the Old Hickory of Jackson
was almost crushed to suffocation in the inaugural reception, to be
rescued from thirsty admirers through a broken window, the United
States had taken on the third dimension of the West, along with a
new version of Jefferson's democracy. So far Canada remained
three minute and seemingly static blobs of settlement beside the
Atlantic coast, the St. Lawrence, and the Red River.

That appearance was deceptive. The Canadians had begun to
create a character quite different from their neighbor's; they did
not seethe so easily; they were little given to slogans, processions,
and written constitutions; they would never tolerate a flamboyant
leader like Jackson and, for the most part, were content to lead a
quiet life. They were not as quiet as they looked beside the restless
Americans. Rebellion was brewing on the St. Lawence. Civil war
of a sort had broken out on the Red River.

In the summer of 1816 the North West Company, unable to dis-
lodge Selkirk's settlers by bribery or threat, meditated a crushing
act of terrorism. Who actually planned it, who was responsible for
its bloody outcome, will never be known. All that the Red River
farmers knew on June 19 was that a band of about seventy half-
breeds, French Canadians, and Indians decked out in feathers and
war paint was riding toward the Red River from the west. The
partners of the North West Company had discreetly absented them-
selves and left the job of butchery in the willing hands of Cuthbert
Grant, a half-breed of "great nerve and resolution" but addicted
(said the leading diarist of the day) to "ardent spirits and thinks
nothing of a Bottle of Rum at a Sitting/'

About five o'clock in the afternoon a boy stationed on the bastion
of Fort Douglas saw Grant's party moving across the prairies. Gov-
ernor Robert Semple recklessly led twenty men out of his fort and
stood waiting in a grove called Seven Oaks.

The horsemen quickly surrounded the helpless settlers, who tried

262 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

to surrender and begged for mercy. They were shot down in a
single volley. As the killers closed in they found only six of the
settlers alive, among them Semple, his hip shattered. Grant prom-
ised him protection but a moment later an Indian shot him to death.

Eleven more men hastened from the fort to the rescue of their
comrades. They too were massacred. Grant counted twenty-three
bodies in the grove of Seven Oaks and he had lost only one man
killed and one wounded.

By his order— signed as a representative of the North West Com-
pany—the whole Red River settlement was to be abandoned. The
settlers were herded into flatboats and headed down the Red River
to the bay. Grant's half-breeds at Fort Douglas stripped naked to
celebrate their triumph with a memorable orgy.

The Nor' Westers had underestimated the romantic young Earl
from St. Mary's Isle. He had been warned in advance and was now
moving west from Montreal with about a hundred veterans of the
recent war, well trained and armed, to save his colony.

It was not until this expedition reached Lake Superior in July
that Selkirk learned from a fleeing survivor the news of the mas-
sacre. Heartbroken and furious, he and his little army swept down
on Fort William, the Nor' Westers' headquarters, seized it without
a blow, arrested nine of the company's partners, charged them with
complicity in the Seven Oaks murders, and sent them eastward
under guard for trial in York.

Selkirk moved westward in the spring. His men scaled the walls
of Fort Douglas in the night and announced the restoration of the
colony. The settlers, who had wintered north of Lake Winnipeg,
returned to receive the welcome of Selkirk in person. He had saved
Canada's only western settlement. He had ruined himself.

In arresting nine North West Company partners at Fort William,
he had not been dealing with half-breed assassins like Cuthbert
Grant. His prisoners were some of the most powerful men in Canada
and included the great explorer, Simon Fraser, William McGillivray,
the Montreal capitalist, and a younger, unknown man, John
McLoughlin, not to be unknown much longer.

The prisoners started eastward in three canoes. Storm overtook
them in Whitefish Bay, one canoe foundered, nine men, but none
of the partners, were drowned, and McLoughlin was dragged, half
dead, from the water. Selkirk must pay high for this accident.

After seeing his colony set to rights, he paddled back to York at
leisure, confident that the courts of Canada would confirm his acts
of Justice and punish his enemies. Instead, he found himself indicted
for the seizure of Fort William and fined £2,000. All his charges
against the Nor' Westers were dismissed. His fortune melting in

EMPEROR AND KING 263

the lawyers' bills of endless litigation, his spirit and health ex-
hausted, the romantic hopes of his youth broken by the reality of
the frontier, he died in Europe two years later, hardly realizing
that the plows of his Red River colony, in lengthening furrows
along the border, had opened to Canada the granary of the western
plains.

McLoughlin meanwhile had survived the icy waters of Lake
Superior and begun a fabulous career. It would lead him to the
Pacific coast, to the ultimate boundary struggle with the United
States, to dictatorship, feud, violence and Christian charity, even-
tually to American citizenship.

This unique and apocalyptic creature had been born at Riviere
du Loup, Quebec, in 1874. His father, a bush farmer of mixed
French-Canadian, Irish and Scottish blood, was of little account,
but the boy's rich maternal relations educated him. He emerged
from a sketchy two-year course in medicine as a giant of six feet
four inches, with a mane of black hair falling to his shoulders, a face
already hardening into the graven lines of an Old Testament
prophet, and a lust for the wilderness.

The young doctor joined the North West Company, was soon one
of its chief traders, and having fathered a son by some Indian
woman, married a pretty half-breed lady, widow of Alexander
McKay, who had accompanied Mackenzie to the Pacific and been
murdered by the Indians of Vancouver Island.

The escape from drowning as Selkirk's prisoner did not satisfy
the honor of McLoughlin. He set out immediately after the accident
for York Factory, where he demanded trial on Selkirk's baseless
charge of murder at Seven Oaks. The jury promptly acquitted him.
He was ready for the incredible work of his life.

The long fur war, culminating in Grant's massacre, had brought
the Hudson's Bay and North West Companies close to bankruptcy.
Both were ready for peace. In the London negotiations leading to
their merger of 1821 McLoughlin was one of the chief negotiators.
He proved himself a subtle politician, a tough bargainer, and a
gaudy figure in black clerical tailcoat, a gold-headed cane in his
hand, the wild mane of hair now almost white.

The enlarged Hudson's Bay Company was the legal government
of an empire rolling from the Red River to the mouth of the Colum-
bia. Its own inner government had become a complex hierarchy of
Hudson's Bay men and Nor' Westers. Its Little Emperor, as all men
called him, was George Simpson, and his like had never been seen
before in the fur trade of America.

Born a bastard in Scotland, this systematic, cunning, and potent
man, with his barrel-shaped body, his shiny, cannon-ball head and

264 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDEfi

round, florid face, had quickly elbowed his way through life and
risen in the Hudson's Bay Company solely by his own merit. Few
men, if any, had ever traveled so far, back and forth across America,
or at such speed. He moved with an emperor's procession of singing
voyageurs, kilted Highland pipers, feasts, balls, rousing orations,
and secret conferences at every post from Montreal to Astoria.

The fur trade had found in him a strategist, fighter, diplomat, and
general manager. He knew the smallest detail of its business, could
stand any hardship on the trail, was at home in a London drawing
room or an Indian camp. Business, profit, and power were his life
but in his ceaseless wanderings he found time to beget unnumbered
half-breed bastards, whose mothers he always supported generously
and ordered his colleagues to do the same for their casual offspring.
He was not only an autocrat, businessman, and amorist, he was also
a penetrating historian, though a pompous and clumsy writer. Every
night, by campfire or the candle of some remote post, he scrupu-
lously recorded the day's events in a minute diary. His frank and
canny opinion of every company official was locked away in a
secret box. For double secrecy no name was attached to any of
these dossiers but each was numbered by the writer's private code
for future reference.

Thus Simpson, after his first meeting with McLoughlin on the
western trail: "He was such a figure as I should not like to meet on
a dark night in one of the bye lanes in the neighborhood of London,
dressed in clothes that had once been fashionable, but now covered
with a thousand patches of different colors, his beard would do
honour to the chin of a Grizzly Bear, his face and hands evidently
show that he had not lost much time at his Toilette, loaded with
Arms and his own herculean dimensions forming a tout ensemble
that would convey a good idea of the highwaymen of former Days
. . . Wanting in system and regularity but a man of strict honour
and integrity . . . ungovernable violent temper and turbulent dis-
position."

In Simpson and McLoughlin two primitive and irreconcilable
forces had met. The whole American West was not large enough to
contain them both. In the beginning, however, they got along well
enough, each measuring the strength and doubting the purposes of
the other.

Simpson picked McLoughlin for the key post of Astoria, now
renamed Fort George, and instructed him to hold Oregon, at least
north of the Columbia, for the Empire. McLoughlin started west as
fast as his voyageurs could paddle him. Simpson was to follow some
weeks later from York Factory and, to demonstrate the superior

EMPEROR AND KING 265

speed of the Emperor, overtook his lieutenant by racing from the
shores of Hudson Bay to the Columbia in eighty-four days, a new
transcontinental speed record.

In 1824 the two men, so far friendly but hastening to inevitable
quarrel, wintered on the Pacific and in their lonely fur post discussed
the chance of repelling the tide of American settlement. It was
hardly a trickle yet. Only a few independent fur traders had ven-
tured into Oregon but they could be bought off or driven out by cut-
throat competition among the Indians. Still, Simpson, the practical
man of business, was not deceived. He knew what was coming and
wrote his opinion in the locked diary (meanwhile gallantly resisting
the efforts of the Indian Princess Chowie to bribe him into marriage
with a dowry of a hundred beaver skins ) .

The principal western depot of his company, Simpson noted,
"should be situated North of this place, about Two or Three De-
grees, at the mouth of Eraser's River." Such a post might hold the
international boundary at or near that river, if Oregon was lost to
the Americans, and it could launch Simpson's favorite project of
transpacific trade with the fur markets of China.

That suggestion of a more northern fort was only a shot in the
dark then, but a sure shot. As Simpson surmised, the Fraser, not the
Columbia, was the river of Canadian destiny, and it contained more
in gold, adventure, and politics than he or any man could guess.
McLoughlin at once opposed the projected second line of defense.
Oregon, he said, was the supreme prize and Oregon must be held.

Simpson told him to hold it if he could. The fort of Astoria,
accordingly, was moved to a better site, ninety miles up the Colum-
bia. Simpson raised the Union Jack, broke a bottle of rum on the
flagpole and named the new post Vancouver, as a gesture of British
power, after the captain who had wrongly claimed the river's dis-
covery. Then the Emperor started eastward. To him Fort Vancouver
was a brief stopping place in his perpetual roamings, a depot of
trade and a doubtful gamble in international power. To McLoughlin
it was the New Jerusalem.

He was now installed under the Emperor as king of a kingdom
lying between the Rockies and the sea, from Russian Alaska to
Spanish California— the last king in America and perhaps the most
successful. His court was a massive banquet hall where no woman
was ever allowed to enter; his attendants Scottish pipers playing
behind the throne; his subjects a handful of traders and 80,000
Indians; his methods Spartan discipline mixed with devout religion
and prodigal generosity to everyone. But no kingdom could long
resist the western thrust of the Republic.

18

Creatures Large and Tiny

[1837-1898]

AMVING AT YORK AS LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR IN 1806, SIR FRANCIS
Gore, a retired British cavalryman with a wealth of ignorance
and prejudice, announced that "I have had the King's interest
only at Heart, and I have and ever will contend against Democratic
Principles." He would never learn that he was contending against
the nature of North America. Least of all could he discern the
approaching shape of rebellion. Americans had challenged Britain's
hold on empty Oregon. Its hold on the settled St. Lawrence Valley
was now to be challenged by Canadians.

What Gore, the British government, and its agents in Canada
failed to see was an obvious and inescapable fact—that the Canadian
people were North Americans and not transplanted Englishmen or
Frenchmen. The French Canadians had been North Americans and
nothing else for two hundred years. The Loyalists who fled the
American Revolution were Americans also. For the most part their
people had spent several generations in the New World. The subse-
quent immigrants to Canada were either citizens of the American
Republic or Britons who soon took on the local coloration, the
thoughtways and the democratic habits of the frontier.

All this Britain could not understand and could not be made to
understand short of rebellion. It had erected in Canada Pitf s per-
fect counterpart of the British Constitution but that was a fraud.
The British people, though few of them yet voted, were represented
by a Parliament which could make and unmake governments and
had unmade two Stuart kings. The Canadian colonies were governed
by the governors sent out from London, by executive councils, and
by appointed legislative councils which had power to veto the
legislation of the elected assemblies.

There was no room under the Canadian Constitution for Gore's

266

CREATURES LARGE AND TINY 267

nightmare of democratic principles and no chance— or so Britain
thought— for a second republican eruption in America.

In the soil of this cozy system there soon flourished at Quebec a
"Chateau Clique" and an "Aristocracy of Shopkeepers/' at York a
tight-knit group of court sycophants, salaried officials, land jobbers,
privileged gentry, and political heelers called the Family Compact.
Family and breeding had little to do with membership, but govern-
ment certainly was compact. Inevitably it produced a counter-
pressure in a Reform movement. Driven too far, it could become a
movement of revolution.

This counterpressure was nearing the explosion point by the first
decade of the nineteenth century.

In the York Assembly the elected Reformers were discovering
irregularities in the public accounts.

William Weeks, an Irishman, who had learned law in the New
York office of Aaron Burr and, moving to Canada, had become one
of the founders of the Reform Party, challenged William Dickson, a
kept lawyer of the Family Compact, to a duel after a courtroom
argument and was shot to death in this affair of honor on the
American side of the Niagara River.

Bartimus Ferguson, another Reformer, dared to criticize the Gov-
ernor and was put in stocks daily for a month.

Robert Gourlay suggested that the Family Compact, for all its
devotion to the crown, had learned to turn a pretty penny in land
graft. He was promptly jailed.

John Gait, a Scottish poet who was patriotically promoting the
immigration of his countrymen to Upper Canada, called York "one
of the worst blue-devil haunts on the face of the earth."

The authentic face of rebellion appeared first in a Dundee draper
and amateur journalist, William Lyon Mackenzie. He would be the
Sam Adams of a revolution lacking a Washington and apparently
a comic failure, yet powerful enough to revolutionize the British
Empire.

Mackenzie was a squat and crabbed man with bulging forehead,
a cadaverous face, a bristling fringe of white side whisker, and a
burning, fanatic eye. The new Lieutenant Governor, Sir Francis
Bond Head, recorded his impression of the Canadian agitator with
British condescension: "Afraid to look me in the face, he sat, with
his feet not reaching the ground, and with his countenance averted
from me, at an angle of about seventy degrees; while, with the
eccentricity, the volubility and indeed the appearance of a madman,
the Tiny Creature raved about grievances here and grievances
there.'1"

It was impossible for a man like Head to understand a man like

268 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

Mackenzie. "You see," the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, had
once remarked to Head over his shaving mug, "you're such a
damned odd fellow!" The gossips of London said, indeed, that Head
had been appointed governor by mistake for another man of the
same name, but doubtless he would do to govern Canada. In the
Damned Odd Fellow and the Tiny Creature were posed again those
fundamental forces of Old World and New that had exploded in
the American Revolution.

Elected to the York Assembly, hurled out by the scruff of the neck
and frequently re-elected, Mackenzie soon made himself the leader
of reform and, after its constant rejection, began to meditate
rebellion.

A loyalist mob threw the press of his newspaper, the Colonial
Advocate, into Lake Ontario for publishing such phrases as "Not
to gain the wealth of the Indies would I now cringe to the funguses
I have beheld in this country, more pestilential in the Town of
York than the marshes and quagmires with which it is environed."

Mackenzie sued for damages, was awarded £625, and continued,
as a popular hero, to distill his corroding editorials. The Family
Compact revenged itself by tearing down the first fourteen feet of
Brock's hideous new monument on Queenston Heights because it
contained in its cornerstone, among other papers, some issues of the
Colonial Advocate.

The Tiny Creature had his own political machine, meeting at
Elliott's Tavern and, more secretly, in John Doel's brewery where,
on July 31, 1837, was issued the Canadian version of the Declaration
of Independence, somewhat awkwardly modeled on the original.
It declared that "Government is founded on the authority, and is
instituted for the benefit of a people; when, therefore, any Govern-
ment long and systematically ceases to answer the great ends of its
foundation, the people have a natural right given them by their
Creator to seek after and establish such institutions as will yield
the greatest quantity of happiness to the greatest number."

Here the latest doctrines of Bentham were united with Locke's
Natural Rights. Mackenzie proposed to combine them in a new
republic north of the St. Lawrence.

In every speech he grow bolder and presently was asking: "Is
then the country under the control of a lawless band of sworn
villains? If so, the citizens will have to form not only political unions
but armed associations for mutual self-defence ... Sir Francis
may find that an opinion is gaining ground that deeds are doing
among us, which will have to be answered by an appeal to cold
steel"

CREATURES LARGE AND TINY 269

Loyalists broke up his meetings but they could not stop Mackenzie
and the Patriots. They were drilling in the forest by night, learning
to shoot at wild pigeons, forging pikes at village smithies, organiz-
ing in companies with secret passwords. They had drafted a consti-
tution for an independent Canadian state, in strict imitation of the
Philadelphia document. And if they decided to strike with cold
steel, to destroy British government in Canada and establish their
republic, they must certainly involve the great Republic across the
river.

Mackenzie's Patriots worked in collaboration with the Patriotes
of Lower Canada. The French Canadians also had thrown up a
leader in Louis Joseph Papineau who, though himself a grand
seigneur, had embraced in rather dilettante fashion, the democracy
of the United States. This confused man-regal in stature, superbly
handsome, with noble Gallic face and plume of curling hair-had
the natural orator's mortal defect. He could rouse himself and the
people, He never knew for what purpose. The moment of crisis must
leave him impotent.

In any case there was no base for rebellion. As in 1775, the church
stood solidly with the government. The habitants might be tem-
porarily hypnotized by the great orator but few of these well-
disciplined folk, unshaken by war, conquest, and every kind of
disaster, could be persuaded to attack established authority. Rebel-
lion, if it came, must be only a superficial disturbance on the deep
current of Quebec's feudal history, a passing aberration in its nature.

Outwardly, however, the agitation in French Canada resembled
more closely than Mackenzie's the theories and tactics of the Ameri-
can Revolution, though few French Canadians admired or Bunder-
stood it. The Patriotes called themselves "Fils de la Liberte* after
the American "Sons of Liberty." They even tried to revive the old
American economic weapon by refusing to wear British cloth and
their leaders appeared before the Assembly dressed in outlandish,
bulging garments of Quebec etoffe du pays.

Papineau, a master of parliamentary maneuver, was not so much
concerned as Mackenzie with man's economic rights but he burned
with political rights, he blockaded the Governor's legislation and
money appropriations in the Assembly, he brought government
almost to a standstill, with matchless eloquence he paraded the
ghosts of the Conquest and, on every village platform, he ignited
the French Canadians' old hatred of the English conquerors.

America's cruel depression of 1837 supplied the spark for^tihis
tinder. All the grievances of unemployment, poverty, and business
failure could now be blamed on the royal governors, whose govern-

270 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BOEDER

ments were soon close to bankruptcy. Mackenzie and Papineau,
euphoric in their sense o£ mob power, were carried beyond their
depth into what they seemed to consider a reproduction of the
American Revolution.

Even then Head was assuring the British government that the
Tiny Creature could do no harm. "First/* the Governor reported of
Mackenzie, 'lie wrote, and then he printed, and then he rode and
then he spoke, stamped, foamed, wiped his seditious little mouth
and then spoke again; and thus, like a squirrel in a cage, he contin-
ued with astonishing assiduity the centre of a revolutionary career."
But, said Head, there was no need to worry.

Unfortunately Head was a better writer than governor. In the
autumn he sent all the regular troops from York to Kingston, under
the impression that they might be needed by the Governor General,
Sir John Colborne, to suppress a rebellion in Lower Canada. Several
thousand rifles were left unprotected in the York City Hall. The
temptation thus provided was too much for Mackenzie. He sum-
moned his lieutenants to Doel's brewery and ordered the revolution.

Still the Damned Odd Fellow in Government House was un-
moved. He had been informed of Mackenzie's plans by James Hogg,
of Hogg's Hollow, one of Mackenzie's frightened followers, but
dismissed the warning with contempt. He did not "apprehend a
rebellion in Upper Canada."

This worst-managed of rebellions began almost accidentally on
November 6, when the loyal Doric Club drove a mob of Patriotes
through the streets of Montreal into the suburbs. Papineau fled and
the Governor General wrongly concluded that he would raise the
countryside. Warrants issued for the arrest of Papineau and his
lieutenants accomplished precisely this result.

The inhabitants of the Richelieu valley gathered in the villages of
St. Denis and St. Charles, planted Trees of Liberty, surmounted by
Liberty's cap, and swore their solemn oaths of freedom. A detach-
ment of Colborne's soldiers was met with rusty muskets at St. Denis
and driven off, but two days later the Governor's troops easily
captured St. Charles. Papineau, having roused the rebellion with
no clear purpose and no military plan, decamped hurriedly to the
United States. The skirmish of the Richelieu was finished.

A bolder rebel, J. O. Chenier, and a mysterious foreigner, Amaury
Girod, assembled five hundred followers in the village of St. Eus-
tache, eighteen miles northwest of Montreal, armed only with
muskets and alcohol, and casually awaited the soldiers' approach.
At Colborne's appearance with 2,000 soldiers, Girod fled and soon
blew his brains out. Gbenier and 200 villagers, locking themselves in

CREATURES LARGE AND TINY 271

the church, bravely withstood a brief siege until they were smoked
out, killed, or overwhelmed.

Unaware that the rebellion was collapsing in Lower Canada,
Mackenzie had altered the timetable of Doel's brewery to strike
simultaneously with Papineau.

December 5, the chosen day of freedom, found at Montgomery's
Tavern, four miles north of York, the most improbable army in the
history of revolution— some seven or eight hundred Patriots with
blunderbuss and pike, with banners demanding "Liberty or Death!";
the Tiny Creature mounted on a white farm horse in absurd imita-
tion of George Washington and shouting contradictory orders; his
lieutenants already quarreling and his followers bewildered, cold,
and hungry.

The attackers were hardly more frightened than the defenders.
At York the Damned Odd Fellow had been roused from his bed in
the middle of the night and now stood with double-barreled gun
in hand and three pistols stuffed in his belt, obediently drilling with
the Chief Justice and other leaders of the Family Compact under
the instructions of a nameless sergeant.

Thus at York the wavering front against the deep damnation of
Democratic Principles, the young Queen's imperial interests, and
the highly practical interests of the Compact in loyal combination
but unhappily without the soldiers, who had been sent where they
were least needed.

At Montgomery's Tavern the depressing news of the Patriotes'
defeat in the Richelieu country— counsels of caution— scared Patriots
proposing to go home— the only soldier among them, Anthony
Anderson, dead in a chance skirmish with a loyalist— Mackenzie,
half crazy by now, declaring that it was too late to turn back, offer-
ing to lead the attack himself, mounting his horse again, his meager
body lost in the folds of a vast overcoat, and finally giving the order
to advance.

Then a disorderly march down Yonge Street to Gallows Hill— a
pause to parley with government agents under a white flag— offer
of amnesty by the quaking Governor— contemptuous rejection by
Mackenzie— sudden hesitation among the rebels— refusal to advance
and, instead of Liberty or Death, demand for dinner. At which
Mackenzie's mind cracked and, says the diary of a participant, 'Tie
went on like a lunatic. Once or twice I thought he was going to
have a fit."

Such a fit now afflicted him. While rations were being served on
Gallows Hill, he leaped from his horse, rushed to a house beside
the road and set it afire with his own hands. The rabble gaped at

272 THE STRUGGLE FOB THE BOEDER

this lunacy and all confidence in their leader oozed out. They began
to stream back to Montgomery's Tavern.

If he could not fight, Mackenzie could talk. His raging eloquence
throughout the afternoon revived the rebellion. Again it was Liberty
or Death. At dusk the rebels marched upon the town. Then followed
one of the most comical and decisive moments in the record of the
British peoples.

Some thirty loyalists under Sheriff Jarvis stood guard by their
barricade on the town's outskirts. They fired at the approaching
mob and scampered off for their lives. The first rebels returned the
fire and dropped to the ground as they reloaded their muskets.
Whereupon the remainder, thinking all their comrades shot down,
turned and ran. Mackenzie on his horse was swept back in the wild
procession to Montgomery's Tavern.

Then more conferences, more quarrels, more oratory. To attack
again or await promised reinforcements from the Niagara country?
The next day passed in fruitless wrangle, speeches by Mackenzie,
reports from spies in York, shortages of food and ammunition, in-
creasing derangement

As the revolutionary capital of Montgomery's Tavern thus reeled
in oratory and doubt, Colonel James FitzGibbon, a veteran of
Brock's army, had managed to convert York into some semblance of
order. On December 7 he marched out of the town with 1,100 ill-
trained troops, to the music of two bands and the cheers of the
populace, the Governor urging him on but remaining discreetly in
the rear.

Two hundred rebels met the attack but, outnumbered and out-
flanked, quickly scattered. Soon cannon balls were ripping through
the frail walls of the tavern. Its occupants ran for the woods. The
rebellion had been crushed in fifteen minutes with only one man
killed, a rebel.

Now that all danger was past, the Governor took full charge,
offered pardons wholesale to his prisoners and then, changing his
mind, arrested them for treason and burned down the tavern to
"mark and record, by some act of stern vengeance, the important
victory." After burning down another house over FitzGibbon's pro-
test and turning a woman and four children into the road, Head
marched back to York with a flush of martial glory and the assurance
that the British Empire, in such hands as his, would go serenely on
its way. That was the one sure thing that could never happen.

Mackenzie had escaped from the tavern, horseless, hopeless, and
half naked. He scurried through Hogg's Hollow, waded the icy win-
ter streams, hid in frozen ditches while the Governor's soldiers

CREATURES LARGE AND TINY 273

passed a few feet away, slept in haystacks or found refuge in the
attics of his friends until he came at last to the Niagara River, dis-
guised as an old woman, with formidable growth of whisker. There
he found a boat and rowed to the American shore, followed by the
baffled shouts of his pursuers.

He had left behind eleven lieutenants to be executed for treason,
ninety-two to be exiled in Van Diemen's Land, and political conse-
quences past reckoning.

The Rebellion of 1837 was now ended, in the opinion of the
Damned Odd Fellow. His career at least was ended. The young
Queen Victoria, awakened a few months before to learn of her
ascension to the throne, saw her empire facing another quarrel in
America. Advised by Lord Melbourne, she did not propose to repeat
her grandfather's mistake.

Britain appointed a dictator to reform the whole government of
Canada and dismissed Bond Head, who thought it wise to retire to
England through the United States, garbed for safety as a valet
He was discovered sitting pensively on a wheelbarrow in an innyard
at Watertown, invited to breakfast by a whimsical band of refugee
Patriots, and sent on his way with cheers. With him went the Second
British Empire, begun at Yorktown and ended at York.

The events launched by the affair of Montgomery's Tavern would
take longer to settle than the affair of Lexington and would have
consequences hardly less important. The Rebellion had failed as a
military coup, partly because it had been bungled from the begin-
ning but mostly because a small minority of Canadians in Upper or
Lower Canada supported it As a political movement it would suc-
ceed beyond the imagination of Mackenzie, Bond Head, the British
government, or the interested spectators of the United States. The
Third British Empire— an empire by no recognizable definition-
would require more than a century of gestation, but it had been
conceived at the barricades of York and nothing could prevent its
birth.

At the beginning of this slow process the Rebellion almost caused
a third war between Britain and the United States.

Safe on the territory of the Republic and welcomed, at first, by
admiring American republicans, Mackenzie undertook at once to
foment this war. His snarling speeches, his prophetic look, his devo-
tion to American principles, his promise to make Canada a republic
or part of the United States soon gathered a band of some thousand
Canadian refugees and American sympathizers on Navy Island,
within the Canadian boundary on the Niagara River*

Here great plans for an invasion of Canada were hastily con-

274 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

certed. Mackenzie formed the provisional government of the new
republic, issued his own money and raised his own flag with the
two stars of Upper and Lower Canada. Americans smuggled mus-
kets out of the U.S. arsenal at Buffalo and produced a government
cannon "to shoot wild ducks."

The Canadian authorities, feeling unable to dislodge the mock
government of Navy Island, decided to cut off its sources of supply,
carried daily from the American shore by the little American steamer
Caroline. On the night of December 29 a Canadian party crossed
the river to reach the Caroline., then berthed at Schlosser. The raiders
leaped upon her decks and hurled her crew and passengers ashore.
One man was killed in the melee. The ship was sent in flames over
Niagara Falls.

An overt act of war had been committed against the United States.
An American citizen, Amos Durfee, had been killed. A Jefferson,
Madison, or Jackson might have reacted differently but the new
American President, Martin Van Buren, had no intention of embroil-
ing himself in a border quarrel when he was grappling, or refusing
to grapple, with a depression at home.

"Little Van" or the "Little Magician," as he was called, a person
of delicate features, luxuriant curls, and immaculate lawyer's lan-
guage—a piece of Dresden china after the Hickory of Jackson—had
assured the Americans, in his inaugural address, that they enjoyed
"an aggregate of human prosperity surely not elsewhere to be
found" and within two months the banking system came crashing
down around his ears. The unemployed laborers and bankrupt
farmers of the Atlantic coast swarmed westward for survival.

After eight years of abundant Jacksonian Democracy, the nation
was prostrate.

Van Buren could only advise the public, in neat lawyer's circum-
locutions, that it was no business of the government to interfere.
It was even whispered in Washington that he had departed so far
from the principles of his mentor as to buy gold spoons for the
White House.

If the Little Magician could not conjure with the enemy of Amer-
ican depression, he was determined at least to avoid a British enemy
across the St. Lawrence. He might be gratified to learn that Jack-
sonian Democracy had spread abroad through such men as Macken-
zie, but that also was no business of Van Buren's government Why
should it be concerned when the obvious course of American ex-
pansion lay in the Southwest, when Canada no longer was feared
as a British base of invasion, and when the immediate problem was
economic collapse?

CREATUBES LABGE AND TINY 275

Certainly some sensible Americans, in addition to the armed liber-
ators of Navy Island, were still talking of Manifest Destiny's future
advance to the North Pole. This, they thought, would come about
not by conquest but by the laws of geography and nature. No
European power—so the unanswerable logic went— could retain its
colonies in the New World for long. In due time, therefore, Canada
would detach itself from the Empire and fall, like a ripe plum, into
the waiting lap of its neighbor.

The first half of this proposition was true-Canada could not be
held as a British colony. The second half was wishful thinking. The
Americans did not imagine, nor did the Canadians, because the
thing was unimaginable, that there could be another kind of con-
nection between Britain and Canada in a new kind of empire
already conceived but yet to be brought forth.

Though the Caroline, in its flaming descent of Niagara Falls, had
lighted the border again, the liberators of Canada need expect no
help from Van Buren— or serious interference either. This renewal
of the old conflict, only twenty-four years after the War of 1812,
had gone far beyond the control of its instigator. Mackenzie's re-
public quickly decamped from Navy Island and later he was
arrested by the American government under its Neutrality Act.

The disillusioned rebel spent eleven months in jail at Rochester
and then, supporting himself by hack writing for the American
press, often saw his wife and family without food after he had sold
the gold medal presented to him by the Patriots of York.

His exile of itself symbolized the process now beginning to revolu-
tionize the Empire. In the United States his wife bore a daughter
who, some thirty years later, would bear a son named William Lyon
Mackenzie King, the future Prime Minister of a completely inde-
pendent Canada; and in the house of the rebel's grandson, dis-
played with pride, would always hang a copy of Bond Head's proc-
lamation offering a reward of £1,000 for Mackenzie's capture.

The rebel eventually returned to Canada, fully pardoned, was
elected to Parliament, and ended his days as a loyal subject of the
Queen. Meanwhile the fire he had lighted on the border was driv-
ing the Empire and Republic toward war.

War certainly would have resulted if Van Buren's government
had shared any of Jefferson's illusions about the nature of Canada,
if the old War Hawks had controlled the Congress, if the British
government had not been determined to save the peace at almost
any price, despite irritating provocations.

The United States could maintain a meticulous neutrality in the
troubles of its neighbor. Its neutral policy was supported by the

276 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

great majority of the nation. It could not control the border states.
They had never been reconciled to the Treaty of Ghent, still be-
lieved that Canadians desired liberation, and saw in Mackenzie's
Rebellion the proof of their theory.

Thus with the tacit connivance of state authorities and against
the mild protests of the Federal government, the border spawned a
network of secret societies, usually organized with Masonic ritual—
the Canadian Refugees Association, the Sons of Liberty, the Hunters
and Chasers of the Eastern Frontier—recruited among passionate
republicans, the unemployed, and some thrifty Americans who were
promised a cash bounty and a grant of land in a Canadian republic.
As always, patriotism, avarice, secrecy, and folly— folly most of all-
were linked in the latest assault against the boundary.

After a few minor raids out of Vermont and Detroit had been
easily repelled, the Hunters and Chasers, now supposed to number
50,000 secret members from Vermont to Michigan, and from Canada
to the Southern states, assembled in convention at Cleveland, in
September, 1838, to establish a republican government for Upper
Canada, to issue paper money, and to plan a new invasion in force.

The Van Buren government protested, the British minister at
Washington denounced the "vast hordes of banditti and assassins
maturing plans for the desolation and ruin of a British territory,"
General Winfield Scott was sent to the border, where he had learned
his first lesson under Brock's instructions at Queenston Heights, but
the state authorities winked at these preparations as two great
powers edged uncomfortably close to an open clash.

The untrained militia of Canada stood awkwardly to arms along
the St. Lawrence (among them a gawky youth who presently would
bestride Canada like a genial colossus). The Van Buren government
continued to protest. The statesmen of London warned their young
queen that she might inherit the war of her grandfather. General
Scott argued with the Northern state governors. Nevertheless, the
Hunters and Chasers were ready to strike in the late autumn.

They had massed about a thousand men at Ogdensburg, opposite
the Ontario village of Prescott, ready for the final coup which would
unite North America forever. On November 11, the steamer United
States moved quietly down the St. Lawrence from Oswego to
Ogdensburg, picking up at every stopping place knots of tough-
looking passengers and bales of heavy, clanking freight.

Like Mackenzie, the American liberators had botched eveiything.
When the United States headed for Prescott, no one apparently was
in command. A river pirate named Bill Johnston, styling himself
"Commodore of the Navy of the Canadian Republic," his belt

CREATUBES LARGE AND TINY 277

crammed with pistols and bowie knives, discovered at the last
moment that he was bound by his duty to remain with his "fleet."
John W. Birge, "General" of the invasion, finding his sword and
flashy uniform oppressive, retired to his cabin with a severe belly-
ache. But among those motley passengers there was one man ready
to offer his life for his illusions.

Nils Szoltevcky Von Schoultz, son of a distinguished Swedish
family long settled in Poland, had come to the United States with
dreams of freedom, had been attracted to the Hunters* cause and
assumed that Canadians suffered under an oppressive government
as did the serfs of Poland. He had embarked on the United States
with selfless motives and no notion of the plans under way. Sud-
denly dumped on the Canadian shore a few miles below Prescott,
he had found himself casually elected leader of an armed invasion.

This tall, swarthy, and gentle young man looked over a diminished
army of some two hundred as dazed as himself and then observed,
not far from the river, a stone windmill. He had little knowledge of
war but the windmill seemed to offer a possible fortress. He
quartered his followers within its sturdy walls. The defenders had
hardly aimed their muskets through the windows before a small
force of Canadian soldiers marched across the fields from Prescott.
Schoultz ordered his men to fire. They aimed so well that the at-
tackers were beaten off.

The Canadians reinforced themselves and began a systematic
siege. Their cannon balls bounded harmlessly off the windmill for
five days. The Americans fought bravely but their food had run
out, there was no ammunition for their single cannon and they
crammed it with nails, hinges, and buckles from their belts while
Schoultz waited vainly for the Hunters' promised reinforcements.
The United States had disappeared, the Canadian farmers failed to
rise against their oppressors, the windmill was surrounded and its
garrison mad with thirst. So Schoultz surrendered.

He and his men were herded upon a riverboat, carried to Kings-
ton, their arms roped together, and marched through the streets by
torchlight, among crowds of gawking townsmen.

One Canadian at least who witnessed that dismal march would
never forget it. A Kingston lawyer named John Alexander Mac-
donald, twenty-three years old and as yet unknown, watched the
tall, stoic figure of Schoultz, expressionless and unafraid, his shirt
torn from his back, his arms tied, his handsome head held high. As
an old man Macdonald, the first prime minister of Canada and its
defender against another invasion of this sort, could still remember
the face of Schoultz, serene in the torchlights of Kingston.

278 THE STRUGGLE FOB THE BORDER

A few mornings later Macdonald was roused from bed at his
boardinghouse. The American prisoners, now locked in Fort Henry,
could find no other lawyer willing to defend them. They had fallen
back upon the briefless youngster who had just been called to the
bar, had distinguished himself only by a courtroom fist fight with
a colleague and had never conducted an important case.

Macdonald had been born in Glasgow in 1815 and brought to
Canada, at the age of five, by his father, a Micawber with a weak-
ness for liquor and speculation. He had spent five years altogether
in school, had joined the Kingston militia, had stood guard, without
a chance to fire a shot, against Mackenzie's Rebellion and the ex-
pected American invasion, Though he was a loyalist, whose most
famous phrase would be "A British subject I was born, a British
subject I will die," he was also a lawyer, a man of generous heart,
and in his way, a genius.

In the tall, loose-jointed and half-clad figure summoned to the
door at dawn, in the gaunt, quizzical face and gigantic, bulbous
nose, there appeared that morning one of the great actors in the
long drama of the boundary. Yes, Macdonald would take the Amer-
ican prisoners' case and, taking it, was embarked on a tide which
would carry him and Canada to fortune.

The young lawyer dressed in his fashionable stovepipe hat, frock
coat, and checked trousers and hastened to Fort Henry. The case
of his clients, as he well knew, was indefensible. They had been
caught as invaders in the Prescott windmill and three of their com-
panions had turned queen's evidence against them. In a military
court-martial Macdonald could not even argue or examine witnesses,
He could only whisper questions and let the prisoners put them to
the court. Those questions showed the hard, practical qualities of
the ablest political mind produced by Canada in the nineteenth
century. The prosecution must prove that the prisoners had joined
with rebellious British subjects in making war on the Queen. The
point was narrow and technical, since no Canadians had joined
Schoultz at Prescott and he had been accompanied by only three
or four ex-Canadians from the United States. However, the charge
was soon established to the satisfaction of the court and two men
were condemned to hang.

Schoultz would not even employ Macdonald, insisted on pleading
guilty, awaited the verdict of death, and received it without a
change of expression. The gentle features of the doomed Swedish
immigrant, dying uncomplainingly for his illusions, were graven
deep in the memory of the young lawyer, and with them an abiding

CREATUBES LARGE AND TINY 279

distrust of Americans. Later that suspicion would alter the prospects
of the continent.

Schoultz, in his only statement to the court, scorned any defense
of his own crime against Canada. He spoke solely to deny, and with
convincing truth, that he had been responsible for the mutilation of
a dead Canadian at the Battle of the Windmill. His honor satisfied,
he asked Macdonald to prepare his will. It bequeathed his money
to the new widows of Canadian soldiers, dead by his folly, and
informed his sister: "My last wish to the Americans is that they may
not think of avenging my death. Let no further blood be shed; and
believe me, from what I have seen, that all the stories that were
told about the sufferings of the Canadian people were untrue."

The final testament of a fearless young Swede summed up, better
than any state document, the nature of Canada and the boundary
problem. Had Schoultz's words been noted and believed in the
United States, much future mischief would have been avoided.
They were little noted, long remembered, or widely understood.

Schoultz bade farewell to his adviser and offered him a hundred
dollars for his work. Macdonald refused to take a cent. He had
admired Schoultz but detested the Canadian rebels and the Amer-
ican invaders. In such a case, involving his country, he said he
could accept no reward. His ultimate reward was to be larger than
he imagined. His name as a lawyer had been made when he dared
to defend the invaders; he would go on from there to become the
father of his country.

The Canadian government hanged eleven men at Kingston but
it had no stomach for this work and soon released the remainder
under a British policy designed to placate the United States. A
policy of conciliation prevailed also in Washington.

The Hunters and Chasers conducted a few more futile raids. A
rabble of 200 men from Detroit was easily repulsed at Windsor.
Their leader, "General" Bierce, chose to lead from behind. Bill
Johnston, who had deserted Schoultz at Prescott, and a band of
Americans with blackened faces boarded the Canadian steamer
Sir Robert Peel on the St. Lawrence and burned her in revenge for
the Caroline. The British government disregarded the Rush-Bagot
agreement by arming a few extra ships on the Great Lakes. But
the will to agreement between London and Washington was un-
broken.

19

The Titan from New England

[1838-1846]

JUST AS THE TWO GOVERNMENTS SEEMED ABOUT TO LIQUIDATE A
dangerous mess which neither had provoked, a meddling Ca-
nadian agent named Alexander McLeod suddenly relighted
the flames of the Caroline affair.

That notable craft, its hulk lying somewhere on the bottom of
the Niagara River, could be written off as a casualty of Mackenzie's
Rebellion and American interference. The name of Amos Durfee,
killed by Canadians in the American town of Fort Schlosser, was
not so easily forgotten. The American government was determined
to find the killers and it suspected McLeod among others.

As a Canadian government deputy sheriff, he was zealously seek-
ing evidence against various Canadian rebels now in the United
States. The American authorities twice arrested him for complicity
in Durfee's death and twice released him for lack of proof. Later,
emboldened by his escape and primed with liquor in an American
bar, he announced to a crowd of hangers-on that he personally had
killed Durfee. He was arrested again while a mob tried to lynch
him, and charged with murder. Here was serious trouble for the
North American neighbors.

Lord Palmerston, as British Foreign Secretary, was well launched
on his ferocious career of imperialism and to him McLeod was a
sacred subject of the Queen. The question of his guilt or innocence
did not concern Palmerston. If McLeod had participated in the
Caroline raid, it was under the orders of the Queen's government.
It could not be bullied by American mobs, statesmen, or courts.
Palmerston would not even apologize for the outrage against Amer-
ican property. He demanded that McLeod be freed without trial.

280

THE TITAN FBOM NEW ENGLAND 281

The politics of the United States had long since produced an
opponent worthy of Palmerston. In the State Department of Presi-
dent Harrison, hero of Tippecanoe, now loomed the massive figure
of Daniel Webster, called "the mount that burned"— an inexhaustible
volcano erupting perpetually by the shores of his native New Eng-
land. This man was about to play his surprising part in the boundary
struggle and, by his own methods, to prevent another war.

All the greatness and accumulated experience of New England
shone in the seamed face, the luminous eye, and the gorgeous
eloquence of the farm boy who somehow had made himself the
very image of the American Dream and given it a voice.

Already the moss of legend had grown thick about him— as when,
pleading a case for Dartmouth College, he remarked, with his mov-
ing power of restraint, that it was "a small college and yet there
are those who love it," and the face of the presiding judge wrinkled
in pain, "liis eyes suffused with tears/*

Legendary, too, Webster's Gargantuan appetite for food and
liquor, the hospitality of his two great farms, the bottomless debts
(of which it was said that he could manage the business of a nation
but would never keep any private accounts), his hypnotic control
of juries, his ambition for the Presidency which would always
elude him and fall to lesser men, his own verdict: "I have done
absolutely nothing. At thirty Alexander had conquered the world;
and I am forty/'

Still more legends would gather about this titanic person, some
whispers of corruption angrily disproved and the scars of domestic
tragedy. Yet in all the violent cavalcade of a life which made him
the American Republic Incarnate his work on the boundary would
be his only intrinsic and enduring feat of statecraft. Perhaps it
was enough for one lifetime. It would protect the interests and
assuage the passions of Webster's beloved New England. It would
forestall the madness of another continental war.

Webster was the one man ideally fitted to solve such a problem.
As a New Englander he had opposed the War of 1812, but taken
no part in the somewhat treasonous Hartford Convention. Above
all, he was a lawyer who could rise above the split hairs of the law,
see the relations of the two American peoples whole and distill out
of his opponents' debating points the common sense of the Con-
stitution—was, indeed, the Constitution itself walking on two legs—-
that document he had first read as a child, printed on a cotton hand-
kerchief.

But it was not of the boundary and his part in its settlement
that Webster would think at the end as he lay staring dimly past

282 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

the shore at the Stars and Stripes, hung on his little yacht
and lighted at night so that he might see them with his dying
eyes.

He was thinking then of a thousand smaller things that seemed
larger than the boundary, of his triumphs in courtroom and council,
of orations, caucuses, victories and defeats, of the great prize that
had passed him by. And after delivering his last delirious oration
on the subject of religion, he looked up to those around him and
asked: "Have I, on this occasion, said anything unworthy of Daniel
Webster?" Reassured that he had not, he died as he had lived, the
supreme actor, orator, and egoist of his race.

History could be left to judge his work. Assuredly in the case of
the boundary he did nothing unworthy of Daniel Webster.

At the beginning of the struggle with Palmerston, Webster saw
that the burned steamship, the murdered Durf ee, and the wretched
McLeod combined were not worth another war, though he was
denounced in the angry Congress for truckling under to the old
British enemy. Even the master of law could not reason with Palm-
erston (who could?) and was powerless to release McLeod, for he
had been charged with murder and arson under the state laws of
New York. Governor Seward agreed with Webster that the miser-
able little dispute should be patched up but he, too, was the cap-
tive of political circumstance. To rescue McLeod from the hangman
might well be political suicide for the rescuer.

As the case dragged on in the New York courts Palmerston sud-
denly announced that McLeod's execution would result in war.
That ultimatum could not be ignored. Palmerston was a terrifying
personality. He actually might mean what he said.

The Secretary of State, not always noted for patience, patiently
sought some legal method of getting the troublesome prisoner out
of jail The Supreme Court of New York was asked for a ruling and
answered that the state laws applied. McLeod must stand trial.
Webster proposed to carry the case to the Supreme Court of the
United States, but it was taken out of his hands. McLeod, weary
of imprisonment, insisted on trial without more delay.

Fortunately for the peace of nations, Palmerston left the Foreign
Office at that point and was replaced by Lord Aberdeen, a less
belligerent minister. London's warlike gestures were toned down.
The prisoner, however, still stood before a jury as a dangerous
symbol of the ancient quarrel.

Then occurred a happy legal accident, which the British govern-
ment was inclined to attribute to the good management of Webster
and the New York authorities. Two of the prosecution's chief wit-

THE TITAN FKOM NEW ENGLAND 283

nesses mysteriously disappeared before the trial opened. Without
them, the jury acquitted McLeod.

If one speck of friction had been removed and the Caroline affair
formally deleted from the British-American agenda, much worse
frictions, involving more than old crimes, involving territory, money
and national honor, had developed on the long-disputed boundary
of Maine and New Brunswick. This was a clash of real substance.
It might well undo all Webster's work of peace.

The Treaty of Ghent had deliberately left unsettled large sectors
of the boundary. Out west there was Oregon, jointly occupied for
the time being and actually ruled by McLoughlin. In the East no
one knew, no one had ever known from the settlement of 1783 on-
ward, where the line of division lay between Maine and New Bruns-
wick. The settlement of 1783 had been drawn arbitrarily on the
map by men who had never seen the land thus divided. Since then
traders, loggers, and settlers from Canada and the United States had
penetrated these unknown regions and begun to fill in the blank
spaces of the map. They intended to stay where they were, how-
ever governments might define the arrangements negotiated by
Britain and the United States at the close of the Revolution.

The starting point of current argument was the St. Croix River.
The boundary was supposed to follow that stream "from its mouth
in the Bay of Fundy to its source," and strike due north from there
to "the highlands which divide those rivers that empty themselves
into the river St. Lawrence from those which fall into the Atlantic
Ocean, to the north-westernmost head of the Connecticut River,
then down the middle of that river to the forty-fifth parallel of
north latitude."

After thus rounding a northern horseshoe, the boundary would
follow the Connecticut southward to the 45th Parallel and westward
by that line to the St. Lawrence. As no one could even identify the
St. Croix from several possible rivers, much less locate its head-
waters and the source of the Connecticut, the boundary lay for
thirty years where any local settler cared to place it.

In 1798 Britain and the United States had referred the mystery
of the St. Croix to a commission of inquiry under Jay's Treaty, The
commissioners rejected the Magaguadavic, as urged by the United
States, and chose the Schoodic, farther to the west. That meant
more land for New Brunswick and less for Maine. The commission
drew a straight line north from the St. Croix's presumed source,
west of the St. John River, to Maine's disappointment.

How far north did this line extend before reaching the imaginary
"highlands" and the north arc of the horseshoe? The British said

284 THE STRUGGLE FOB THE BORDER

it ran for only forty miles, ended at Mars Hill, in Aroostook County,
fell far short of the St. John, and thus gave the upper reaches of
that river and the country south of it to New Brunswick. The Amer-
icans insisted that the line ran farther north by 143 miles and be-
yond the Restigouche. Some twelve thousand square miles of land
remained in dispute until after the War of 1812.

Again a joint commission pondered the map, the politics behind
the map, and the position of the people within the disputed area.
The commissioners managed to divide the islands of Passama-
quoddy Bay satisfactorily between the two contenders but, after
four more years of work, they abandoned, in 1822, the attempt to
fix the boundary from the St. Croix to the St. Lawrence. The prob-
lem was handed back to the British and American governments.

Five more years were spent in arranging an arbitration, as per-
mitted under the Treaty of Ghent, neither side willing to accept
the arbitrator suggested by the other. In the end both agreed to the
King of the Netherlands. That puzzled monarch could find only that
the task, as presented to him, was "inexplicable and impractical."

Accordingly, he disregarded the strict definitions of the 1783
settlement and attempted a reasonable compromise by a line along
the St John and St. Francis Rivers. This gave roughly the northern
third of the questionable land to New Brunswick and the remainder
to Maine. Britain accepted the award. The American government,
the Congress, and especially the people of Maine exploded in wrath
at what appeared to be a sell-out of their just claims.

Now the United States opportunely discovered that the arbitrator
was no longer competent to render any decision. He had been ap-
pointed as King of the Netherlands and since the Belgian revolu-
tion of 1830 he was only King of Holland—a preposterous argument
but, lacking better, it must serve.

The American government threw up its hands in the face of this
mounting confusion and sought the advice of the Senate. It re-
jected the King's findings. Britain and the United States were back
where they had started in 1783. That was nowhere in particular.

Arbitrators, diplomats, and mapmakers might abandon the prob-
lem as insoluble, but men from Maine and New Brunswick were
moving into the unsettled border country, cutting down trees, plow-
ing the earth, claiming them for both countries and constantly col-
liding. The authorities of New Brunswick were granting valuable
timber licenses to Canadians within the area claimed by Maine.
Maine was granting similar licenses within the area claimed by
New Brunswick. The lumberman's busy ax disregarded the border
until New Brunswick seized cut timber within Maine, or what the

THE TITAN FROM NEW ENGLAND 285

Americans called Maine, and Maine did the same in what Britain
called New Brunswick. The victims of the seizures on both sides at
once demanded redress from their governments.

Soon settlers were following the lumbermen and cultivating the
cutover valleys. Farmers from Maine moved into the Madawaska
country of the upper St. John, where Canadians already were set-
tled and where New Brunswick asserted its jurisdiction. There fol-
lowed ten years of seizures, arrests, and litigation while the temper
of Maine rose and its governor told the Federal government that
"Maine has a right to know fully and explicitly whether she is to be
protected or left to struggle alone and unaided/*

Maine did not wait for the Federal government to intervene. In
1839 it sent two hundred men to remove the New Brunswick loggers
from the Aroostook valley. This raid, like so many others of recent
years, was a ridiculous failure. Agents of New Brunswick surprised
the Americans by night and carried off fifty of them to the jail in
Woodstock. The townsmen of Woodstock, inspired by this victory,
broke into the local arsenal, armed themselves, and marched into
the Aroostook country as if to repel an invasion.

That was more than Governor Harvey, of New Brunswick, had
bargained for. He ordered the Woodstock volunteers back home but
informed the government of Maine that, if necessary, he would de-
fend Aroostook with Canadian troops. Maine voted money for an
army of its own, Congress authorized the recruitment of 50,000
men; the British and American governments warned each other
against provoking a war of incalculable consequence.

The little valley of Aroostook, a pocket of lumbermen and bush
farmers, had suddenly become the focal point of world politics. At
a distance of a few yards armed Americans and Canadians watched
one another, spoiling for a fight. Those few yards proved enough
to restrain another continental disaster. For actually neither side
wanted a war and nobody started shooting.

The American government now bethought itself of that reliable
soldier and pacificator, Winfield Scott. Hurrying to the Aroostock
front, he persuaded both sides to release their prisoners and with-
draw their forces before the fatal shot could be fired. By tacit
arrangement Maine was given control of Aroostock and New Bruns-
wick of Madawaska.

The border lay quiet at the moment when the McLeod case, now
nearing its queer anticlimax, was straining British- American rela-
tions to the breaking point. Once McLeod was out of the way and
the "Aroostook War" halted, it was obviously time for London and
Washington to cease this nonsense and arrange a general settlement

286 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

Britain had found in Lord Ashburton a negotiator well trained to
deal with the Americans. His financial firm of Baring had large
interests in the United States and he had spent much time there,
had married the daughter of an American senator, and had helped
to finance the Louisiana Purchase. Also, he had met Webster when
the American was selling Massachusetts stock in London and trying
to re-establish the damaged financial credit of the Republic.

The able British negotiator first tried to make sure that there
would be no more McLeod cases. His arguments and pressure from
the State Department persuaded the Congress to pass a law ena-
bling the Federal government to remove from state to federal courts
prisoners who had acted under the orders of a foreign government.
In return for this concession Ashburton wound up the Caroline affair
by the apology long demanded in Washington and refused by
Palmerston. It was a restrained apology, regretting only "the hur-
ried execution of the necessary service" but it was enough to satisfy
the United States' honor. Next an extradition agreement (excluding
political exiles) was negotiated to cover the criminals of Canada
and the United States who continually fled across the border.

These were details. Ashburton's primary assignment was to fix
the Maine-New Brunswick boundary and, as a practical man of
business, he did not propose to allow either technicalities, historic
formulae, or local interests to stand in his way. He told the Cana-
dian Governor General bluntly: "No slight advantage to be de-
rived from contrivance & cunning can for a moment be placed in
comparison with those to be derived from having as a result of my
negotiations a reciprocal feeling of respect & harmony." Those
words laid down the only practical operative principle on which the
future boundary could be managed. They deserved to be remem-
bered, would often be forgotten, but could never be denied.

Ashburton found that he could do business with Webster, who
was as eager as he for a durable settlement, even if it cost a few
square miles of supposedly American territory. As New England's
greatest living son, Webster undertook to smooth the temper of
Maine and prepare it for the loss of some of its claims.

The London businessman was free of these local politics. Britain,
as always, was not consulting the wishes or interests of Canadians
but settling an imperial problem to suit its own imperial conven-
ience. It was little worried now by the problem of defending New
Brunswick from Maine. Its concern was to leave a corridor between
New Brunswick and the St. Lawrence so that troops could be moved
from St. John to Quebec for the defense of Upper and Lower
Canada when die river was frozen.

THE TITAN FROM NEW ENGLAND 287

Webster was equally concerned with the defense of the historic
British invasion route southward by the Richelieu and Lake Cham-
plain. To cork this dangerous bottle the United States already had
built a fort at Rouses Point, only to find when final surveys were
made that it lay a quarter of a mile within Canada. The British
government saw Rouses Point as a useful bargaining counter.

The bargain finally offered by Ashburton to Webster provided a
boundary between Maine and New Brunswick on the upper St.
John. In return, Canada would leave Rouses Point in American
possession. This seemed reasonable but did not satisfy Maine. It
still demanded the islands at the mouth of the St. Croix, a slight
alteration in the St. John line, and navigation rights on that
river.

Ashburton had gone as far as he could. His position was strength-
ened at this point by an interesting discovery in the dusty archives
of Paris, where some diligent clerk produced a map defining the old
boundaries of French Acadia as conforming to the British descrip-
tion of New Brunswick. This map also seemed to correspond too
closely for the comfort of the American negotiators to a map drawn
by Franklin in describing the settlement of 1783.

The Washington government ceased to look for more old records
and the government at London quietly suppressed a map found in
the British Museum which seemed to support the American case.
Webster warned the authorities of Maine and Massachusetts that
the maps were against them. He offered each state a subsidy of
$150,000 if it would agree to Ashburton's offer. And so the deal
was made.

Britain got the boundary it wanted north of the St. John, the
United States the boundary it wanted west of the Connecticut, to-
gether with Rouses Point, and Maine got the right to use the St.
John to carry its logs to the sea. Webster reckoned that he had
secured seven-twelfths of the disputed area and four-fifths of its
total value. Ashburton thought he had made "greater sacrifices than
the thing is worth" because "the whole territory we were wrangling
about was worth nothing." New Brunswick thought it valuable and
would not quickly forgive its surrender.

Probably Ashburton could not have forced a better bargain short
of war. He and Webster seemed to have reached the best com-
promise available in practical politics if not in theoretical justice.
They might not have succeeded were it not that Britain and the
United States both needed each other's markets and the United
States needed British capital. For Canada, however, the long north-
ern nose of Maine, thrust almost to the edge of the St. Lawrence,

288 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

was a wedge driven between its interior and its Atlantic coast, a
barrier to transportation and a serious economic problem for the
future.

The international boundary now ran, unquestioned, from the
Atlantic to the Rockies. An agreement of 1818 had settled the old
dispute arising out of the 1783 settlement and its impossible line
drawn directly west from the Lake of the Woods to the headwaters
of the Mississippi. After it was found that the river lay far south
of the 49th Parallel, Britain had proposed to swing the agreed
boundary southward but the United States Senate rejected this
claim and it was not seriously pressed. Britain thus surrendered
also its right of free navigation on the Mississippi. By the 1818 con-
vention the line started from the Lake of the Woods and ran straight
west by the 49th Parallel as far as the Rockies. Both nations claimed
Oregon, occupied it jointly, and left it under the patriarchal rule
of McLoughlin.

He was now established as a monarch without constitution or
local competitor, the ostensible servant but actually the rival of
Simpson, the 'White Headed Eagle" of the Indians, the ally of
Comcomly, that able one-eyed chief who had been converted to
British principles by a gift of a Union Jack, a gaudy tunic, cocked
hat, and heavy sword.

Wherever he went the splendid figure of McLoughlin, with his
silver mane, his .flowing cloak, and gold-headed walking stick was
reverenced by the northwest tribes only this side idolatry. As "Dr.
John/* he treated their diseases with extract of dogwood root,
labored night and day through their plague of 1829, watched them
leap, crazed with fever, into the Columbia, and wept over their
dead. Everyone, Indian or white, was welcome under his sprawling
roof and many curious men turned up at Vancouver from the ends
of the earth.

One of them was David Douglas, botanist of the Royal Horti-
cultural Society of London. The natives held him in awe for his
mysterious power over the creatures of the forest— a fiction invented
by McLoughlin. Often Douglas went short of clothing so that he
might carry paper for his records and sketches as he added over a
thousand strange plants to the science of botany and named the
giant Douglas fir, containing within its wrinkled trunk the economic
future of the Pacific coast.

Another guest at Vancouver was the British sea captain, Aemelius
Simpson. He always wore kid gloves and, pulling them from his
pocket one day, discovered some forgotten apple seeds presented to
him by a lady in London for planting in the soil of Oregon, They

THE TITAN FROM NEW ENGLAND 289

were planted by the fort's gardener, Robert Bruce, their seedling
shoots were eagerly watched by McLoughlin, and their first apple
was handed around so that all could taste it. That was the beginning
of Oregon's great fruit industry.

Not all visitors were welcome. Herbert Beaver, a repulsive char-
acter who came as a missionary from England, sent home reports
suggesting that McLoughlin's marriage was not quite legal. Hearing
of this, McLoughlin caned his guest publicly in the yard of the
fort but apologized next day. Beaver rejected the apology, preferring
to return to London and spread more slanders.

Least welcome of all were the occasional American fur traders.
None was molested, some were bought off, others driven out by
cutthroat price competition. When Jedediah Smith, the famous
trader and "praying man" of Salt Lake, was attacked by Indians on
the coast, McLoughlin rescued him, recaptured his stolen furs, and
entertained him all winter. The two became fast friends, but by his
presence in the fort Smith, quite innocently, was undermining his
host's kingdom*

Smith's reports to Washington warned the government that
McLoughlin's influence over the Indians was "decisive" and de-
scribed in minute detail his flourishing fields of grain, his cattle,
apples, and grapes. In thus whetting the American appetite for the
rich coastal soil Smith was too honest to hide his ambitions from
his friend. The Americans, he said, would surely colonize Oregon.
A few years later the Comanches murdered Smith on the Cimarron,
McLoughlin grieved deeply.

Perhaps unconsciously his mind already was reconciling itself to
Smith's prophecy. So far, however, he had never admitted to him-
self, much less to Simpson, that Oregon could be lost to Britain.
He was constantly expanding his domain with a sawmill on the
Willamette River, new posts in the mountains, a farming com-
munity on Puget Sound, a depot in Spain's San Francisco Bay, an
agency in the Hawaiian Islands to sell his lumber and salmon, and,
on the far northern coast, Fort Stikine, to trade in furs with the
Russians of Alaska. Vancouver's sphere of influence now stretched
from California to the latitude of 54°, a parallel soon to enter inter-
national politics and the folklore of the American people.

George Simpson watched this expansion with distrust McLough-
lin had been instructed to build an empire of fur. He seemed to be
building something like a colony which, in the end, might prove
fatal to the fur trade and actually was building the foundations of
the American Republic on the Pacific. In any case, the Little Em-
peror could tolerate no rival. He was secretly jealous of McLough-

290 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

lin's power and contemptuous of his openhanded ways with the
American competitors.

McLoughlin had indeed grown a little dizzy with success. His
salary of £2,900 a year was kingly, His word was law. No one in
his great dining hall ventured to interrupt his oracular pronounce-
ments on business, politics, philosophy, religion, and the virtues of
Napoleon Bonaparte. On a canoe journey across Canada to England
in 1838 he regaled the startled Hudson's Bay factors of the prairies
with praises of Papineau, the newly exiled rebel. Where would all
this end? As the subtle mind of Simpson may have suspected, it
would end in tragedy.

If he was too easygoing with the competitors and too prodigal
with the company's money to suit Simpson, McLoughlin could be
ruthless. The Clallam tribe having killed five of his traders, he pun-
ished them by destroying their village and massacring twenty-five
inhabitants.

The King's rule was absolute but at the heyday of his power the
tragedy of McLoughlin had begun. He appointed his worthless son,
John, to command the Stikine fort and there the youth was mur-
dered by a mutinous crew in a drunken riot. The father was wild
with grief and then with anger on learning that Simpson had re-
leased the confessed murderer. The quarrel between McLoughlin
and Simpson, long growing out of business disputes but mostly out
of their egocentric and incompatible natures, was now past curing.
McLoughlin's furious letters to the company's headquarters in Lon-
don attacked Simpson's policies, methods, and lavish sexual morals.

Still, the business of the company must go on, Simpson foresaw
the future more clearly, or at least admitted it more frankly, than
McLoughlin. In Simpson's mind the original guess that the Colum-
bia line could not be held, that the company must establish itself on
the defensible line of the Fraser, had been confirmed by the Amer-
ican pressure on Oregon.

He had ordered the construction of Fort Langley, near the
Fraser s mouth, in 1827. A single stake driven there did not satisfy
him. Cruising up the coast on the company's steamship Beaver, he
was struck by the possibilities of Vancouver Island, for it thrust
well southward of the 49th Parallel into the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
Its southern extremity and a safe harbor would make an ideal site
for a fort to hold the island and, if necessary, a boundary through
the strait This was to prove Simpson's most important inspiration.
It would largely determine in the end the western division of the
continent.

The man who would thus anchor the boundary had lately ar-

THE TITAN FROM NEW ENGLAND 291

rived at Vancouver. He was a towering Scot of mysterious origin,
swarthy skin, courtly manners, hard mind, and glacial cold. Young
James Douglas had learned the fur trade in Eraser's New Caledonia
and narrowly escaped with his life from the Indians there. He
immediately took over the management of McLoughlin's business
and became his silent alter ego. The two men, with their lively
half-breed wives and numerous children, lived apart as a remote
aristocracy. McLoughlin and "Black" Douglas dined with visitors
in the central hall while their women were forbidden any company.

This comfortable life could not continue. The exotic little growth
planted by McLoughlin on the Columbia must perish in the storm
of imperial power now sweeping across America or become part of
the larger growth of the American Republic, of which the first
portents were a few destitute and starving missionaries from Bos-
ton. They had crossed the plains by covered wagon, with ghastly
hardship, and slid down the river on rafts.

In 1834 McLoughlin had confronted the visage of Manifest Des-
tiny in the person of Jason Lee, a lanky young Methodist minister
"with strong nerve and indomitable will/7 Lee had been moved by
a delegation of Flathead Indians, seeking the word of God at St.
Louis, and felt called to duty among them.

The little band of missionaries was guided across the plains and
mountains by Nathaniel Wyeth, an enterprising merchant, whom
McLoughlin liked at first sight. His own Christianity rising above
the interests of his company, McLoughlin warmly welcomed the
tattered travelers but discreetly directed Lee to the Willamette
valley, south of the Columbia, that essential line of British power.

Wyeth was not to be diverted so easily. He decided, against
McLoughlin's honest advice, to build his own trade post on Sauve
Island directly west of Vancouver. It saddened McLoughlin to ruin
his new friend but, in loyalty to the company, the menace of the
Sauve post must be removed. The Indians, accordingly, were per-
suaded to boycott the American trader. Within two years he was
bankrupt.

This kind of interference could not retard the westering tide of
American settlement now rising east of the Rockies and fed by
missionary fervor, land hunger, and the chance of commercial profit.

Soon there arrived at Vancouver, via Mexico, the "penniless and
ill-clad" figure of Hall J. Kelley, the ardent Boston schoolteacher
who had long preached the American colonization of Oregon. Mc-
Loughlin recognized him as the archenemy. Kelley, he noted, was
garbed in "a white slouched hat, blanket capote, leather pants with
a red stripe down the seam—rather outre even for Vancouver," and

292 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

besides, he was a horse thief. This charge, made against Kelley and
his guide, Ewing Young, in Mexico, was untrue, but McLoughlin
believed it and treated the two Americans coldly. After being
housed, fed, and ignored all winter, Zelley went home 'hating
McLoughlin as a "prosecuting monster" and continued his crusade
for an ail-American Oregon.

Next came Samuel Parker, "the plug-hat missionary" in torn
clerical clothes, to spy out the land for his eastern followers. Then,
in 1936, Dr. Marcus Whitman and his bride, the lovely Narcissa, on
an odd coast-to-coast honeymoon by wagon. They were accom-
panied by Henry Spalding, a missionary, and his wife, these two
women being the first to cross the Rockies.

The American missions, dauntless among the tribes of the coast
and interior, and highly practical in their business management,
were now firmly established. They asked the protection of Con-
gress for their lands. Lee went east to raise money by lectures on
the religious needs and natural riches of the West. The American
public was excited by his news, the government disturbed by
McLoughlin's hold on Oregon. It was time to find out what had
happened to a joint occupation which apparently had turned into
a British monopoly.

Captain William A. Slacum was, therefore, sent to Vancouver by
sea as "a private gentleman." The disguise failed to deceive Mc-
Loughlin, but Slacum was royally entertained and the business
affairs of the company opened to him.

His report to the government repaid McLoughlin's kindness by
the false charge that the company enforced slavery among the In-
dians. Slacum's findings were to prove vital in the future of the
Pacific coast. They urged the government to demand the 49th
Parallel as the international boundary and rightly insisted that the
Puget Sound country, providing the only secure harbors north of
San Francisco, was too valuable a prize to be lost. The govern-
ment began to think increasingly of Oregon, where the United
States had planted a few men of God and a handful of godless
traders but no settlement,

McLoughlin also had been thinking his own thoughts. He had
long realized that settlement could not be avoided south of the
Columbia and had quietly encouraged it there to prevent its spread-
ing north of the river.

The case of Louis Labonte, a French-Canadian servant of the
company, had plainly indicated years before the future of this
fertile soil. Labonte had finished his term of service, had secured
his discharge, and proposed to farm in the Willamette valley.

THE TITAN FROM NEW ENGLAND 293

Alarmed at this first prospect of settlement, McLoughlin sent
Labonte home to Montreal, according to the strict letter of his con-
tract. This determined man paddled back across the continent and
cleared his farm. A French Canadian from the St. Lawrence had
begun the private settlement of Oregon— a small beginning, a few
acres. Nothing thenceforth could suppress it.

McLoughlin made no serious attempt to stop other settlers and
constantly twisted the company's regulations to help them. The
minute but spreading farms on the Willamette, little known to the
statesmen of Washington and London, were perhaps the most
significant speck of land at the moment in America. If crops would
grow in Oregon, the land-hungry Americans., now halfway across
die dry plains, would certainly try to possess this abundant and
well-watered earth. The Hudson's Bay empire was doomed by such
unnoted men as Louis Labonte with his lonely plow. And, though
he did not know it yet, even McLoughlin, the Canadian from
Riviere du Loup, the empire's defender, the King of Oregon, was
being sucked day by day into the Republic.

In 1841— the year before Elijah White's first immigrant caravan
rolled over the Oregon trail— Simpson's erratic travels brought him
to Vancouver. He and McLoughlin agreed that the final crisis of
Oregon was at hand. They masked their quarrel and, outwardly
polite, conferred on strategy.

It was essential, said Simpson, that Britain escape without more
delay from the long-standing temporary arrangements and assert
its control of Oregon before the Americans could occupy it. The
crafty Scot, knowing the ways of politicians in London, suspected
that they would surrender in the pinch. Therefore, his original
project of a second line in the vicinity of the Fraser, with an anchor-
ing fort on Vancouver Island, could be postponed no longer. Mc-
Loughlin approved. He saw his kingdom slipping from him.

Who should be selected for the task of holding the future
boundary in the Strait of Juan de Fuca? The choice was obvious.
Black Douglas, the silent man who had long been the King's prime
minister in Oregon, was sent north in 1843 and built the new post
of Camosun, soon to be called Victoria. It stood on the east side of
a snug harbor, safe from the Songeesh Indians' village on the west-
ern side; it fronted on Fuca's Strait and, though it was only a
palisade and a few whitewashed buildings, it must soon become
a vital strategic point in the North American struggle.

Douglas, without knowing it, held in his competent hands the
future of Canada as a transcontinental state. And far away, on the
other side of the poiatinent, in the town of Kingston, Douglas's un-

294 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

seen partner, John A. Macdonald, was still practicing law, learning
politics, drinking too much whisky, and little supposing that he
would carry Canada to the Pacific some thirty years hence.

In London meanwhile the Hudson's Bay Company was bestirring
itself. Governor John Henry Pelly had read with alarm Simpson's
urgent dispatches from Oregon. The agreement of joint occupancy
and free trade had ended in 1828 and had been renewed indefinitely,
either side free to abrogate it with a year's notice. Britain and the
United States still could not agree on a permanent settlement.
Pelly continually urged Foreign Secretary Canning to prepare his
final bargaining terms.

Britain's position looked strong. The American movement into
Oregon so far was only a trickle. Washington statesmen seemed
little interested in this distant territory, being much more con-
cerned with the Spanish possessions of the Southwest. Britain, said
Pelly, should propose a boundary from the 49th Parallel at the
Rockies southward on the height of land to a point where Lewis
and Clark had crossed the mountains, at about 46°, then westerly
along "Lewis' River" until it fell into the Columbia, thence straight
to the sea.

This settlement, Pelly thought, would be generous to the Amer-
icans—so generous that when McLoughlin first heard of it by
delayed dispatches he was outraged. Invaluable fur areas, he pro-
tested, would be cut out of his kingdom south of the Columbia and
Vancouver's trade ruined.

Already he had seen such Yankee skippers as Captain William
McNeill sailing into the Columbia, offering ridiculous prices for
furs, and delighting the Indians with the new temptations of toys,
whistles, wooden soldiers, jumping jacks and other gimcracks from
New England.

The company, after its experience of nearly two centuries, thought
it knew best.* It proposed that Canning demand far more than he
could hope to get. He should insist at the beginning on a boundary
well south of the Columbia so that, in the ultimate division, he
could offer large concessions to the Americans and, feigning sur-
render, could retreat to the river line.

All this subtle strategy of the last ten years was now obsolete and
McLoughlin knew it when, in 1843, Douglas was building Fort
Victoria and 900 Americans of the "Great Migration" reached the
Willamette valley. A trickle became a flood. The company had
brought in a few Canadian farmers from the Red River colony
but their numbers only proved that in the contest of settlement
Canada must lose. It lacked the population for such a struggle,
while the Republic was bursting with eager immigrants.

THE TITAN FROM NEW ENGLAND 295

The private surrender of McLoughlin also had begun. At first
he gave the American settlers credit at his store, contrary to the
company's instructions, to keep them alive, though he knew that
many of these debts would never be repaid. The flood stQl rose.
The Indians having assembled around Vancouver for a general
massacre and announced that "It's good for us to kill these Bostons/'
McLoughlin rushed among them, brandishing his cane, and fore-
stalled what might easily have turned into a general Indian war
and another familiar clash between Britain and the United States.

Under this kind of pressure the aging man suffered a fierce strug-
gle of conscience. He had recently returned to his mother's religion,
taken the communion of the Roman Catholic Church, and ratified
by solemn rites the secular marriage of the Canadian frontier. As
his mind mellowed, the American settlers began to look less like
enemies than friends, the American Republic more congenial than
the rule of a distant London and its hateful agent, the Little
Emperor.

Simpson's worst suspicions would have been confirmed if he had
seen McLoughlin board a visiting American ship of war and salute
the Stars and Stripes. By this gesture the King of Oregon showed
the first outward sign of his conversion.

The increasing settlers of the Willamette— as is the nature of all
North Americans— were demanding self-government at their town of
Oregon City. McLoughlin was able to postpone this movement
briefly by his influence over the French Canadians, his own people.
On May 2, 1843, however, an open-air meeting resolved by a
majority of two votes to establish a local administration forthwith.
Those two votes came from French Canadians who resented Can-
ada's treatment of Papineau. Even Oregon felt the backwash of the
Canadian Rebellion.

McLoughlin abandoned his attempt to control the settlers. They
were passing their own laws, levying taxes, and seeking admission
to the Union. One-man rule west of the Rockies had closed. Mc-
Loughlin faced the supreme decision of his life.

Actually the decision had been taken out of his hands. More
immigrants were pouring in, 1,400 in 1844. Without British military
power behind him, probably without a continental war, McLough-
lin could not hold the Columbia line against such numbers. His
appeals to London, his hint that he might be elected to lead an
independent state of Oregon, went unheeded. He was too old, too
tired by his prodigal life, too disillusioned with the company to
fight any more.

Next year the settlers elected George Abernethy as their governor.
McLoughlin knew this was the end. He formally agreed, on August

296 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

15, 1845, to "support the Organic Laws of the Provisional Govern-
ment of Oregon." His resignation went to London. The King had
abdicated. His retreat to Oregon City with his family was a king's
voluntary exile. It had been his own manifest destiny from the be-
ginning. And when he built a huge house for himself there and
applied for American citizenship the long adventure of the boy from
Riviere du Loup was complete. There would never be its like
again.

He lived eleven years in exile, more as a legend than a man. The
Americans eventually granted him citizenship, they observed the
giant stooped figure in old-fashioned clothes moving about the
streets, but he had no influence in a bustling little community which
become a territory of the United States in 1848.

He was suspect as a former Briton, a retired dictator, and a Cath-
olic. His private land claim was stolen from him by endless litiga-
tion, a bitter quarrel with the Methodist Church, and some high-class
finagling in Congressional politics. He was compelled to recoup
the Hudson's Bay Company out of his own pocket for all the
credits extended to the American settlers, who now refused to
honor their debts and treated their benefactor almost as an outcast.
Sometimes the old man would fall to sobbing over his old account
books, the lost assets, the unpaid debts, the memories of better
times.

"By British demagogues," he wrote in his final testament, "I
have been represented as a traitor. What for? Because I acted as a
Christian, saved American citizens, men, women and children, from
the Indian tomahawk . . . American demagogues have been base
enough to assert that I had caused American citizens to be mas-
sacred by hundreds of savages— I who saved all I could ... I
founded this settlement and prevented a war."

He got no thanks for this in life. Americans of Oregon had yet
to recognize the father of their state. The Republic little noted the
broken man who, more than any other, had carried it, as a British
subject, to the Pacific coast. On his deathbed— looking, as a Wash-
ington visitor observed, "the picture of General Jackson"— he said
he would have been better shot forty years ago, He had now re-
verted to the French language of his youth on the St. Lawrence.
"Comment allez-vous?" asked his doctor and nephew, Henri de
Chesne. "A Dieu," murmured the deposed King of Oregon and
passed into American history. In good time it would vindicate him.
With McLoughlin passed the infancy of the West,

The quickening clash of imperial powers could not pause to ob-
serve the tragedy of the man whose arrival in Oregon had precipi-

THE TITAN FROM NEW ENGLAND 297

tated it in the first place. All the long wrangle between London
and Washington had failed to settle the boundary. Britain had pro-
posed in 1826 to hold Oregon but offered the United States a harbor
on Fuca's Strait. The United States refused to surrender Oregon
but offered Britain free navigation on the Columbia. Both offers
were rejected. The uneasy joint occupation continued, each side
still free to end it with one year's notice.

By the eighteen-forties it was plain that the Americans intended
to end the stalemate somehow. For in fact the settlers and not the
Hudson's Bay Company possessed and governed Oregon, whatever
international agreement might say. It remained only to assert this
ownership.

The presidential election of 1844 presented in the Democratic
candidate, a dark horse named James Knox Polk, from the moun-
tains of Tennessee, the man who evidently proposed to say the final
word. Folk's campaign indicated that, if elected, he would have
Oregon and probably would have Texas as well. His policy was
uttered in an alarming slogan meaning little or much— "Fifty-four
Forty or Fight!"

With Folk's election the statesmen of London asked themselves if
this man, grim-faced, angry and subtle, intended to enforce his
slogan literally and expand the Republic all the way up the Pacific
coast to the edge of Russian Alaska. A British warship cruised osten-
tatiously through the Strait of Juan de Fuca. London proposed an
attempt at mediation. Polk refused, gave legal notice ending the
joint occupation, and undertook public preparations for war.

To all appearances the third British-American war for the bound-
ary was on the way. These appearances were deceptive. As Britain
guessed, Folk's real interest lay in the Southwest and California.
While acquiring the lands of Spain, he desired no more than Britain
a contest in the north.

Following the necessary gestures of power, therefore, Polk of-
fered at the proper moment to accept the line of the 49th Parallel,
cutting straight across Vancouver Island, though he recognized
Douglas's Fort Victoria as a free port. Britain, while ready to sur-
render Oregon and avoid war, rejected Folk's formula. It had
determined to hold the island and, as a last resort, to accept a
boundary through the Gulf of Georgia and Fuca's Strait. That com-
promise satisfied Polk, since it gave the United States far more
than it had expected to obtain without a war and left American
energies free to deal with Spain in the Southwest.

Thus the bargain was sealed by the treaty of June 15, 1846, and,
save for a disturbing little clash concerning certain islands in the

298 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

Gulf of Georgia, the North American border was fixed from Atlantic
to Pacific. The division of a continent, begun at Jamestown and
Quebec, had been completed after 238 years of wars innumerable
and the labors of countless men now forgotten.

The boundary was fixed on paper. It was backed by the covenant
of Britain, the world's leading power, and of the United States, a
growing power of the second class. Britain had often surrendered
the vital interests of Canada before now, as it had surrendered the
rich territory of Oregon, leaving the poorer northern lands to its
colonists. Would there be another surrender?

Two men still unknown to each other were thinking of these things
at opposite sides of the continent. In Fort Victoria, Douglas held
the British far West with a corporal's guard and in a dozen years
must meet a new American invasion, peaceful but dangerous. In
Kingston, Macdonald was entering his life of politics, as yet youth-
ful, naive and confused, but behind his convivial manners, the
homely face, and the famous nose, already reddening with alcohol,
there burned a vehement flame. The murk of politics, the years of
private anguish, dissipation, and titanic labor could never extinguish
that flame. By its secret light Macdonald had seen the vision of a
nation from coast to coast. And he also, in due time, must meet
the final thrust of Manifest Destiny on the border.

20

The Dictator and His Disciples

[1838-1849]

IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF CHAMPLAIN, FRONTENAC, PHTPS, MONTCALM,
Wolfe, Montgomery, and the others who had worn smooth the
cobblestones or battered down the walls of Quebec for more
than two centuries, there arrived, on May 29, 1838, an egregious
personage, who would have perhaps a larger effect on Canada, the
United States, and the world then any of his predecessors. That
date, if any can be fixed in an evolution so long and amorphous,
will serve as well as any other for the beginning of the Third British
Empire, later called a Commonwealth.

When a white charger bore the gaudy, gold-braided figure up to
the CMteau St. Louis, John George Lambton, Earl of Durham,
appeared to the eager Canadians as their savior from rebellion,
business collapse, and anarchy. He had come from London as a
dictator to investigate the Mackenzie-Papineau uprising and, if
possible, to invent a new system of government for Canada. His
assignment and powers were practically unlimited and quite un-
precedented.

Much more depended on him than the young Queen Victoria
and her government supposed. They knew only that the bewildered
Canadians, even the loyal ones, were dissatisfied with their present
system and yet clung to the Empire. What did they want? Maybe
Durham could make some sense of this outlandish country. In any
case, the easygoing British Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, had
found Durham a prickly companion in Parliament and his voyage
at least would keep him out of the way for a while. He was in-
structed to save Canada from a rebellion which had been suppressed
but might recur. Actually he was undertaking to save the Empire,
though few men saw that its future was in imminent peril.

Durham's work, failing or succeeding, must forever affect the

299

300 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

future of the American public as well. If he failed, the weak, dis-
jointed, and chaotic Canadian colonies would certainly lapse, one
by one or all together, into the United States. If he succeeded,
there might be a Canadian nation on the flank of the Republic and,
later on, other similar nations in Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific.
If a new kind of empire could be invented— a project hardly con-
sidered in Britain so far— it might endure as a permanent friend
and ally of the Republic. Not otherwise.

The shoulders on which this heavy and incalculable burden had
been placed were young but powerful. Durham was forty-six years
old. The chiseled face, almost theatrical in its beauty, was crowned
with an aura of glistening curls, the eye luminous and hypnotic.
A brilliant mind and a febrile energy were marred only by frail
health.

This darling of a fickle fortune had come from an ancient county
family so distinguished that his father had scorned a title. After
college and three years in the army, the son had quickly revealed a
certain fashionable Byronic ardor by running off with an heiress
for a somewhat scandalous Gretna Green marriage, had fought a
duel to settle an election argument, had supported the great Reform

O ' JL JL O

Bill with his father-in-law, Earl Grey, and on entering Parliament
had won the name of "Radical Jack."

His radicalism was entirely abstract and intellectual. At heart he
was an arrogant, brittle and moody aristocrat, who traveled across
the Atlantic with his own private band, his family plate, his racing
trophies, and other baggage requiring two days to unload. So
delicate were his tastes, so sensitive his nostrils, that he forbade
anyone on his ship to smoke and, sniffing tobacco one night, rushed
from his cabin in a rage to find Vice-Admiral Sir Charles Paget
crouched with a secret cigar in the lee of a lifeboat.

Conditions in America, as Durham judged them, were much
worse than he or his government had believed. Of Lower Canada
he said in his most memorable phrase: "I expected to find a contest
between a government and a people; I found two nations warring
in the bosom of a single state."

Canada, Upper and Lower, was prostrate with depression— pub-
lic works suspended, government unable to pay its bills, the people
desperate or apathetic, many farmers emigrating in despair to the
United States, The border still smoldered in the fires of the recent
rebellion. The Canadian steamer Sir Robert Peel was burned by a
black-faced gang of American pirates on the St. Lawrence a few
days after the dictator's arrival. The Hunters' raids were being
planned but had yet to come.

THE DICTATOR AND HIS DISCIPLES 301

One of Durham's first acts was to offer a reward of £1,000 for the
conviction in the American courts of any person who had com-
mitted a crime against Canada. By this gesture he told the American
government plainly that the Canadian rebellion and its aftermath
had become an international concern, that he expected Washington
to enforce its own laws against pirates and raiders. He then sent
his brother-in-law, Colonel Grey, to see President Van Buren and
demand an end of American interference.

Next he solved the problem of the hundreds of rebels in the
overcrowded Quebec jails by releasing all of them save eight ring-
leaders, who were mercifully exiled to Bermuda, since no Quebec
jury would convict them anyway. That was the fatal step of Dur-
ham's career and would soon end it.

Ignorant of the conspiracy now under way against him in London,
he set feverishly to work, examined witnesses, questioned delega-
tions, read mountains of documents, dashed about the country by
boat, carriage or horseback, and began to compile the famous
Durham Report.

It has been called, with some justice, the greatest state paper in
the history of the British peoples. Certainly it was to have an effect
on their affairs comparable to that of Magna Carta or the Bill of
Rights. It was to be, indeed, the starting point of the future Com-
monwealth, even if few students in Britain, Canada, or the United
States seem to have realized its importance at the time.

Who actually wrote the report has never been clear. Durham had
brought with him an odd brain trust which reflected his contempt
of convention. Thomas Turton, after drafting the Reform Bill of
1832, had acquired a soiled reputation in a disagreeable divorce
case, Charles Buller was an able secretary but practiced a sharp
wit, wounding to Canadians. Gibbon Wakefield, not a member of
Durham's official staff, worked closely with him and undoubtedly
wrote some part of his findings. This notorious man had been in
jail recently for abducting an heiress. Altogether it was a somewhat
gamey group of men to represent the virgin Queen.

Durham's enemy, Lord Brougham, meeting the historian, Macau-
lay, in a London street, said of the report and its authors: "The
matter came from a felon, the style from a coxcomb and the Dic-
tator furnished only six letters, D-u-r-h-a-m." That rather shabby
aphorism was typical of Brougham, the prince of cads, who would
be remembered chiefly as the inventor of a new kind of carriage.
Durham would be remembered for the unconscious invention of
the Third British Empire.

No single hand could possibly h^ve written the report in the

302 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

available time, but it was essentially Durham's work and could
hardly have been implemented without his prestige behind it.

There was nothing new in its two principal recommendations. A
legislative union of Upper and Lower Canada in one colony had
long been discussed by Canadians, had been proposed by the Brit-
ish government a few years earlier but abandoned in the face of
Quebec's protest. There was nothing new either in Durham's pro-
posal to give a united Canada and the other Canadian colonies of
the Atlantic coast responsible government. That revolutionary re-
form, which might have prevented the American Revolution sixty
years before, had been urged on Durham in York by a Canadian,
Robert Baldwin.

In accepting it, Durham proposed to alter the whole course of
the Empire's business. Once responsible government had been
granted to the Canadian colonies, the process could not be halted.
It must be the watershed of the Second Empire leading to the
Third and to the modern Commonwealth. If a colonial government
was to be made responsible to an elected legislature, the legislature's
powers could never be limited. A colony could even contract, when
it felt strong enough, out of the Empire.

Moreover, as a dubious British government immediately objected,
if a British governor in Canada must accept the advice of his min-
isters, if that advice conflicted with his instructions from London,
if it imperiled imperial interests, which authority should he obey—
the will of Canada or of Britain? Durham could not answer that
question. It could not be answered by logic or precedent. It must
be answered, like so many others, without logic or precedent, in
the loose, flexible, and entirely pragmatic methods of the British
system, a system only in name.

Durham had seen the first fact of Canada clear and whole— Cana-
dians must be allowed to govern themselves or they would finally
leave the Empire, as the Americans had left it for the same reason.
The issue, as he accurately concluded, was self-government, more
rebellion, or annexation to the United States.

His second conclusion was totally, almost comically, erroneous.
He believed that if the French Canadians of Lower Canada were
joined in legislative union with the English-speaking Canadians of
Upper Canada they would be quietly engulfed and Anglicized.
Their separate language, church, and culture would gradually dis-
appear. One can hardly understand why a man so intelligent could
not see that once the French Canadians were given the power of
self-government they would use it primarily to protect their sep-
arate life. So it was to turn out.

THE DICTATOR AND HIS DISCIPLES 303

These things lay some distance ahead. As Durham was starting
work on his report at Quebec he read in a New York newspaper
the news of his betrayal at home. Brougham, always malignant and
remorseless, had attacked him in Parliament for exceeding his
authority in the banishment of the eight rebels to Bermuda, a
colony outside his jurisdiction.

The power of Brougham, who might have been the most notable
British figure of his age if he had possessed virtue equal to his
talent, was too much for Durham's fair-weather friends. Melbourne
yielded to the pressure and disallowed Durham's ordinance. The
lucky prisoners of Bermuda, as guilty as men could be of treason,
were released. Durham instantly resigned. After only five months
of office in Canada, he boarded his ship with another ceremonial
procession and sailed for England. Quebec townsmen burned
Brougham in effigy.

The deposed dictator reached Plymouth in November. Hastening
his work with the ruin of his health, he pushed his report into print
by early February. About a year later he died of exhaustion, first
of four British governors who would go the same way. His last
words— "Canada will one day do justice to my memory"— were an
understatement. His countrymen built a Greek temple over his
grave. His proper monument is the modern Commonwealth.

Durham was dead but he had left a time bomb in the politics of
Britain.

The practical politicians of London asked themselves whether
his proposed experiment would work, whether it should be allowed
to work at the risk of smashing the centralized Empire. That ques-
tion was hardly less important to Americans than to Canadians. If
the experiment worked, it must produce a second American nation
not long hence and only such a nation could permanently secure
the boundary, still unfixed in Maine and Oregon and no more than
a geographical expression from the Great Lakes to the Rockies.

If the Canadian colonies could not learn to govern themselves
and join together as a nation, the fate of annexation to the Republic,
prepared for them by the statesmen of the Continental Congress,
by Jefferson, and by the present American liberators, must ulti-
mately ensue. Canada could not endure in separate, quarreling
fragments.

On the other hand, if the colonies governed themselves and de-
cided to unite, how could they be compelled to serve the interests
of Britain? What kind of empire would it be if its several members
could go their own separate ways in great affairs? Obviously it would
be no kind of empire ever known before.

304 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BOEDER

Faced with this apparently insuperable dilemma of logic, the
British government instructed its new governor to mark time and
feel out the Canadian situation. Responsible government was in-
definitely delayed. Only legislative union of the two colonies was
to go ahead for the present.

Durham's successor, Charles Poulett Thomson, a timber merchant
and candlestick maker of middle-class origin but as able, as hand-
some, and as sickly as the dictator, had to secure the assent of
Upper and Lower Canada to a joint government and legislature.

They were acceptable to Upper Canada because with its smaller
population it would have equal representation with Lower Canada
in an assembly of eighty-four members and, by combining with the
English-speaking members from Lower Canada, could form an
English-speaking majority, as Durham intended. Lower Canada
opposed the union on those grounds but could not reject it. The
Assembly there had been suspended after the rebellion and re-
placed by Durham's appointed council. So union was formally
approved and enacted by the British Parliament in 1840.

That for Governor Thomson, now established at his shabby little
capital of Kingston, was only the beginning. Britain's rejection of
responsible government in form, as early as 1837, was gradually
dissolving in fact. Thomson must try to get on with the Canadians,
must accept the advice of his appointed council so long as it did
not damage British interests and, in that case, refuse it.

He thus became his own prime minister. He lobbied his legisla-
tion through the Assembly. He began to erect a political party in
his own support among politicians who had each been a party unto
himself, joining with others in brief, shifting combinations, and
having no fixed policy save an insatiable appetite for political
patronage.

The Governor, Prime Minister, and party leader charmed the
backwoods politicians with his Old World manners, his pretty
feminine face, his intellectual power, and his deceptive courage.
Though too sick to live long, he rode about the country (often with
voluntary escorts of settlers on their farm horses), studied every
local problem, and finally appeased the sulking Assembly by secur-
ing British subsidies to finance the suspended work on roads and
the St. Lawrence canals.

The depression began to lift, orderly but not self-government had
been established, and Thomson, like Durham, was worn out. Just as
he was about to address his queer parliament for the last time and
return home, he was thrown from his horse, his broken leg would
not mend, and within a few days he knew he was dying of tetanus.

THE DICTATOR AND HIS DISCIPLES 3(fo

Yet he completed his speech, ending with a prayer for the blessings
of Providence on his colony. When they buried him at Kingston the
prayer seemed unlikely of fulfillment

The next Governor, Sir Charles Bagot, an English gentleman of
the old school, and negotiator of the Rush-Bagot Treaty, found
Canada almost impossible to govern. At least he discovered the
cardinal and permanent fact of Canadian politics— this country
could not be governed at all "without the French."

Would French Canadians ever accept British institutions and
work with their English-speaking compatriots? Would Upper Can-
ada ever abandon Durham's hope and accept a dual society of two
distinct races?

Bagot was too old and tired to hazard an answer. He soon en-
countered the only Canadian who seemed to know it, Robert Bald-
win, a Reformer but a moderate of lofty, cold mind and a contempt
of demagogues, had urged responsible government on Durham and
now urged it on Bagot. The British government's instructions for-
bade that final grant of power. Bagot escaped the dilemma by death.

His successor, Sir Charles Metcalfe, an able but stuffy and literal-
minded civilian administrator from India, regarded Canadians as
subject to the same imperial rules as Indians. His attempt to enforce
them produced the first serious test of responsible government.

Baldwin had entered Metcalfe's council, still hoping that freedom
was broadening slowly down from precedent to precedent. He was
backed by a Reform majority in the Assembly and had formed a
working partnership with the first powerful French Canadian pre-
pared to accept a dual state. Louis Hippolyte Lafontaine had sym-
pathized with the 1837 rebellion, had fled to France after it failed,
had there been noted by Napoleon's veterans as the exact physical
image of the Emperor, had returned to replace Papineau as the
leader of his race, and had taken office with Baldwin. The coopera-
tion between these men of different races established the only
pattern by which Durham's experiment could possibly work, then
or later.

Metcalfe challenged these men and repudiated their theory of
responsible government by making an appointment without con-
sulting them. They instantly resigned to prove that responsible
government did not exist. The destruction of a majority administra-
tion failed to halt Metcalfe's private counterrevolution. He made
himself the leader of a loyalist party, compaigned throughout the
country in an election of fury and riot, and managed to return a
legislative majority favorable to him.

His victory was a brief back-eddy in the current now flowing.

306 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

Metcalfe went home to die. He was replaced by the greatest gov-
ernor since Frontenac, the man who would establish responsible
government, inaugurate the Third Empire, and almost singlehanded
introduce a novel sanity into the joint affairs of Canada and the
United States.

James Bruce, Earl of Elgin and Kincardine, was the son of a
famous father who had carried the Elgin marbles out of Athens and
set them up in England. He had been well educated in government
and he nourished a devout Christians faith in humanity. His
square John Bull's face shone with noble sentiments, his manners
were disarming, his methods mild, but he could manipulate even
the senators of Washington and he turned out to be one of the
toughest men ever sent across the Atlantic.

He needed all those qualities. A man less idealistic or less tough
might well have smashed the great experiment, ended the chance
of an independent Canadian state, and assured the disruption of
the Empire.

No American, observing the extraordinary events of 1849, could
imagine for a moment that a nation, or rather the deranged ele-
ments of a future nation, conceived in vague theory and apparently
dedicated to chaos, could endure much longer. Its politics had
erupted again in mob violence. Its economic foundations had crum-
bled overnight. The most optimistic prophecies of the Jeffersons,
Jacksons, and Clays seemed to be wholly confirmed.

That view failed to take account of events in London. Britain was
embarked on its own revolution, Politically this process was called
Reform; economically, the Industrial Revolution.

Reform had brought the Whigs back to office under Lord John
Russell and the third Earl Grey, brother-in-law of Durham, to the
Colonial Office, The Tories had been broken by Peel in the repeal
of the Corn Laws. His successors were ready to enforce the Durham
theory of responsible government in Canada.

To the leaders of economic revolution, guided by the Free Trade
theories of Adam Smith, Canada no longer looked like an asset. The
tariff preferences on its exports to Britain raised the cost of British
manufactures. The continual deficits of local governments were a
charge on the British taxpayer. Schoolmen of the new religion had
long debated how many angels could dance on the point of the
Free Trade needle but the better minds seemed agreed that this
company did not include the colonies. The eminent oracles of the
Edinburgh Review had declared that "Every man of sense, whether
In the Cabinet or out of it, knows that Canada must at no distant
period be merged in the American Republic."

THE DICTATOR AND HIS DISCIPLES 307

That opinion was widely shared in the new priestcraft of Free
Trade, for it regarded all past human experience as a temporary
aberration, it worshiped the Market as a divine revelation, and it
almost regarded God as the Founder of the Manchester School.

Still, a British government moving steadily into Free Trade and
doubtful about its colonial liabilities, was not quite ready to imple-
ment an economic faith by an irrevocable imperial sacrifice. Instead,
it finally yielded to Durham's recommendation and accepted a
dubious trial of self-government Elgin was sent to Canada with
instructions to follow the advice of his local advisers, at least to the
point where they might seriously damage Britain. The danger point
was not defined and, with luck, might not be reached.

At the same time, the old colonial system was obviously falling
to pieces on the Atlantic coast also. In Nova Scotia, Joseph Howe,
a man of burly frame and square granite face, a graduate printer,
an editor who wrote classic English, a poet who wrote inferior
jingles, a coarse raconteur in the back concessions, a platform orator
of magnetic eloquence, a politician loyal to Britain but implacable
in his demand for self-government, now emerged as the chosen
tribune of his people. He had fought a duel, had driven two gov-
ernors home in disgrace to England, and in his control of Nova
Scotia could no longer be resisted. The new Governor at Halifax,
Sir John Harvey, was instructed, like Governor General Elgin, to
accept the advice of his councilors.

Thus quietly, by secret instructions and official hints, almost by
osmosis, the British government had ended the Second Empire, in
theory anyway. In practical politics the ending was not to be easy
or peaceful.

When Elgin arrived in Montreal, the new Canadian capital, it
was to find much more than two races warring in the bosom of a
single state. The old racial split remained unhealed and newer
sores had developed.

Quebec, under the surface of politics, had changed little since
the Conquest but the English-speaking community was divided be-
tween Tories and Reformers by the apparent disaster of British
free trade and the loss of Canada's essential markets, by the strug-
gle for responsible government and by ferocious sectarian feuds
among the Loyalist Church of England, the Methodists, the Pres-
byterians, and many minor communions. A sudden flood of starving
and plague-stricken immigrants from Ireland— dying like flies on the
Montreal docks and spreading cholera along the St. Lawrence— had
introduced the ancient Irish hatreds of Orangemen and Catholics
into religion and a new violence into politics.

308 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

Weakened by absentee government, by inability to erect a work-
ing government of its own, by internal strain, and by the loss of
overseas trade, Canada had fallen far behind its neighbor, econom-
ically, politically, and spiritually. Its meager population of less than
two and a half millions was frustrated, splintered, and poor while
the Republic had burst into the Southwest, now owned Oregon,
was about to find gold in California, and with its new railways was
building a continental economy of unprecedented wealth.

What was a Christian gentleman out of London's genteel politics
to think of such a country? What could be made of a parliament
in which the shameless figure of Papineau had reappeared, after
his treason, exile, and long indoctrination in the radical notions of
Paris, actually demanding his back pay as a former speaker of the
Lower Canada Assembly? Elgin, for all his faith in human progress,
was appalled.

"Property, especially in the capital," he reported, "has fallen fifty
per cent, in value within the last three years. Three-fourths of the
commercial men are bankrupt, owing to Free Trade; a large pro-
portion of the exportable produce of Canada is obliged to seek a
market in the United States. It pays a duty of twenty per cent, on
the frontier. How long can such a state of things be expected to
endure?"

Not long, it appeared. "No matter what the subject of complaint,"
Elgin added, "or what the party complaining, whether it be alleged
that the French are oppressing the British, or the British the
French— that the Upper Canada debt presses on Lower Canada or
Lower Canadian claims on Upper— whether merchants be bankrupt,
stocks depreciated, roads bad, or seasons unfavorable— Annexation
is invoked as the remedy for all ills, imaginary or real."

Annexation, then, was the overriding issue and it must settle
Canada's future one way or the other, soon and forever. The turning
point, long foreseen, had been reached. There would be a self-
governing nation or no nation at all, and the outcome depended at
die moment more on Elgin than on any other man. "To
render Annexation by violence impossible and by other means
as improbable as may be," he wrote, "is the polar star of my
policy/*

The catalyst of all these forces—political, racial, religious, and
economic— appeared overnight in a piece of legislation called the
Rebellion Losses Bill and designed to award generous compensa-
tion to the victims of the 1837 disorders. While convicted traitors
were excluded from its benefits, many persons who had participated
in the rebellion would be paid handsomely for their treason. Such

THE DICTATOR AND HIS DISCIPLES 309

was the Baldwin-Lafontaine compromise between the two races
that must compromise or fight.

The loyalists of Upper Canada indignantly rejected the com-
promise as an outrage and petitioned Elgin to disallow the hateful
legislation. He listened but refused to commit himself, waiting for
the boil to ripen. As he knew, this was the absolute test of the
great experiment. The Rebellion Losses Bill had been passed by a
2-to-l Reform majority in the Assembly. It was recommended by
his chief advisers. If it was disallowed, responsible government
would become a farce.

On the other hand, by approving the advice of his council and
the decision of the Assembly, Elgin must face the fury of the loyal-
ists, who would accuse him of betraying them and the Queen. By
disapproving he probably would foment a new rebellion among the
French Canadians and Upper Canada Reformers. The war of words
might well become a war of muskets and pikes again— or, more
likely, Canada's voluntary annexation by the United States. The
issue had become stark clear. Either Canada must manage its own
affairs, however foolishly, accept the management of the crown
through its agent, or seek escape from the Empire. The birth hour
of this Third Empire had arrived. So Elgin, knowing everything,
waited and said nothing.

No one else in all Canada seemed to be silent. The introduction
of the indemnity bill had revived all the passions of the rebellion.
"No pay to rebels!" shouted the Tories and attacked the French
Canadians as "Aliens and rebels." W. H. Blake, Solicitor General for
Upper Canada, retorted in the Assembly that the Tories were
"Rebels to their constitution and country." At which Sir Allan Mac-
Nab, an old soldier and deep-dyed loyalist, leaped up to give Blake
"the lie with circumstance." The two men rushed at each other,
were pulled apart by the sergeant-at-arms and taken into custody
until they cooled oflf. Early use of MacNab's famous silver-mounted
dueling pistols was expected but the struggle was too big for
settlement on the field of honor.

The country writhed in speeches, demonstrations, parades, and
riots. Baldwin, Blake, and William Lyon Mackenzie were burned
in effigy. A reporter of the New York Herald viewed this spreading
anarchy with satisfaction and predicted "a complete and perfect
separation of those provinces from the rule of England/*

This was a well-worn prediction and as unsound as it had always
been. In his lonely residence of "Monklands," outside Montreal,
Elgin was watching not the death of the Canadian colonies but a
new state and a new empire in their first labor pangs.

310 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

His mind was made up: "If I had dissolved Parliament I might
have produced a rebellion, but assuredly I should not have pro-
duced a change of ministry." The alternative of "reserving" the^ in-
demnity bill and leaving the British government to approve or reject
it he considered cowardly. The responsibility "rests and ought, I
think, to rest on my shoulders. If I pass the Bill, whatever mischief
ensues may possibly be repaired, if the worst comes to the worst, by
the sacrifice of me. Whereas if the case be referred to England, it is
not impossible that Her Majesty may have before her the alternative
of provoking a rebellion in Lower Canada ... or of wounding the
susceptibilities of some of the best subjects she has in the prov-
ince/'

The ice of the St. Lawrence broke early in the spring of 1849
and with it the brittle substance of Canadian society. The first
ship was sighted in the river on April 25. The Assembly having
passed a new tariff act, little noted in the larger excitement, the
government proposed to apply it to the cargo of this approaching
vessel. Francis Hincks, the treasurer, drove hurriedly out to "Monk-
lands" and asked Elgin to appear in Montreal and approve the new
customs duties. At the same time he could sign the Rebellion Losses

Bill.

Elgin., expecting trouble, was staggered by his reception in the
city. A restive crowd watched him approach the remodeled market
building that. housed the Assembly. There he signed all the legisla-
tion laid before him. The news passed swiftly to the townsmen
waiting outside. Elgin left the parliament buildings to be greeted,
in his own words, "with mingled cheers and hootings from a crowd
by no means numerous. ... A small knot of individuals, consist-
ing, it has since been ascertained, of persons of a respectable class
in society, pelted the carriage with missiles which they must have
brought with them for the purpose."

The missiles included a rotten egg, smashed against the cheek of
the Queen's representative. He drove on without turning his head.
One rotten egg would be a small price to pay for responsible gov-
ernment. It was only the first installment.

That night Canadian democracy took leave of its senses— clanging
firebells; streets filled with mobs and flaming torches; on the Champ
de Mars a riotous multitude, hoarse orators screaming "Tyranny!";
then the shout, "To the parliament buildings!"; mobs surging into
town, smashing Hincks's newspaper plant on the way, breaking into
the Assembly, driving out the members, splintering the furniture:
ua man with a broken nose" in the speaker's chair declaring: "I dis-
solve this Housel"

THE DICTATOR AND HIS DISCIPLES 311

It was in truth dissolved. Was Canadian democracy dissolved
with it?

The mob had no time for these abstractions. It was lighting balls
of paper and tossing them about the wrecked Assembly hall. In a
moment the center of responsible government was aflame. Firemen
turned back by the rioters, the seventy-two city policemen helpless,
the militia called out too late, the buildings soon a smoking ruin,
all official records burned, the Queen's portrait carried through the
flames by some intrepid young man— thus had responsible govern-
ment achieved its agonizing birth.

But not quite born yet. Next day there were attacks on the Reform
leaders' houses; arrest of ringleaders by Lafontaine; destruction of
his home and stables; a thousand special constables, armed with

Eistols and cutlasses, and regiments of militia patrolling the streets;
)ur days of civic revolution.

The Assembly, though homeless, was unafraid. It drew up an
address protesting its loyalty to the Queen and Elgin and decided
to present it to him not secretly and safely in rural "Monklands"
but publicly, despite the risk, in the heart of the city. For this
ceremony it ostentatiously chose the Chateau de Ramezay, once the
residence of the French governors and headquarters of Montgomery
and Franklin in 75. The story of this notable building was to have
another violent chapter.

Elgin had been assaulted once with rotten eggs. He was warned
that on a second visit to Montreal he might be murdered. It did
not occur to him to avoid this danger. On April 30 he drove into
town again, escorted by a troop of dragoons and looking straight
ahead, motionless and cool, when the stones began to fly. A howl-
ing crowd tried to block his entry into the cMteau. His dragoons
shouldered a narrow passage for him.

The Christian gentleman had not lost his sense of humor. He
entered the chateau carrying in his hand a two-pound rock which
had fallen into his carriage.

The address of loyalty was read and accepted. Elgin started home
again by a back street The mob soon discovered him and followed
in "cabs, caleches and everything that would run . . . the carriage
was bitterly assailed in the main street of the St. Lawrence suburbs.
The good and rapid driving of his postillions enabled him to clear
the desperate mob, but not till the head of his brother, Colonel
Bruce, had been cut, injuries inflicted on the chief of police and
on Captain Jones, commanding the escort, and every panel of the
carriage driven in."

The loyalist counterrevolution had demonstrated its loyalty to

312 THE STRUGGLE FOB THE BORDER

queen and empire by hounding their representative out of the Ca-
nadian capital. He escaped into the protection of "Monklands"
within an inch of his life. But Elgin had won. By refusing to meet
violence with violence, rejecting the use of martial law, sitting
quiet in his house and writing his cold, factual dispatches to Lon-
don, he had at last established responsible government. Could the
Canadians manage it? That was the only question remaining.

The counterrevolution, failing by violence, now attempted to
destroy Canada by lawful means.

A lunatic fringe of Canadian Toryism had imitated the left-wing
lunatics of '37 in riot, had assaulted the Queen's deputy, burned the
center of government, and compelled the Assembly to move the
Canadian capital from Montreal to Quebec and Toronto, which
would be occupied alternately. All this it had done in loyalty to the
Queen, in defense of the Empire, and in punishment of the former
rebels.

And what had been the loyalists' reward? They had been be-
trayed by a British governor when he signed the Rebellion Losses
Bill. They had been betrayed by a -British government when it
introduced free trade. The poison of betrayal turned the Montreal
Tories sour and a little mad. They swallowed their past, their prin-
ciples, and their pride by proposing that Canada be annexed forth-
with to the United States.

If Canada could not be saved for the Empire in their way it was
not worth saving. If it could not provide Montreal with the satis-
factory profits of preferential trade, the businessmen must forget all
their battles of the border, all their martial memories, and if neces-
sary their sacred honor. They must follow, like the Tories of Britain,
the new god called the Market and find that deity in the Republic
even though they had been resisting it since Carleton's time.

The Annexation Manifesto issued in the autumn of 1849 was the
work of embittered loyalists and desperate businessmen. It argued,
with economic determinism worthy of Adam Smith, that annexa-
tion was Canada's natural future (a fact oddly overlooked before)
and that Britain desired it (a slander instantly denied by the British
government, which called the Manifesto a document "scarcely short
of treason").

Over a thousand merchants and politicians, some of them the
leading figures of Montreal, signed the Manifesto and soon wished
they hadn't, for it was to become in the Canadian mind a register
of infamy. Outside Montreal the plan of national suicide received
no serious support. Quebec would never approve annexation be-
cause it would assuredly mean the destruction of the French-Cana-

THE DICTATOK AND HIS DISCIPLES 313

dian race and culture. The radical English-speaking elements had
listened to Mackenzie's republican ideas sympathetically twelve
years before but were now pacified by the grant of responsible gov-
ernment. Most Tories refused to trade the British connection for a
chance of business in the United States. Few Canadians in any
party believed that annexation would be profitable even commer-
cially.

In this test, as in all others previously and afterwards, the Cana-
dian instinct was clear and overwhelming— these people somehow,
sometime, would build a nation of their own. Thus the Manifesto,
exciting for the moment and humiliating in retrospect, failed to re-
verse and only swelled the tide of Canadian independence. The
work of Carleton at Quebec and Brock at Queenston was confirmed
again.

The United States, having twice fought vainly for Canada, showed
little interest in acquiring it by consent. Politics in Washington
were concerned with the new territories secured by the Mexican
War, with the gold discoveries of California, and above all, with
the developing conflict between North and South.

The American government made no response to the offer from
Montreal. Vermont and New York passed resolutions of approval
in their legislatures but nothing came of them. The Republic as a
whole saw no reason to take over Canada against its evident wishes
when, no doubt, it would be clamoring unanimously for admission
a little latter.

Montreal's Manifesto thus proved a brief sensation and total
fiasco, but its early death did not kill the idea behind it. Annexation
would remain a kind of dark upper attic in the Canadian mind, a
possible retreat if all else failed; in the American mind, a long hope
for the future. Always thenceforth it would stand dimly in the back-
ground of every great Canadian decision and twice it would enter
again the foreground of practical politics with continental conse-
quences.

21

Days of Goodwill

[1849-1862]

ONE OF THE LOYAL TORIES WHO HAD KEPT HIS HEAD THROUGH
the frenzied days of 1849 was the young Kingston lawyer,
John A. Maedonald. He had been elected to the Assembly
in opposition to Reform, had found in politics his natural element,
and for all his convivial habits and lighthearted manners, was be-
ginning to attract the notice of older men. "Our fellows," he said of
the Manifesto, 'lost their heads/' He refused to sign it and, instead,
proposed the formation of the British America League as a "safety
valve" for the Tory Party. The league defended the British connec-
tion, began to advocate the confederation of all the Canadian
colonies, and found in Maedonald the final architect of that union.

The same period of reappraisal also produced Macdonald's im-
placable and lifelong enemy, George Brown, a Toronto editor of
huge frame, bristling whisker, and dry, powerful intellect. This
leader of the Clear Grits— the future Liberal Party— was a man
utterly antipathetic to Maedonald in his logic, his lack of humor,
and his hatreds, especially his hatred of French Canada and the
Catholic Church. Thus began a struggle of men and ideas that
would bring Canada to nationhood, Maedonald to pre-eminence and
Brown almost to the stature of martyrdom after his murder by a
disgruntled employee.

Elgin discerned the true nature of Canada's problem in 1849 more
clearly than most of his Canadian advisers. "Depend upon it," he
wrote to London, "our commercial embarrassments are our real
difficulty. Political discontent, properly so called, there is none . , .
I am confident I could carry Canada unscathed through all these
evils of transition and place the [British] connection on a surer
foundation than ever if I could only tell the people of the province

314

DAYS OF GOODWILL 315

that, as regards the conditions of material prosperity, they would
be raised to a level with their [American] neighbors. But if this be
not achieved, if free navigation and reciprocal trade with the Union
be not secured for us, the worst, I fear, will come, and that at no
distant date."

There, in a British mouth, spoke the logic of North American
geography. It had failed in the attempt to join the two American
communities politically. It might succeed in joining them economi-
cally. And, as Elgin foresaw, the commercial union would prevent
the political.

An American market was, for the Canadian colonies, the only
available alternative to the diminished markets of Free Trade
Britain. Until now Canada had sold little south of the border but
it was beginning to find opportunities for its wheat and lumber in
the growing American cities. As early as 1846 an enterprising Cana-
dian businessman, William Hamilton Merritt, seeing his grain mills
and canal works threatened by the prospect of free trade in Britain,
had advocated the removal of tariffs from the North American
boundary. His insistent agitation finally persuaded the Canadian
Assembly to petition London for a reciprocity treaty. London was
agreeable to a plan fitting its own commercial theories and likely
to cure the perpetual problem of Canada.

When approached in 1849, however, the American government
was cool, though the Congress already had considered legislation
to permit the free entry of some Canadian products, if Canada
treated American imports likewise. This project failed in the Con-
gress, but Canada adopted it.

Reciprocity remained merely a slogan for the next two years and
seemed unlikely to become anything else. Strong protectionist in-
dustries in the American North were opposed to the competition of
Canadian imports. The South saw in reciprocity the first stage of
Canadian annexation and the addition of several new anti-slave
states to the Union. Suddenly reciprocity was rescued by a curious
agent, the codfish of the Atlantic coast.

American fishermen had been excluded from most of the terri-
torial waters of the Canadian colonies since 1818. What were
territorial waters? According to Britain, the three-mile limit ran
from headland to headland on the sinuous coastline. According to
the United States, it followed the curves of the shore and thus
allowed Americans into many teeming bays and inlets regarded by
the Canadian fishermen as their exclusive preserves.

Aroused by the Canadians' growing resentment of foreign
poachers, the British government announced that its navy would

316 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BOEDER

protect the three-mile limit as Britain defined it. The American
government dispatched a warship to the disputed waters. These
gestures alarmed both sides, for neither wanted another war, and
compelled them to consider a peaceful settlement, not only of the
fisheries but of all commercial problems. So Elgin's project of reci-
procity was revived and he was chosen to negotiate it.

No better choice could have been made. Elgin had proved him-
self a strong governor in Montreal. He proved himself a smooth
diplomat in Washington. American senators found his charm irre-
sistible, his dinners opulent, his wine impeccable. It would be writ-
ten in the Canadian apocrypha that his reciprocity treaty was
"floated through on champagne" but actually it required much
judicious pressure.

Elgin fortunately understood the art of pressure and soon pro-
cured a useful instrument to exert it in a mysterious person, Israel
deWolfe Andrews, the first big-time American public relations
counsel.

Andrews had been hired previously by the American government
to report on conditions in Canada; he had served many generous
Canadian employers who desired reciprocity and he had taken
"such measures as the circumstances of the case require ... to
keep the public mind in a quiet state." Those measures were costly,
but Andrews had no difficulty in raising campaign funds on both
sides of the border.

Elgin immediately hired this genius— first of a long line— who held
that statesmanship is no substitute for money judiciously spent in
the right places. Andrews's bill for such donations to ninety persons
in Washington totaled $118,000. A reciprocity agreement, as Elgin
knew, would be cheap at the price.

Negotiations, oiled by Andrews and floated in champagne, slid
forward with surprising speed. The American government was de-
termined to keep its fishermen close to the Atlantic shores of the
Canadian colonies and would pay for those rights by encouraging
the importation of Canadian goods. The North as a whole seemed
satisfied, because reciprocity ultimately would mean annexation.
The South was quietly persuaded that reciprocity would prevent
annexation by giving Canadians prosperity and contentment within
the British Empire—an argument, sedulously cultivated by Elgin,
which had the added advantage of being true.

With Elgin's charm and logic, Andrews's labors of public rela-
tions, the unsound assumptions of the North and the sound assump-
tions of the South, the Reciprocity Treaty of June, 1854, passed with-
out difficulty through the Congress. The only serious opposition

BAYS OF GOODWILL 317

came from the legislature of Nova Scotia. It saw its fisheries frit-
tered away without adequate compensation but, after a brief argu-
ment in Halifax, the treaty was ratified by all the colonial Assem-
blies.

American fishermen secured access to the inshore waters of the
Atlantic colonies, where the catch was rich; and the Canadians to
the American waters, above Florida, where it was poor. However,
the free entry of the Canadians' catch into the American market
was a substantial benefit to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick*

For Canada, Upper and Lower, the great prize won by Elgin was
the abolition of customs duties on nearly all Canadian natural
products. The price paid for it, in addition to fishing rights, was
reasonable. Canadian tariffs were removed from turpentine, rice,
and unmanufactured tobacco to satisfy the South and on many
other products to satisfy the North. The United States was given
free navigation of the entire St. Lawrence, Canadian ships being
admitted to Lake Michigan.

Elgin's Treaty was to last for ten years, after which it could be
denounced by either side. In those days of increasing goodwill and
dawning economic sense reciprocity seemed likely to be permanent.
It had the sanction of both parties to the bargain. It had also the
sanction of geography. It recognized the obvious fact of continental
economics— that the United States and the Canadian colonies could
profit most by producing and swapping the goods which each could
produce most efficiently.

The treaty, in short, introduced almost the first ray of sanity in
the long and usually insensate struggle of the border by proposing
that two peoples living apart politically should prosper by co-
operation commercially.

The sanction of geography, economics, and sanity was not
enough. Reciprocity would soon encounter much harder facts, the
facts of nationality, racial pride, old prejudice, and sheer accident.
It could not hope to survive such primitive forces.

The new arrangements had hardly been signed before the sur-
vival of Canada itself began to appear questionable again.

A rising young Tory politician like Macdonald, for example, or
his radical competitor, Brown, could see already, above the bitter
and shifting struggle of politics at Toronto and Quebec, much
larger affairs out west that might well doom all their hopes.

Growing reciprocal trade, together with rapid canal and railway
construction, had lifted Canada out of depression into an unprece-
dented boom, had quite overcome the disaster of British free trade,
but the boom was narrowly based on the St. Lawrence Valley.

318 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

Once across the Alleghenies, the Americans found the rich plains
of the Middle West awaiting them. The Canadians' movement out
of the St. Lawrence Valley was barred by the badlands, the lakes,
rock, and stunted trees of the Pre-Cambrian shield.

Many settlers, discouraged by the shortage of fertile land in
Upper Canada or the difficulty of acquiring it from rapacious land
jobbers, emigrated to the United States. The Maritime colonies of
the Atlantic, their lumber markets in Britain curtailed, their fisheries
open to Americans, began to export their young men to New Eng-
land. The Republic would remain a strong magnet for the human
failures of Canada and for those seeking quick success. A tide of
immigration, which had flowed northward until the War of 1812,
was reversed.

Halfway through the century the United States had built the
skeleton of a transcontinental economy, was fleshing it with political
organization, had proved its ability to govern and develop the
whole land mass between the Atlantic and the newly won state of
California.

This westward march passed by, almost without a glance, the
vast and empty Canadian plains. When the Americans had occupied
and exploited all their own land south of the border, would the
pressure of growing population turn them northward? The case of
Oregon had proved that population could be irresistible and pop-
ulation was Canada's fatal lack.

The Colonial Office in London admitted that it had never been
able to restrain that pressure in America or other continents and
"The Government of the United States will be equally unable to
prevent such an occurrence." An imaginary, unmarked boundary
line of itself would not hold the Canadian West if the Americans
wanted it. The hidden fact, as yet unknown to either side, was
that the Americans did not want it enough to take it.

No British or Canadian government could operate on that doubt-
ful assumption. If the West was to be surely held it could be held
only by settlement and in the eighteen-fifties time obviously was
running out.

Between the St. Lawrence and the Pacific Canadian settlement
on the prairies was confined to Selkirk's Red River colony, nourish-
ing some five thousand Scots and French-Canadian half-breeds,
whose main contact with the outside world was through Minnesota.
They were powerfully attracted to the booming American country
close at hand and did little business with Canada. American immi-
grants from Minnesota continually agitated among the Red River
folk for annexation and won some converts. Here was a potentially

DAYS OF GOODWILL 319

dangerous southward pull in the geographical center of a future
transcontinental Canadian state.

From the Red River to the Pacific lived a few fur traders, the
Indians, and the buffalo. And beyond the appalling barrier of the
Rockies, on the southern tip of Vancouver Island, stood a minute
crown colony managed by the Hudson's Bay Company.

Governor James Douglas's little Fort Victoria appeared the weak-
est of the British colonies and the most likely to fall. As a settlement
it had made no progress. The company had agreed to promote
colonization, Douglas was as anxious as the British government to
hold the boundary of Fucas Strait, but colonization was the fur
trade's natural enemy.

In 1856, therefore, Victoria slumbered as a peaceful trade post
with a few acres of surrounding farm lands, ignorant of the imperial
currents already threatening it. The cold and swarthy Governor
was not asleep. He had been startled by sudden news from the
tributaries of the Fraser River.

A prospector named James Huston had crossed the border by
the old fur route to the Okanagan valley and moved northward to
hit the Thompson River at the Hudson's Bay post of Fort Kainloops.
There he had sampled the gravel of Tranquille Creek and found his
gold pan full of nuggets. It was filled also with incalculable
consequences for the British Empire, Canada, and the United
States.

Douglas guessed at once what the discovery of gold would mean.
"It appears," he wrote hurriedly to London in 1857, "that the aurif-
erous character is becoming daily more extensively developed,
through the exertions of the native Indian tribes who, having tasted
the sweets of gold mining, are devoting much of their time and
attention to that pursuit. The reported wealth of the ... mines
is causing much excitement among the population of the United
States territory of Washington and Oregon, and I have no doubt
that a great number of the people from those territories will be
attracted thither with the return of fine weather in the spring."

The Fraser's secret was out It soon reached the restless miners
of California, where the great rush of '49 was on the ebb. The
original Argonauts surged north to the new El Dorado. They
crammed the steamboats, sleeping in shifts on the decks. They came
by sailboat, rowboat, and canoe. In the spring of '58 Douglas found
his fort besieged by 20,000 men, all bound for the Fraser. This
overnight invasion by an army of rough-looking and probably law-
less treasure hunters, mostly Americans, appeared more dangerous
than the peaceful settlement which had driven Douglas out of

320 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

Oregon. He soon saw, however, that the invaders were not so law-
less as they looked.

"They are represented as being, with some exceptions/* he re-
ported, "a specimen of the worst of the population of San Francisco;
the very dregs, in fact, of society. Their conduct here would have
led me to form a very different opinion."

The American miners, unlike the settlers of Oregon, had little
interest in land, government, or Manifest Destiny. They sought
nothing but gold. Having bought $2,000,000 worth of supplies from
Douglas, they left Victoria as rapidly as they had come and pushed
up the Fraser.

Soon they were joined by an overland rush out of Oregon. The
coal mines and sawmills of Puget Sound closed for lack of workers.
Farmers abandoned their spring plowing. Soldiers deserted the
forts. It seemed likely to Douglas that he must confront most of
the population of the Pacific coast and he had learned, in the
tragedy of McLoughlin, that an American population inevitably
would demand its own government.

Douglas, a tougher man, did not intend to repeat that tragedy.
During the first year of the rush Britain's power in the West hung
almost entirely on this one man, who lacked any official authority
over the Fraser River country. His commission covered only Van-
couver Island, but that technical flaw did not deter him for a mo-
ment. As there was no time to secure new authority from London,
he acted without it.

A fee of $6 was charged for every rowboat and canoe entering
the Fraser and $12 for a decked vessel. No one could pan a shovelful
of gravel without a miner's license of 10 and later 21 shillings a
month. These deliberate gestures of sovereignty informed the for-
eigner that he was on British territory only at the Queen's pleasure
and must obey her laws.

So far Douglas lacked not only authority but any power to en-
force laws not yet written. He had no army or police force. He was
running a bold bluff. What if the bluff was called? What if the
American miners clashed with the Indians and appealed to Wash-
ington for protection? How could Douglas resist official American
intervention? As he could not resist it, he must prevent it by strict
enforcement of the law, quite illegally, and for this purpose he
needed a judge.

In answer to his frantic plea, the British government selected the
most unlikely judge available. His name was Matthew Baillie
Begbie, already a failure in the legal profession of London and re-
duced to the humble job of reporting the courts for the Law Times.

DAYS OF GOODWILL 321

No established lawyer had any wish to be judge of a wilderness at
£800 a year. Begbie— especially after his brother had stolen his
girl— was glad to escape from England on any terms.

Though he knew no law worth mentioning, he appeared, in the
words of the Colonial Secretary, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a writer
of colorful fiction, as a man "who could truss a murderer and hang
him to the nearest tree." It was not the first time the British govern-
ment, by mere chance, had picked exactly the right man.

Douglas could hardly have suspected that when he beheld the
flashy figure of Begbie descending the gangplank at Victoria in
November, 1858. The new judge was just under forty years old,
a giant in stature, with the waxed mustaches, the pointed beard,
and the arrogant eye of Mephistopheles. Douglas surveyed this his-
trionic creature skeptically but thought he might do.

They sailed immediately for the mainland to introduce the law
officially in the gold fields. At Fort Langley, Douglas swore in the
judge. The judge then swore in Douglas as governor of the new
mainland colony of British Columbia. The law was legal and gov-
ernment established from the Rockies to the sea.

Begbie set out on horseback; he heard the disputes over mining
claims and scribbled his judgments in the saddle; he empaneled
juries to try criminals, acting as judge, prosecutor, and defense
counsel; he screeched and raved in his nasal voice at jurors who re-
turned the wrong verdict; he was threatened with assassination and,
overhearing the plotters from his hotel room, contemptuously emp-
tied a chamber pot on their heads; he jailed a newspaper editor for
contempt, was himself accused of corruption, and spent years dis-
proving the charge.

He became, in fact, the Queen's law on horseback, her writ car-
ried in his saddlebags—a builder of empire, a tyrant in public, a
prodigal philanthropist and humble Christian in private, who had
his grave marked only with the words: "Lord, be merciful to me a
sinner/* The American miners understood, feared, and obeyed the
"Hanging Judge."

This unique partnership of the silent Douglas and the garrulous
Begbie had not been formed a moment too soon. At the end of '58
some thirty-three thousand miners were washing the sand bars of
the black Fraser Canyon. Douglas now heard the news he had
expected from the beginning. The Indians were on the warpath.
White men's bodies came floating down the river. A series of mas-
sacres, the number of their victims never known, was quickly sup-
pressed by the miners' vigilance committees but they were what
Douglas most feared— the miners were taking the law into their own

322 THE STRUGGLE FOB THE BORDER

hands. Latest dispatches indicated that they might take British
Columbia as well.

At Yale, the head of Fraser navigation, Ned McGowan, a dis-
graced judge and desperado from California, had quarreled with the
local magistrate, arrested him for "contempt of court" and, with a
junta of twenty kindred spirits, had fined him $50. McGowan appar-
ently was setting up a government of his own. While it was only a
barroom posse, it could quickly grow into something more serious.
It might well be, like the first settlers' government of Oregon, an-
other unplanned eruption of Manifest Destiny.

Here, then, was a clear test of British sovereignty. Douglas loaded
a hundred British sailors from a visiting warship, some hundred and
fifty newly arrived Royal Engineers, Judge Begbie, and a cannon on
Tom Wright's stern-wheeler. As that overburdened little craft pad-
dled slowly up the river and headed into the bank at Yale, McGowan
blustered and threatened to resist the government, then quickly
changed his mind when he saw the troops and the cannon. The
absurd rebellion ended with its leader paying a public apology and
a fine and giving a champagne dinner at Hill's Bar for the officers
who had arrested him.

It was a small affair, a mere comedy, and no blood or tears had
been shed, yet precisely the sort of spontaneous incident which,
countless times before, had grown into large affairs along the bound-
ary. Douglas's prompt demonstration of force, Begbie's law, in-
vented ia his own head and enforced on horseback, the miners'
generally good behavior and their lack of interest in anything except
gold held the Fraser, that natural line of power long ago identified
by Simpson.

The immediate possibility of crisis passed. The miners gutted the
river bars and pronounced the Fraser a "humbug." Within a year
the tide of invasion drained back to California and Oregon, the river
towns were deserted, and the bankrupt merchants of Fort Victoria
"could only stand by their doors and project idle spittle into the
streets."

Douglas and his forgotten capital lived once more in peace. They
had not heard of four ragged men who, in the autumn of '60, strug-
gled eastward from the Fraser, reached Quesnel Lake, and followed
an unmapped creek northward into the mountains. Their names
were Doc Keithley, John Rose, Sandy MacDonald, and George
Weaver.

One bitter night—food gone on the eve of winter, the trail behind
soon to be blocked by snow, the creeks empty of gold— the desperate
partners sat down by their campfire to debate a question of life and

DAYS OF GOODWILL 323

death. Should they push on or retreat while there was yet
time?

They slept on that question and in the morning awakened to see,
across an upland valley, the glitter of a little stream. If it yielded
nothing, they agreed that they would walk back to the coast.

The first pan of gravel from the creek contained a quarter of a
pound of nuggets. Four crazy men washed gravel all that day, filled
their pockets with gold, and lay down, exhausted, in the darkness.
They awoke under a foot of snow. And now the great Cariboo gold
rush was on.

It brought madmen from every corner of the world— the returning
Argonauts from California, planters from the deep South, gamblers
from New York, workmen from New England, clerks from London,
painted dance-hall girls from Germany (the memorable Hurdy-
Gurdies), yellow men from Asia, and even caravans of lunatics from
Upper Canada, who crossed the continent by ox train, slid down the
upper Fraser on rafts, lost many lives in the current, and never
found a single speck of gold.

This, for the Hudson's Bay Company, was the end of fur monop-
oly and the good old days. Douglas no longer faced an invasion of
miners but a permanent population.

The weird town of Barkerville— named for Billy Barker, first miner
to dig down through the blue clay and reach the dazzling bedrock,
only to end in an old man's home— sprang up beside Williams Creek
in a single muddy street of saloons, stores, hotels, dance halls, and a
roaring opera house.

The new army of all nations burst through the narrow gut of the
Fraser Canyon by the Indians' old trail in Fraser's footsteps; it built
a detour, at ten miles a day, through the swampy jungles of Harrison
Lake; it pushed stern-wheelers halfway to the Rockies; drove ox
trains and pack mules to death and even imported twenty-one
camels to carry a thousand pounds apiece until the fetid stench of
these animals scared every ox and mule off the trail.

No trail could serve this massive migration and resulting settle-
ment. Douglas saw now that the game of fur was finished. He sur-
rendered all his old hopes in the decision to build a wagon road
from the head of navigation on the river to Barkerville on the
western flank of the Rockies.

As usual, he lacked both money and authority. No matter, the
road must be built or the uncounted thousands of miners in the gold
fields would starve for lack of supplies. Moreover, a road was essen-
tial to govern this swarming territory and hold it for the crown.

The shocked British government therefore read a dispatch from

324 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

its governor, dated October 24, 1861, announcing that he would
build a road "to reduce the cost of transport, thereby securing the
whole trade of the colony for Eraser's river and defeating aU at-
tempts at competition from Oregon/' Thus spoke a natural geopoli-
tician. How would he pay for his road? "I have in these circum-
stances come to the resolution of meeting the contingency and
raising the necessary funds by effecting a loan of fifteen or twenty
thousand pounds in this country."

Again he had exceeded his powers. But on money borrowed from
the Victoria banks and with the labor of a few Royal Engineers,
some Chinese, and any idle miners he could find, Douglas undertook
the most extraordinary feat of construction yet attempted in America.

Two years later he had finished a road 385 miles long and 18 feet
wide, at a cost of $1,250,000. And what a road! It clung like a gos-
samer to the blank cliffs of the Fraser Canyon; it was bored through
solid rock or propped on fragile toothpicks; it crossed the river on a
suspension bridge by cables woven on the spot; it wound through
the upland jack pine forest, was broken by a steamboat service on
the Upper Fraser and finally, across the gravel tailings of the Wil-
liams Creek claims, it ended in the muddy street of Barkerville.

Conquered at last, the turbulent Fraser of the far West had com-
plemented the peaceful St. Lawrence of the East. Both of them had
carried Canadians into the interior. Both had given the future
Canadian nation an essential line of power. The gold of Cariboo,
like the furs of eastern Canada, had brought in a permanent popu-
lation and altered all the prospects of British America. It was no
longer a group of colonies on the Atlantic and the St. Lawrence. It
had leapfrogged the prairies and landed on the Pacific slope. It
finally possessed the ingredients of a transcontinental state.

The ingredients only. Unless the eastern and western settlements
could be joined and the empty center filled, there could be no such
state.

22

Old Tomorrow

[1860-1866]

JTT^HE SOVEREIGN FACT OF THE EMPTY WEST WAS UNDEBSTOOD BY A

I few men in the politics of Canada, now reeling toward new

JL chaos or final paralysis. Brown, leader of the Upper Canada
Reformers, saw the West as Canada's only escape from the strait-
jacket of the St. Lawrence economy. "We can beat the United
States/' he wrote in his Toronto Globe, "if we start at once. It is an
empire we have in view."

Brown could solve any problem in theory. In the practice of poli-
tics his doctrinaire approach, his hysterical rages, and his quarrels
with his French-Canadian colleagues made him an unequaled critic,
an impossible leader.

Macdonald, the patient and durable man (called Old Tomorrow
for his habit of deliberate delay), the plodding, indispensable
mechanic of the groaning political machine, could see as far as
Brown in terms of geography. In terms of politics he knew that the
machine must first be repaired and made to work before any prac-
tical problem like the acquisition of the West, or indeed the survival
of Canada itself, could be solved.

The machine was not working as Durham had hoped, as Elgin
had planned. It was hardly working at all. The union of Upper and
Lower Canada was legal but no more. The decision to give both the
old colonies equal representation in Parliament, regardless of popu-
lation, had produced recurring deadlock between the English-
speaking and French races.

Two flimsy political parties, in constant shift and realignment,
attempted to span this old gulf.

The old Tories, lately calling themselves the Liberal-Conservative
Party and dominated by Macdonald in Upper Canada, had formed

325

326 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

an alliance with the conservative Roman Catholics of Quebec, under
Georges Etienne Cartier who had once followed Papineau but now
sought a reconciliation with the Protestant English. This conserva-
tive combination of Macdonald and Cartier had constructed, on the
Reform foundation laid by Baldwin and Lafontaine, the only kind
of national party that could possibly govern such a split community.

In Cartier, a brisk man of business with a terrier face, Quebec
accepted the fact that the French Canadians were a minority and
could not hope to be anything else. He had strong support in the
church for, after the European revolutions of 1848, it held liberalism
in horror. And he knew how to win elections.

In Macdonald, English-speaking Canada, or a large part of it,
accepted the fact that the French-Canadian minority would never
be absorbed, as Durham had expected, that Canada must always be
a dual society. Treat the French Canadians as a nation, Macdonald
said, "and they will act as a free people usually do— generously.
Treat them as a faction and they become factious." Refusing to
"ride the Protestant horse/' Brown's reliable steed, in Upper Canada
and enduring heavy short-run electoral losses in the hope of long-
run gains, Macdonald was basing his future for the moment mainly
on Quebec. While Brown plied his editorial scalpel, Macdonald had
learned the inner anatomy of Canada, not by dissection but by
instinct and practical experience with votes.

The Reform Party, soon to be called Liberals, was a loose partner-
ship of the Upper Canada Clear Grits under Brown and Antoine
Aime Dorion's Quebec Parti Rouge, a movement deriving its democ-
racy and anticlericalism from the European revolutions. This brittle
union suffered grievously in Quebec and the Macdonald-Cartier
party increased its strength from Brown's feverish attacks on Cathol-
icism and his demand for parliamentary representation by popula-
tion ("Rep. by Pop."), meaning domination of Parliament by Upper
Canada.

The deepening racial deadlock and the conflict between these
loose groups were driving the parliamentary system toward complete
breakdown. Governments rose and fell in fluid, short-lived coali-
tions. Lesser men, like Etienne Tache from Lower and Sandfield
Macdonald from Upper Canada, attained titular office now and
then but the only permanent parcels of power were in the hands of
John A. Macdonald, Cartier, and Brown, all of whom held the title
of first minister at one time or another. So far, however, no man and
no party commanded enough power to give the country stable gov-
ernment, a consistent policy of any sort, or the energy needed to
possess the West,

OLD TOMORROW 327

Men like Alexander Tilloch Gait, a daring railway builder of
Lower Canada, who had supported annexation in 1849 but had later
become the leading advocate of an all-Canadian political and eco-
nomic system, had seen the only possible cure for parliamentary
paralysis— the divided colony of Canada must be merged in federal
union with the colonies of the Atlantic coast and the gold-rush
colonies of the Pacific.

The political crisis of 1858, when government seemed to be on
the point of collapse, forced Gait, a disillusioned Rouge, to join the
Conservative cabinet as finance minister on condition that it support
a general confederation of all the colonies. Brown's Reformers coun-
tered with a more modest plan for a federal union between Upper
and Lower Canada and a larger union to come, perhaps, later; or,
failing this, a complete dissolution of the existing union.

The project of a Canadian federation was not new. Guy Carleton
had vainly urged it on the British government in 1791. William Lyon
Mackenzie had proposed it before plunging into the idiotic Rebel-
lion of 1837. Durham had regarded the union of Upper and Lower
Canada as the beginning of a general union. Howe had advocated
it in Nova Scotia. It had supporters on both sides of politics in
Upper and Lower Canada.

But the obstacles appeared insuperable— the unpeopled wilder-
ness between Canada and the Atlantic colonies; the barrier of the
Pre-Cambrian shield to the westward; the vacuum of the prairies;
then the Rockies, behind which the tiny settlement of Vancouver
Island seemed to lie on the other side of the world; and, above all,
the impossible cost of linking these distant fragments of population
by railway.

For all the talk of politicians and businessmen, the colonies re-
mained almost completely isolated from one another, with separate
constitutions, tariffs, and currencies, while the Americans, a few
miles away, having passed that infant state and built a nation, were
about to test its endurance in a civil war.

No apparent progress was made in any scheme of union, and the
maneuvers of political managers, frantic governments, and angry
oppositions presented a record of almost uiibelievable outward con-
fusion in the eighteen-fifties and early sixties. Still, they reflected
deep movements that must make a Canadian nation of the disjointed
colonies or carry them eventually into the United States.

Commercial interests favored a confederation strong enough to
exploit the West. They were outgrowing the colonial phase when
Canada was solely a producer of raw materials for Britain and the
United States. They already had begun to push up the tariff on

328 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

manufactured goods and were devising the embryo of a national in
place of an international economic system.

All the great plans of the railway builders, all the chances of
profits in the West, and all the economic arguments would never
suffice to solve the problem of Canada's future. It could be solved,
if solved at all, only by the force of an abstract idea, the sort of idea
that had inspired the Philadelphia Congress. That idea— the dream
of an independent state from sea to sea— was growing steadily be-
neath the outer confusion of politics. The greatness of Macdonald's
mind, beside the otherwise abler and better-educated mind of
Brown, lay in its ability to grasp the abstraction and make it con-
crete in the political process.

Macdonald had been only a practical politician, none too respect-
able in his methods and sometimes disreputable in his habits. At
moments of crisis he was likely to be absent and drunk. Yet few men
could resist him, drunk or sober.

The Governor General's aide-de-camp, in search of the missing
Attorney General, once found him in bed with a French novel and
a decanter of his favorite sherry. "If," Macdonald told the trembling
messenger, "you are here in your official capacity, give my compli-
ments to the Governor General and tell him to go to hell. If you're
here as a private individual you can go there yourself."

Another governor general addressed a university in Greek. Mac-
donald told the newspapers that "His Lordship spoke in the purest
ancient Greek without mispronouncing a word or making the slight-
est grammatical solecism." Asked by a surprised colleague if he
knew any Greek, Macdonald replied: "No, but I know a little about
politics."

Attacked by Brown for intemperance, Macdonald replied on the
public platform: "I know the electors of Canada would rather any
day have John A. drunk than George Brown sober." That was true.

"I want," he once said, "men who will support me when I'm
wrong/7 but added wistfully, "Send me better men to deal with, and
I will be a better man." Meanwhile he worked with the material at
hand and supplied his candidates with what he called, in a famous
letter, "Good bunkum arguments."

Under that patient, lined face, with its twisted, humorous mouth,
its bulbous red nose and quizzical eye, Old Tomorrow often seethed
—as when he shook his fist at Oliver Mowat, his former law clerk,
across the aisle of Parliament and screamed, "You damned pup, I'll
slap your chops for you!" At sixty he fought an opposing candidate
with his fists on the platform. At sixty-three he leaped from the
government benches at the opposition, shouting, "I can lick you

OLD TOMORROW 329

quicker than hell can scorch a feather!" and was with difficulty
restrained from doing it. He was later arrested by the sergeant at
arms to prevent him challenging a Liberal to a duel. But to humbler
friends whom he had offended in his cups he apologized and begged
forgiveness.

He seldom knew or cared to know any detailed facts. His assist-
ants dug them up and briefed him, he scrawled a few notes on an
envelope (usually losing it), and then this man who had spent only
five years in school could hold Parliament all night with what ap-
peared to be a prepared thesis on any subject. If he suffered from a
hang-over on such occasions he supported himself with innocent-
looking glasses of water, laced by his friends with gin.

The jaunty dress, the battered face between the disordered mop
of curls, the swollen whisky nose, the sly winks and grimaces, the
stream of jokes and reminiscences, the bouts of liquor, all hid the
lifelong anguish of this many-sided being. As a boy of seven he had
seen his brother beaten to death by a drunken servant. His first son
died from a fall at the age of two. Then for years the young lawyer
and politician had neglected his career to sit night after night beside
the bed of his wife and watch her die. His second marriage pro-
duced a daughter whose mind never grew out of infancy and whom
he treated tenderly as a child when she was a woman of middle age.
Toward the end of his days his wife discovered in his room a box
filled with the toys of his dead son. The wounds had never healed.
He hid them with drink, raillery, and the work of building a
nation.

That work seemed hopelessly stalled, the proposed Canadian
union was still only a theme of academic discussion when the Con-
federate guns fired at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. At least one
Canadian suspected their meaning north of the border.

Thomas D'Arcy McGee, an Irishman and the darling of Canadian
politics, at once warned the Assembly that the Civil War would
change the quarrelsome life of Canada. "That shot," he said, "had
a message for the north as for the south . . . the signal gun of a new
epoch for North America, which told the people of Canada, more
plainly than human speech can express it, to sleep no more except
on their arms."

The shot meant more than even McGee or any other Canadian yet
imagined. It might mean a war with the United States. It must mean
a Canadian confederation or the end of Canada.

The muskets of Lexington had split Canadians from Americans
and assured Canada of an English-speaking population. The mus-
kets of Queenston had convinced Canadians that they could defend

330 THE STKUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

that separation. Now the bombardment of Fort Sumter, like the
ticking of a clock, told Canadians that their time was short. As from
the beginning, Canada must be made or unmade largely by neigh-
bors who cared little one way or the other. Born of the American
Revolution, was Canada to die in the overflow of an American civil
war?

That fear obsessed many Canadians as long as the war lasted. It
outlasted the war in the mind of Macdonald,

There was the obvious danger of a clash between Britain and the
United States, involving Canada. Less obvious but equally danger-
ous was the possibility that the United States, having mobilized
huge armies for its own purposes, would use them to repair the
failure of 1812. Or there might be a renewal of casual raids like
those of 1838. In any case, it was soon clear that the profitable new
commercial relations between the United States and Canada would
be disrupted, perhaps forever.

Canadians generally sided with the North. They hated slavery.
Canada had long been the terminus of the Underground Railway,
had defied the Fugitive Slave Law and protected escaped slaves
from extradition. Besides, a quick victory for the North, now a major
Canadian market, should be good for business, if the Reciprocity
Treaty survived.

A minority of Canadians, especially the Tories—including Mac-
donald, who had stood at arms against the raids of the Hunters and
Chasers— nourished an abiding suspicion of the Northern states as
the historic base of aggression, whereas the South looked distant and
harmless. The Tory press made no secret of its hope that the war
would enfeeble or even smash the American Union, and these utter-
ances, though they did not represent general Canadian opinion,
inflamed the Northern press.

Even a radical like Brown, who detested the South's Peculiar
Institution, was moved to exclaim in his Toronto Globe that the
tone of the American newspapers was unbearable; "It is not in
human nature long to maintain cordial sympathy toward those who
are pouring insult continuously upon us/'

The slavery issue and commercial interest made most Canadians
pro-North, but the war had not been under way long before they
felt the historic tug of Britain, always in conflict with the tug of
North America.

Like Canada, Britain was divided on the war. The instincts of its
people were strongly opposed to slavery. Many of its most powerful
leaders, however, men like Palmerston, Russell and Gladstone,
sided with the South, and for the South the position of Britain was

OLD TOMORROW 331

vital. If the South was to secure the desired recognition of its Con-
federacy in Europe, Britain must lead the way.

Louis Napoleon, the adventurer who now ruled France and who,
on a youthful visit to the United States, had appeared a little insane
to the discerning Gallatin, was eager to recognize the South for his
own purposes, but dared not act without British support. The Brit-
ish government almost accepted the French adventurer's advice, for
the old quarrels were not forgotten, the diplomatic defeats of the
Oregon and Maine boundaries were fresh and rankling, while, on
the other hand, the North, with memories stretching back to Lex-
ington, still seemed to regard Britain as the Union's natural enemy.

Two men of unequal stature but equal goodwill, the larger in the
White House, the lesser in a London palace, understood the mad-
ness of another transatlantic war. Lincoln, with the earthy wisdom
of the Illinois prairies, and Albert, Queen Victoria's dominant con-
sort, from the perspective of an ancient royal history in Europe,
were both determined in their own ways to prevent that calamity.
For Lincoln one war at a time was more than enough. For Albert
war of any sort was folly in an age of enlightenment and inevitable
human progress.

Such men— Lincoln, with all the power of his character and the
Presidency, Albert, with only the power of the Queen's shadow-
were at the mercy of other unknown men and of sheer accident.

On November 8, 1861, the American ship San Jacinto halted the
British mail packet Trent on its way to England and forcibly re-
moved two Confederate agents, James Murray Mason and John
Slidell. The British government, well charged with high explosives
in the person of Prime Minister Palmerston, exploded in rage.

The official note of protest to the United States, written by Earl
Russell, the Foreign Secretary, was violent enough to drive an
American government, perhaps even the cautious government of
Lincoln, into war. It came to the twin desks of Queen Victoria and
her husband at a time when they were conducting a long feud with
Palmerston and seemed to regard foreign policy as their exclusive
prerogative.

Albert was dying from a long illness and the immediate effects of
a chill caught at Cambridge, where he had gone to discipline his
amorous son, the future King Edward VII. The invalid had just time
and energy enough to tone down Russell's draft before he died.

In the final version the note was still sufficiently vigorous to irri-
tate the American government and public— especially as they were
so obviously in the wrong— but not to the point of war. Lincoln
would not be distracted by a second war from his task of saving the

332 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

Union. Nevertheless, the North did not forget. The captured Con-
federate agents were reluctantly released and the Trent affair col-
ored all the relations between the United States and Britain during
the remainder of the Civil War and beyond it

Canada, being the nearest British possession, the historic base of
British attack on the Republic, was to feel, as usual, the results of an
incident beyond its control.

Gait met Lincoln on December 4, at the height of the crisis, to
discuss matters of trade. The President's obvious good sense reas-
sured and his droll stories delighted the dour Canadian minister.
He reported Lincoln as hinting that the public belligerence of the
American government must not be taken too seriously in Canada.
The Trent business must be "gotten along with," though "we must
say something to satisfy the people."

The evident passion of the people sent Gait home in a state of
alarm. His report only confirmed Macdonald's old suspicions. The
Canadian government hastily attempted to rebuild the frail defenses
of the colony with British help. Britain rushed some fifteen thousand
troops across the Atlantic and, the St. Lawrence being frozen,
inarched them overland through the snow from New Brunswick to
Canada.

The flash point of war was uncomfortably close that winter and
was safely passed only when the United States released the Confed-
erate agents seized by the San Jacinto. Canada's fears did not pass.
Should the North, after its victory, decide to revenge itself on Brit-
ain, now the friend of the South, Canada would be the obvious
avenue of attack.

The newly created Canadian Department of Militia, Macdonald
in charge, decided on a substantial mobilization. Though the crisis
had eased by this time, in the larger commotion of the Civil War,
Macdonald's Militia Bill of 1862 provided for an active military
force of 50,000 and a reserve of the same number, with the use of
conscription if necessary. The annual cost of $480,000 staggered
Parliament and people.

Here was an issue on which the opposition could hope to wreck
the government Mostly for reasons of local politics, having nothing
to do with defense, it went enthusiastically to work. It had caught
the Macdonald-Cartier administration off guard, Macdonald hard
up, sick, disgusted with the ceaseless betrayal of politics, tired of
carrying the load day in and day out while others came and went
and voted as they pleased, anxious to retire, and at the moment on
a prolonged drinking bout.

He did not appear for two weeks in the Assembly while the

OLD TOMORKOW

333

opposition attack mounted against his Militia Bill. When the vote
came at last a few French-Canadian supporters abandoned the
government and defeated the bill by 61 to 54. That was the end of
the government and, temporarily, of the defense plan, but for
Macdonald it was a merciful release. "I am at last free, thank God!"
he wrote home. "I have longed for this hour."

The hour was not to last long. At the age of forty-seven Macdon-
ald thought he was finished with public life; he watched with
cynical amusement the erection of a Reform government under
Sandfield Macdonald (Brown being temporarily out of politics) but
there was to be no easy escape for the indispensable man. A few
months' idleness in opposition convinced him and his followers
that he alone could save the Liberal-Conservative Party. Choosing
his own time, he defeated the new government and in the election
of 1863 was inarching again with bands, banners, and torchlights.
The march would end only on his deathbed.

These sham battles of party war did nothing to protect the coun-
try from a possible war with the United States, once the North had
leisure to consider Canada after crushing the South.

Despite the confusions of politics, a formidable military force,
British and Canadian, soon stood on the border, awaiting an Ameri-
can blow; and behind the soldiers stood the power of Britain, re-
strained by a hair trigger. The nervous finger of Palmerston fondled
that congenial weapon.

Canada's official behavior, if irritating to the North, had been
strictly correct up to 1863. Now, less by bad will than by bad man-
agement, Canadians found themselves involved directly in the
American struggle. The involvement fortunately was slight— a series
of clumsy blunders which the Canadian government failed to
prevent.

The South, in its desperation, remembered the ancient strategy of
North America and proposed to make Canada the base of diversion-
ary attacks on the North. It was useless at this stage to expect the
overt assistance of the Canadian or British government, but the
South hoped at least for tolerance in Canada.

The first test came with the seizure of the Northern ship Chesa-
peake, between New York and Portland, by a band of fourteen
Confederates. Unable to think of a better plan, they finally put into
Nova Scotia, abandoned their prize, and asked for asylum.

The Chesapeake was immediately returned by the Nova Scotia
authorities to her owners. Her crew could not be disposed of so
easily. The United States demanded their extradition as pirates, but
Nova Scotia did not propose to facilitate the hanging of men re-

334 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BOBBER

garded as political refugees. They were conveniently released by
habeas corpus, and when a new warrant was issued for their arrest
the police somehow failed to find them. After further American
protests the incident was officially forgotten.

More dangerous was the case of Jacob Thompson. This remark-
able man had been a member of President Buchanan's Cabinet, had
later been appointed an assistant to Jefferson Davis, and in July,
1864, had arrived in Toronto with mysterious instructions from the
Confederate government. He was to act "in such manner as shall
seem most likely to conduce to the furtherance of the interests of
the Confederate States of America/'

Thompson's own ideas appeared extremely vague. He proposed
as a start to burn St. Louis, Cincinnati and New York, for which
purposes professional incendiaries were hired. Then he thought of
releasing the Confederate prisoners near Sandusky and Chicago.

As he meditated some method of eliminating the Michigan, the
United States' only armed vessel on the Great Lakes, a man named
Charles H. Cole arrived with an admirably simple plan. He said he
was a lieutenant in the Confederate Navy, the friend and drinking
companion of the Michigan's officers. It would be simple for Cole
to engage the ship's company in a debauch while Thompson and a
raiding party captured her.

Thompson bought another steamer, the Philo Parsons., and filled
her at Canadian ports with Confederate agents in the disguise of
tourists. She proceeded to Sandusky, where the Michigan was
moored, pausing only to scuttle a harmless lake boat on the way.

At Sandusky, however, the feckless Cole had spent a subsidy of
$4,000 to intoxicate himself instead of the Michigan's crew, had
babbled in his cups and warned the American authorities of the
crackbrained plot. Thompson, therefore, found the Michigan bris-
tling with fourteen guns aimed accurately at the Philo Parsons, He
returned in haste to Canada and scuttled his own ship. Even that
simple job was botched. The Philo Parsons sank in such shallow
water that she was soon salvaged.

Thompson's next project was an uprising in Chicago. The Sons of
Liberty, disguised as delegates to the Democratic Convention, would
seize the city and release the Confederate prisoners at Camp Doug-
las nearby. A few agents proceeded hopefully from Canada to
Chicago. Their plan was discovered by the American police and
suppressed.

The Canadian government at last had bestirred itself. The Ameri-
can government was given all available information on Confederate
activities and Thompson kept under close watch until he disap-

OLD TOMORROW 335

peared in despair. He had accomplished nothing but the waste of
the Confederacy's funds and the irritation of the North against
Canada.

If Lincoln could have peered inside the Canadian government,
he would have realized that it was too weak and convulsed to offer
the slightest danger to any country but its own. The United States
was rent with civil war but would soon be reunited. Canada, after
years of futile talk, was split by political war and seemed to have
little prospect of union, then or ever.

Lincoln, the politician writ large, would have been the first to
understand the Canadian problem and to understand also that its
solution, one way or another, must vitally affect the future of the
United States. As he was solving the bloody stalemate of war, the
colony of Canada had finally encountered political stalemate and
impotence.

23

Back to Quebec

[1864-1866]

MACDONALD AND HIS FRIENDS WERE IN OFFICE AGAIN, BY A
majority of a few unreliable votes. They could not govern.
Neither could the Reformers, While Macdonald brooded,
schemed, and drank but could find no way out of the dead end
devised by Durham's constitution, Brown was beginning to rise
above his partisan passions and the implacable hatred of his rival.

His sudden hints of reconciliation were quickly carried to Mac-
donald, who instantly grasped them. With Gait as a buffer, he met
Brown ceremoniously at the St. Louis Hotel, Quebec, on June 17,
1864, a memorable date in continental history. The two men had
not spoken in recent years, except formally across the floor of Parlia-
ment. Now their patriotism compelled them to get down to prac-
tical bargaining and save the country.

Brown still favored a federal union of Upper and Lower Canada
only, based on representation of the two provinces by population,
as a first stage in the confederation of all the colonies. He abandoned
that plan on Macdonald's insistence that the whole work must be
done at once.

Macdonald had favored a centralized, legislative union, he still
believed in it but agreed to a federal constitution as the only system
that the colonies would accept.

To this end a coalition government, including Brown and two
other Reformers, was erected overnight, the stalemate ended, and
the work of building a nation-state begun.

The necessary conferences had taken six days only but the new
government and the project of confederation were in reality the
product of more than twenty years' trial and error in the iron lung
of the existing constitution, of all Canada's experience since the

336

BACK TO QUEBEC 337

Conquest. The rivals had been reconciled temporarily by forces
larger than their personal quarrel or any wrangle of local politics—
by the breakdown of government, by the old haunting fear of the
United States, which had created the Canadian colonies in the first
place, by the commercial attractions of the West, and most of all by
an intangible as old as Champlain— the blind will to build a Cana-
dian community across the northern slope of America.

The deranged Canadian Assembly beheld that old dream again
when the new coalition government presented its confederation
policy. Reformers cheered Macdonald, their old enemy. Tories
cheered Brown. "An excitable, elderly little French member" rushed
across the floor in tears to fling his arms around the Reform leader's
neck and "hang several seconds there suspended, to the visible con-
sternation of Mr. Brown and to the infinite joy of all beholders/'

Confederation, thus announced, was a mighty dream and a dream
only. Could it ever be reduced from mere emotion to a written con-
stitution and a living nation? Could the colony of Canada, on the
St. Lawrence, and the Atlantic colonies of New Brunswick, Nova
Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and perhaps even distant Newfound-
land, be united strongly enough to hold the border against a nation
presently dismembered but already the largest military power in
the world? And what of the West, with its little gold-rush colonies
of Vancouver Island and British Columbia?

The speeches, the shouting, and the tears in the Parliament at
Quebec were gratifying to Macdonald, the secret sentimentalist.
They counted for little with the practical politicians. Yet from now
on confederation must be the work of politics on the most practical
terms.

By a happy coincidence the Atlantic colonies were then about to
meet at Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, to discuss a union
among themselves. Their conference offered a chance to strike while
the iron was hot. Accordingly, Macdonald, Cartier, Brown, Gait,
four junior ministers, and three secretaries, an impressive delega-
tion, sailed for Charlottetown at the end of August in the hope of
selling a continental union to the Maritirnes.

Their first reception was damp and discouraging. The little Queen
Victoria steamed into Charlottetown harbor but no welcoming com-
mittee appeared to greet the distinguished visitors. Nearly every-
body, including the delegates to the Maritime conference, had left
town .to see a traveling circus, clearly more interesting than the
birth of a nation. Only one man, W. H. Pope, a member of the
Prince Edward Island government, took any notice of the Canadian
statesmen or the blueprint of the new nation in their pockets. Pope

338 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

found a skiff and rowed alone out to the Queen Victoria. There was
lodging ashore for only four Canadians, he admitted with embar-
rassment, and not even a carriage or wagon to carry their luggage.
Macdonald and most of the Canadian delegation therefore remained
on the ship.

So began, about as inauspiciously as possible, a circus on shore
and a handful of dubious men anchored in the harbor— the Cana-
dian equivalent of the first Continental Congress. But at Charlotte-
town, as at Philadelphia, a new state was surely in gestation,

Once the circus had closed, things moved fast. The Maritime
delegates proved surprisingly receptive to the strangers from Can-
ada. They postponed their own scheme of Maritime union to con-
sider the larger scheme.

This conference presented the supreme crisis of Macdonald's
career so far, and he knew it. Keeping strictly sober and for once
preparing his speech with meticulous care, he held the delegates all
morning with quiet unanswerable argument— the danger of Ameri-
can invasion, the urgency of joint defense, the necessity of building
a strong, centralized union, free of those constitutional weaknesses
which, he said, had split the American Union in civil war.

The conference was impressed by its first sight of the greatest man
in British America. The delegates adjourned to luncheon on the
Queen Victoria and drank toasts until late at night. One watershed
had been crossed.

A lavish banquet on shore, a ball, and an evening of champagne
so enlivened the conference that it decided to carry its work and
good news to Halifax. There more speeches, celebrations, and cham-
pagne revealed that Maritime union already was obsolete, that the
colonies would frame a continental union or nothing. At another
brave dinner party Macdonald reiterated his former warning—the
colonies must "avoid the mistakes of our neighbors" and found a
strong central government.

That result seemed assured in the first flush of expectation and
wine. It was to be speedily completed at a final conference in
Quebec, on October 10.

Macdonald, a very tired man, knew that the really dangerous
obstacles lay ahead. Would the British government, though favor-
able to the confederation project, really accept the beginnings of a
new nation in place of its obedient colonies, possibly a restive and
truculent nation when it matured? Would the colonies themselves
agree on confederation when they faced, in place of easy generali-
ties, the hard facts of national constitution and the essential surren-
der of local powers to a national government and legislature?

BACK TO QUEBEC 339

There was little time to prepare for the Quebec conference,
though it would make or break confederation, since it must be
carried through, if possible, before the first enthusiasm ebbed. On
October 10, therefore, the delegates of Canada, New Brunswick,
Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland met in a
bleak and chilly building constructed as a post office, and used by
the Canadian Assembly after its original quarters burned ten years
before—hardly the edifice for such an occasion, but larger than
Carpenters' Hall, Philadelphia, meeting place of the first Con-
tinental Congress. And from the edge of the great rock the Canadian
delegates looked down, as so many Canadians had looked before,
upon the sleek current of the St. Lawrence, the ancient bearer of
their people's life.

Unhappily the river was blurred by rain, yet through the first
autumn haze the dullest eye could hardly fail to see the invisible
company of this place. Cartier in his icebound ship, Champlain in
his first Habitation, Frontenac in his lonely castle, Montcalm look-
ing from his decayed walls upon the British fleet, Carleton waiting
for the Americans in a New Year's blizzard, and countless other
passengers, brought to Quebec by the broad avenue of the river,
all had played their parts, large or small, in the process now nearing
its consummation.

Quebec had been the first spiritual center of Canadian life. The
long circumference stretched now from Newfoundland to the arctic
and the Pacific, enclosing an almost empty circle. Everything had
begun in the town built by Champlain. Here, if anywhere, more than
a century and a half of toil, agony, and bloodshed could be com-
pleted. Canadians instinctively had returned to their original home,
driven there mainly by their dangerous neighbors.

If Quebec was to be Canada's Philadelphia and if the problems
of the two American unions were similar in many ways, in others
they differed radically.

The Republic had burst out of a revolution against Britain, with
revolutionary passion sufficient to carry it across the Alleghenies, the
plains, and the Rockies to the western sea.

The Canadian Confederation, a peaceful evolution, lacked any
such violent momentum from overseas. Its outer propulsion came
from the Republic, its inner from quiet men with little of the anger,
the scholarship, the confidence, or the philosophic theories of the
men who had written the American Constitution in heat and genius.
Philadelphia had writhed in anger, inspiration, and noble oratory.
The Quebec conference was cold, pedestrian, and dull. For all that,
it knew precisely what it wanted.

340 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

The Americans had devised an entirely new experiment in govern-
ment and codified it in rigid law. The Canadians intended to adopt
the federal device of that invention, since they could not hope to
unite on any other basis, but otherwise their government would be
a strict imitation of the well-tried British parliamentary system and
would be linked to it through the monarchy,

Economic, physical, and racial circumstances of the two peoples
also were different. The Americans claimed the richer half of the
continent, the Canadians the poorer, and even that claim, asserted
by some three million people, was frail and doubtful The Thirteen
American Colonies had been mostly of one race, culture, language,
and tradition. The Canadians were split between two races which
would not merge. The American society could be single, united, and
homogeneous; the Canadian must be dual, conjugate, and viable
only by an almost impossible feat of compromise and concession.

In short, the Americans had come to Philadelphia illuminated by
a dazzling vision and expected it to illuminate mankind. The
Canadians, all but a very few, saw hardly beyond the immediate
problems of a political accommodation and asked only to be left
alone to make it work.

Though the Macdonalds, Browns, Gaits, and Cartiers could not
speak and write like the Washingtons, Jeffersons, Franklins, and
Hamiltons of Philadelphia, they had their own dream. It was
nebulous, inarticulate, perhaps beyond their grasp, and now half
hidden by the St. Lawrence mists. Still it was their own, it was
native, it was as valid as the dream of their neighbors.

Thus Philadelphia nearly ninety years before, in the first heady
days, the splendid illusions and the written guarantees of the En-
lightenment, when the world was clearly embarked on its Great
Age; and thus Quebec in the stolid respectability, the automatic
progress, the newer illusions of Queen Victoria's deathless Pax
Britannica. Thus the silks, ruffles, knee breeches, silver buckles, and
boundless hopes of the eighteenth century; and thus the sober,
bearded men in the top hats, tailcoats, and equal innocence of the
nineteenth.

Thus also the sharp distinction between the characters of two

Seoples— the self-sufficient Americans, their Old World roots sud-
enly severed, the New World their oyster, and the past disinherited
by law; the confused and pragmatic Canadians, half rooted over-
seas, clinging to their mother, and satisfied to take one tentative step
at a time.

Would the next essential step now be taken? Macdonald, hiding
his dream and his doubts under a cheerful, bustling air and buoying

BACK TO QUEBEC. 341

up the delegates' spirits by a ceaseless round of parties and un-
limited supplies of stimulants (at a cost of $1,000 when the best
French brandy sold for $1.25 a pint) could not foresee the outcome.

As titular head of the Canadian government, Tache, with his
handsome face and halo of white hair, presided at the conference,
Macdonald was its manager and factotum. His long apprenticeship
in grass-roots politics, his knowledge of men high and low, his
capacity as an extraordinary man to feel and reflect the ordinary life
of the Canadian folk, indeed his very weaknesses almost as much
as his inner strength had equipped him perfectly— as formal educa-
tion could not— for this work, which seemed to be a work of law and
constitution but was actually a work of human nature. Brown might
explain the dry details of the proposed constitution, Cartier the law,
and Gait the problems of finance; Macdonald was the spirit of con-
federation incarnate, the mirror of Canadian life.

He saw and mollified everybody. He treated Brown not only as
an equal but almost as a superior, referring respectfully to him
(though he was five years younger) as the "old chap." He sensed
instinctively where opposition lay and turned all his playful charm
on the objectors. He was always ready with formulae, adjustments,
and accommodations. Most of the future constitution was written in
his own hand on slips of paper that, one by one, became the 72
Resolutions of the conference.

It was prospering, but the weary, laughing factotum knew that
confederation remained at the rnercy of any little private quarrel or
any piqued colonial government. As he rose on the second day of
the conference to deliver his greatest speech he still could not count
on final agreement. The array of bearded faces around him looked
grim and skeptical. Their first ardor had passed. These men must
now be convinced by facts.

Most of them knew little of Canada and less of Macdonald, were
parochial politicians and nothing more. Apart from his unconscious
allies in the United States, he had only two sure supporters outside
his own government—Charles Tupper, the moon-faced and resource-
ful doctor who had beaten Joe Howe and made himself premier of
Nova Scotia, the dapper little Samuel Leonard Tilley, premier of
New Brunswick, who wanted confederation but was in serious politi-
cal trouble at home.

Macdonald's immediate task was to swing the four votes of the
Maritime delegation. He was sure of Canada's two. At the end of his
speech he was sure of all. His motion in favor of confederation
carried unanimously, not so much by his argument as by his vision
of a national state. The apprenticeship of public labor and private

342 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BOBBER

pain had not been wasted. The immigrant boy from Scotland, the
ill-schooled lawyer from Kingston, bad mastered his trade and, in
home-spun phrases, articulated his vision,

Now began the hard bargaining on details, the process that had
almost smashed the Philadelphia Congress after the Revolution. The
Quebec conference lacked a Washington. Luckily, in Macdonald it
had found Its Franklin. With infinite patience., compromise, strategic
retreat, and immovable obstinacy on essentials, he sought to recon-
cile the conflicting pressures between the more populous colony of
the St. Lawrence and the weaker colonies of the Atlantic.

Representation in the elected chamber of the new Parliament
must be on a basis of population. The Maritimes, therefore, de-
manded more than their numerical share in the upper, appointed
chamber, corresponding to the British House of Lords, and for this
purpose they could point to the American Senate, where population
was disregarded in favor of equal representation for every state.
The Maritimes asked more than Canada could possibly grant, on
the false assumption that the upper chamber would become an
equal partner in legislation with the lower. In fact, it was to be-
come little more than a peaceful asylum for the aged and tired sup-
porters of the ruling party.

Long wrangles, much lobbying, many banquets, the unstinted
flow of liquor, and Macdonald's stage management gradually re-
vealed the lines of disagreement and possible agreement. Ten days
after the conference opened it was obvious that Newfoundland
would not enter confederation, that Prince Edward Island's adhesion
was unlikely, that Canada and the governments, though not neces-
sarily the people, of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia could agree
on representation in the new Parliament.

Then came the division of powers between the central and provin-
cial governments. There was room for dickering and compromise
but on one point Macdonald was obdurate— confederation must
avoid the Republic's mistake of giving too much power to its states,
and the test was the disposition of residual powers not definitely
assigned to the central or provincial legislatures.

The Americans, said Macdonald, had made a fatal error in leaving
those powers to the states. Confederation must leave them with the
central government. He would not yield an inch on that principle,
for otherwise, he said, "it would ruin us in the eyes of the civilized
world/' Again his combination of firmness and geniality carried his
principle unanimously.

• By October 27, after fourteen working days, a constitution had
been roughly drawn. The new state was to be an amalgam of

BACK TO QUEBEC 343

monarchy and federalism. Its apex would be the crown of Britain,
represented by a governor general in Canada; its base, an elected
assembly and an appointed upper chamber of second thought; its
executive, a cabinet, sitting in the legislature and responsible to it.

The projected Canadian state thus was an exact duplication of
the British parliamentary system, with the addition of provincial
legislatures and governments sovereign in their own prescribed
fields of power like the states of the Republic. Where the central
and provincial powers began and ended was not quite clear, would
be constantly blurred and altered by judicial interpretation for a
long time to come, but in general the Fathers of Confederation be-
lieved that they were giving their central government more power
than that of the Republic.

On the other hand, the constitution of Canada was to be an act
of the British Parliament and could not be changed by Canada
alone— at least in theory. It did not take a prophet, however, to
foresee that if a Canadian nation emerged from the Quebec blueprint
it would soon control its constitution in fact, if not in name. Like-
wise, foreign affairs remained in the control of London. There again
that control must become a fiction once Canada was strong enough
to make its own foreign policy. Finally, the new union was not to
be confined to the St. Lawrence and the Maritimes, it was to be
open to the colonies of the Pacific coast and any communities
sprouting from the empty soil of the prairies.

Macdonald had been watching the westernmost colonies of
Vancouver Island and British Columbia anxiously, knowing that
they might elect to enter the United States and bar Canada forever
from the Pacific. They must be joined to Canada at any cost. The
cost would be even higher than he expected. It would include the
one nearly fatal disaster of his career.

All that trouble and much more lay down the years. As he left
the Quebec conference, Macdonald carried in his battered valise the
72 Resolutions, most of them in his own handwriting, the anatomy
of the new state.

The womb of Quebec, in fitful gestation since 1608, apparently
had borne its child. But the child had come into the world scarce
half made up. All the Resolutions, proposing a second British
nation and, inevitably, a new form of empire unknown before in
human affairs, had yet to receive Britain's approval Still more
doubtful was the approval of the Maritime legislatures.

The Quebec delegates now moved on in triumph to Ottawa, the
former settlement of Bytown, which Queen Victoria had lately
chosen as the permanent capital of the existing colony of Canada,

344 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

thus, in the words of Goldwin Smith, the eminent English historian,
converting "a sub-arctic lumber-village by royal mandate into a
political cockpit/'

The new parliament buildings rose, stark and unfinished, a
jungle of Gothic towers, from the noble hill above the river first
sighted by Champlain. They had already the look of a national
capital and they appalled the economical mind of Brown.

"The buildings/' he wrote, "were magnificent; style, extent, site
and workmanship surprisingly fine . . . just five hundred years in
advance of the time; it would cost half the revenue of the province
to light and heat and keep them clean. Such monstrous folly was
never perpetrated before." Folly— that was the word for confedera-
tion in financial reckoning. Happily Macdonald was never much of
a hand with figures.

Among the littered stone and lumber the Quebec delegates ate a
ceremonious luncheon designed to symbolize the adoption of Ottawa
as the center of the prospective transcontinental nation. Macdonald's
skill and pertinacity had mainly brought confederation this far and
completely exhausted him. He was cold sober when he rose to speak
but he could not utter a word. Gait took his place in the em-
barrassed silence. Macdonald was only forty-nine years old. He did
not appear that day as a man strong enough, or with enough
years left, to lead his nation.

A brief rest in Kingston returned him to his usual gay, bantering,
and salty self. That was fortunate. The Canadian government, in the
midst of its domestic labors, had been plunged into a new foreign
incident wearing a very ugly look. The North American border
was again in eruption; or at least the Republic seemed to think
it was.

A first feverish telegram from Governor Gregory Smith, of
Vermont, in the autumn of 1863, suggested that his state was being
massively invaded by Canadians. It turned out, after the hysteria
simmered down, that some months earlier a Confederate agent,
Bennett H. Young, had arrived in Lower Canada with credentials
attesting This sincerity as a man and his piety as a Christian." His
pious assignment was to burn and loot New England. Crossing the
border into the Vermont village of St. Albans, on the night of
October 19, Young and twenty-five followers in civilian clothes
robbed a bank of $200,000, set fire to some buildings, wounded two
men, one fatally, and hurried back to Canada with their booty.

The St. Albans raid was a small affair, a sorry fiasco beside the
many border battles of the past, and not to be compared to the
American raids of 1838, but it had occurred at the worst possible

BACK TO QUEBEC 345

moment, three weeks before a presidential election and after three
years of friction between the United States and Britain.

The American politicians made the most of it. Hustings and press
rang with the old familiar cries. General John A. Dix ordered his
soldiers to follow the raiders into Canada. Secretary of State Seward
notified the British government that the United States considered
itself free to abrogate the Rush-Bagot agreement and arm ships on
the Great Lakes. He also warned the British ambassador that "it
would be impossible to resist the pressure which would be put
upon the Government to abrogate the Reciprocity Treaty also, if
these invasions from Canada continued."

"Invasions"— the word must have made Macdonald smile. He was
accustomed to the hysteria and hyperbole of election campaigns,
having often used these weapons himself. In one way, the Canadian
government found these latest troubles disturbing at the crisis of the
confederation scheme. In another, they confirmed the necessity of
confederation as a defense measure and were calculated to still the
doubts of the Maritimes. As usual, the angry Republic had acted at
exactly the right moment— almost, it seemed, by a law of continental
nature— to unite its Canadian neighbors.

Those historic forces must take their course. Meanwhile it was
essential to satisfy the United States that Canada had played no
part in the St. Albans raid and was determined to punish the raiders.

Tliirteen of them were promptly arrested, despite their claim for
treatment as soldiers engaged in lawful war. They were, indeed, in
precisely the same position as that of the notorious Alexander
McLeod of the Caroline affair. Britain had insisted, on threat of war,
that McLeod could not be tried in American courts because he had
boarded the Caroline on the orders of the Canadian authorities.
The St. Albans raiders demanded similar protection. Washington
replied that they were criminals and must be extradited at once.

The Canadian government promised to deliver them as soon as
their guilt had been sufficiently proved to meet the terms of the
extradition treaty. On this assurance Washington's anger seemed to
subside, the British government, more alarmed than the Canadian,
felt a welcome relief, and Lincoln, the man of tolerance, was re-
elected.

A curious state paper of the British Colonial Office noted, how-
ever: "If McClellan had carried the Presidency and peace had been
made on Southern and pro-slavery conditions, which was a suffi-
ciently possible contingency not to be excluded from our view, the
immediate danger to our small force in Canada might have been
considerable. That hazard does not seem TO great now."

346 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

The Colonial Office and the Canadian government had not antic-
ipated the stupidity of Charles Joseph Coursol, a magistrate of
Montreal, before whom the St. Albans raiders were arraigned.
Quite casually he announced that, through certain obscure defects
in the law, he lacked any jurisdiction in this case. Therefore, he
could not consider the central issue— whether the prisoners were
criminals, subject to extradition, or soldiers of a belligerent nation.
The thirteen Confederates were released, some of the stolen money
from the St. Albans bank still in their pockets.

Macdonald realized that this had become a serious business.
Coursol, he wrote, would be regarded in the United States as a
responsible judge though he was only a foolish local magistrate who
"altogether mistook his duty." American resentment was even
stronger than Macdonald expected.

The Northern press resumed its bitter denunciation of Canada
and proposed that when General Grant and the Grand Army of
the Republic had finished with the South they could profitably
turn north and conquer Canada in a few days' easy march. The
American government, urged on by the anger of the Congress,
ordered all Canadians to carry passports when they entered the
United States. As passports had never been required before, this
order, from a president as friendly as Lincoln, sounded ominous.

It was a relief in Canada to hear that the President had canceled
General Dix's plan to pursue the Confederates across the border.
At the same time it became obvious that the Congress intended to
cancel the Reciprocity Treaty at the earliest possible moment and
deliver a crushing blow on the Canadian economy.

The half-made confederation of Quebec assuredly was being
born into a troubled continent. Macdonald stayed calm. "We must
perform our duty," he said, "irrespective of the smiles or frowns of
any foreign body and will never be hurried into extra exertions by
proclamations like these of General Dix, or prevented by any feel-
ing of indignation from carrying our laws into full force/'

They were not easy to enforce. The prisoners had been quickly
rearrested after Coursors judgment but there seemed to be some-
thing in the magistrate's reasoning. Under existing law, the govern-
ment could not secure a conviction. The case dragged on while
Parliament sought to amend the law.

These delays brought American public opinion to a final sense
of outrage. The wildest rumors circulated in the Northern cities-
Confederate forces were being organized in Canada, ships were
being armed on the Great Lakes, a rusty ornamental gun had dis-
appeared from a Guelph lawn and doubtless was part of a general

BACK TO QUEBEC 347

conspiracy. Ottawa strove to pacify Washington by hastily forbid-
ding the export of armaments.

The man in the White House, with only a few weeks more to
live, had remained serene throughout this turmoil. His doctrine of
malice toward none and charity for all evidently included even
foreigners north of the border. Lincoln's annual message noted the
"insecurity of life and property in the region adjacent to the Cana-
dian border" but assured the Congress that the Canadian govern-
ment would "take necessary measures to prevent new incursions."
The immediate alarms subsided and were soon engulfed in the
larger excitement of Northern victories.

Just the same, the Canadian government stationed some two
thousand militia volunteers on the boundary to prevent more Con-
federate crimes and Macdonald organized a secret detective force
to advise him of possible raids in the opposite direction. His crude
espionage net would be needed within two years.

The desperate Canadian railways, their traffic hard hit by the
American passport regulation, urged Macdonald to seek its re-
moval by friendly representations to Washington. He flatly refused:
"It would be extremely impolitic ... if the Canadian Government
went on its knees to the United States Government for the purpose
of procuring a revocation of the late order. It would give Mr. Seward
an exaggerated idea of the inconvenience and the loss sustained by
Canada and would be kept up as a means of punishment or for
purposes of coercion. The true way to succeed is for the Canadian
Government to assume an indifferent tone in the matter, leaving it
to the Western States and private solicitation to effect the purpose."

A false air of indifference was maintained on the border and soon
the passport regulation was dropped. The threatened abrogation of
the Rush-Bagot Treaty also was quietly forgotten. The Reciprocity
Treaty, however, was clearly doomed.

Macdonald could feign indifference to a foreign people. His own
were quite another matter, for it had begun to appear that the
politicians of the Maritimes intended to stifle confederation in its
cradle.

Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island definitely rejected the
proposed union. Tilley, its sedulous nurse in New Brunswick, faced
a revolt among his supporters. He had foolishly promised to call a
new election before asking approval of the Quebec Resolutions and
he might well lose it. Tupper, who had been so optimistic at Que-
bec, began to doubt that he could carry the Resolutions through
the Assembly of Nova Scotia.

There a Homeric battle had been joined between two local

348 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

giants, Joe Howe had one a painted the picture of a transcontinental
state in lofty orations, lately he had retired from politics into a
safe, insignificant job and a comfortable salary as the British gov-
ernment's fishery commissioner. Now he emerged like an angry
bear from hibernation to denounce any scheme of union but his own.

Since confederation had been shaped by other hands in his ab-
sence, Howe would have none of it. His glory as the greatest Nova
Scotian could not be shared with Tupper, whom he had once con-
temptuously called "the little 'doctor/' He would not, he said, "play
second fiddle to that damned Tupper!" So Howe's unequaled edi-
torial pen and golden voice were turned from fishery reports to the
more congenial task of attacking confederation as a "Botheration
Scheme" ruinous to the Maritimes, of value only to Canada.

No one could argue with this triumphant and yet tragic man. No
one could stop him. The tortures of his megalomania were legible
in his coarsened face and brutal language; and in his insatiable
vanity, his frustration as a humble observer of codfish, his eloquence
and elemental power. Confederation faced a dangerous enemy.
Macdonald watched and wondered if Howe's virtues, buried under
the rubble of wasted tal^At and lost years, could ever be excavated
for future use. At the right moment the expert human excavator of
Ottawa would go to work, but the time was not yet.

The first months of 1865 found Macdonald sick but able to put
the Quebec Resolution through the Canadian Assembly; the British
government suddenly doubtful about the cost of fortifying and de-
fending Canada; the Americans still incensed by the St. Albans raid
and raw from the costly victories of the Civil War; Tupper dizzy
from Howe's attacks; and now Tilley defeated at the polls, in the
first direct test of public opinion, by a combination of anticonfed-
erationists and American railway interests had hoped to link
New Brunswick, by rail, with the business of the Northeastern
states.

A weaker man would have retreated before these swinging
blows. Macdonald decided to advance. The government, he an-
nounced, would confer immediately with Britain on confederation,
on the expected loss of American markets, and above all on a
Canadian defense plan.

He was more than ever obsessed with the American danger that
spring as General Grant swept down upon the Court House of
Appomattox and, after defeating the South, would quickly be able
to turn the Grand Army of the Republic northward and overrun
all the Canadian colonies, if the Lincoln government decided to
end the long quarrel by an obvious and quick solution.

BACK TO QUEBEC 349

The British government's delay in devising a Canadian defense
plan, its meager appropriation of £50,000 a year, embittered Mac-
donald and had not, he said, "Diminished the dread of forced an-
nexation and abandonment by Great Britain. ... If England can
do nothing better for us than vote £50,000 a year for four years
to fortify Quebec, we may give up the idea of resistance as hope-
less."

On April 15 he learned of Lincoln's assassination. It could hardly
have occurred to the harassed Canadian politician that someday
his countrymen would regard him with something like the Amer-
ican people's reverence for their martyred president. All he knew
then was that the simple, kindly man, with malice toward none,
had gone from the White House, that the only sure stabilizing force
in American politics had been removed, that the Republic's foreign
policy was in new, untried, and perhaps reckless hands, with the
world's largest army at their bidding.

Thus, under the usual disguise of careless jest, it was a heartsick
Canadian who sailed for England on April 20. The company of the
irascible Brown made the voyage no easier. Macdonald put on his
most disarming act and Brown seemed to relax for once over cards
and wine, suspending his vow to have nothing but "parliamentary
intercourse" with his old enemy and temporary colleague. To all
appearances they were friends when they reached England. The
appearances were to be brief, but might last just long enough to
save confederation, if it was not past saving.

The Canadian delegation— Macdonald, Brown, Gait, and Cartier—
found the British government surprisingly complacent about the
North American border after its alarm two years earlier. "I frankly
own my entire inability/' said the economy-minded Gladstone, "to
comprehend the feverish impatience of the Deputation, and their
repeated declarations that the spring of 1866 is the crisis of their
danger."

Britain evidently had no intention of financing any defense plan
until confederation had been established. The Canadians must sat-
isfy themselves with Britain's pledge to use all its resources in
support of Canada in case of war. No real defense plan without
confederation and no confederation without a change in the mean
little local politics of the Maritimes— it was enough to drive Mac-
donald to despair.

Instead, he drove out to Epsom for the Derby, naturally picked
the winner, won a handsome bet, enjoyed royal refreshments, solid
and liquid, and on the five-hour drive back to London amused him-
self by attacking the holiday crowds with a peashooter and paper

350 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

bags of flour, even Brown joining for the moment in a sport which
would have horrified his Clear Grits in Upper Canada.

What had been accomplished by the London conference? Very
little. At least the British government was wholeheartedly behind
confederation, if the Canadians could only persuade the Maritimes;
it had taken Macdonald's measure as a leader; and it thought the
Canadians "all able men with unlimited powers of consuming
champagne/'

Macdonald reached Canada at midsummer to face still more
trouble. Confederation was at a standstill. Old Tache, titular head
of the government, was dying. The Governor General asked Mac-
donald, long the real leader, to accept the formal title. That was
too much for Brown to swallow. He would serve temporarily with
Macdonald as an equal. He would not accept his rival as a superior.

Finally, to save the coalition and the chance of confederation,
Macdonald devised a polite fiction. A minor politician, Sir Nar-
cisse Belleau, became the first minister in name and the ostensibly
equal partnership of Macdonald, Brown, and Cartier continued.

These were minor matters beside the daunting look of the Re-
public. True, the Grand Army was dissolving peacefully. President
Johnson was fully occupied with the problems of Reconstruction.
But the American Congress was demanding huge damages from
Britain for the wartime activities of the cruiser Alabama, built for
the Confederacy in a British shipyard, and some politicians blandly
suggested that Canada might be handed over to satisfy those
claims. This could hardly be considered a serious proposal, though
Seward had considered it and later sounded out the British ambas-
sador. It indicated, however, the state of the American mind.

Anyway, Gait returned from Washington to report that the Reci-
procity Treaty was certainly dead and Canada's vital exports of
raw materials must shortly meet a ruinous tariff wall. Something
still more sinister was afoot. Macdonald's detective force reported
plans for another unofficial American invasion. Once again, as so
many times before, Canada was caught in the perpetual feuds of
the Old World.

24

Wild Irishmen

[1858-1866]

THE FENIAN BROTHERHOOD HAD BEEN FORMED IN 1858, WITH
strong support from Irish Americans, to liberate Ireland from
British rule. Its first attempt landed a shipload of invaders
from the United States in an English jail.

After this burlesque, a rebel American wing of the movement,
led by W. R. Roberts and R. W. Sweeney, proposed to invade
Canada and make it the base of later attacks on Ireland. A conven-
tion in Chicago in 1863 solemnly wrote the constitution of a Cana-
dian republic, appointed a cabinet to govern it, and organized
secret regiments, largely recruited from unemployed veterans of the
Civil War. Substantial campaign funds were raised by subscriptions
all over the United States and by the sale of Irish Republic bonds.
"General" Sweeney, as secretary of war, strutting at his New York
headquarters in gorgeous uniform of green and gold, drafted a de-
tailed invasion plan to be carried out by 30,000 men at a cost of
$15,000,000. In two weeks, according to Sweeney's neat timetable,
the invaders would hold the western St. Lawrence and secure Lakes
Ontario, Erie, and Huron with Republican navies. Then they would
strike eastward at Montreal while a fleet from San Francisco "will
carry Vancouver Island and the Fraser River country." When
Canada fell, it would be officially recognized by the United States
as the independent nation of New Ireland.

All this, Sweeney assured his followers and campaign fund con-
tributors, would be easy: "The population of the British provinces
is little above two and a half millions and the military resources of
the united provinces fall far short of sixty thousand men. Of these
nearly ten thousand are of Irish birth or descent. By the tempting
offer of a surrender of Canada to the United States, Mr. Seward,

351

352 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

it is hoped, will wink at connivance between American citizens and
the Fenian Conquerors." The Canadian conquest complete, the
Fenians would take Ireland at leisure.

And so, totally misjudging both Seward and Canada, the little
band of Irish patriots and American adventurers drilled without
interference in the towns of the United States to the rousing strains
of their war song:

We are a Fenian Brotherhood, skilled in the arts of war,
And we're going to fight for Ireland, the land that we adore.
Many battles have we won, along with the boys in blue,
And we'll go and capture Canada for we've nothing else to do.

The American government turned a tolerant eye on these strange
pursuits. As an Irishman, Mr. Dooley, would later remark of the
Supreme Court, the White House and Congress were watching the
election returns and the Irish vote. Britain's international manners
in the Civil War had proved intolerable to the Republic. Now the
Republic applied the same sort of free-and-easy code to Britain's
Canadian colonies.

Macdonald, as minister of militia in his spare time, learned all
the Fenians' plans from his private espionage system. In any case,
the secret brotherhood could not keep a secret overnight. The in-
vasion apparently was scheduled for the appropriate date of St.
Patrick's Day, 1866. By design or disagreement in the high com-
mand, this schedule was not carried through. Canadian militia
waited vainly along the St. Lawrence on March 17. Nothing hap-
pened. Was it all a false alarm?

Macdonald thought not, His agents told him that large numbers
of Fenians in plain clothes, and substantial stores of weapons in
innocent-looking parcels, were being massed along the border. In
April the first blow was struck, not where it was expected but on
the Atlantic coast.

A Fenian vessel, ordered to capture the island of Campobello, at
the mouth of the St. Croix River, was seized by American officials
in Eastport, Maine. The American government was not living up
to Sweeney's expectations.

April and May passed without further incident, and most Cana-
dians assumed that the danger had passed also. Macdonald's agents
knew better. They reported increasing concentrations of Fenians
at St. Albans, Vermont, and at Malone, Ogdensburg, Oswego, Buf-
falo, and Rochester, New York. As in 1812, the Niagara frontier
was regarded as the open door to Canada. One© it had been cap-
tured, Sweeney, in personal command at Ogdensburg, would take

WILD miSHMEN 353

Prescott, directly across the river, and the combined forces would
begin their march to Montreal.

On the night of May 31 groups of furtive strangers moved out of
Buffalo to the Niagara River. The intended breach of the United
States' Neutrality Act was obvious but the local authorities did not
appear to observe it even when the invaders embarked at Pratfs
Iron Furnace Dock on two hiied tugs and two canalboats.

The dawn of June 1 revealed some fifteen hundred men on Lower
Ferry Dock, a mile below the Canadian village of Fort Erie, where
the green Fenian flag, with its gold crown and harp, was unfurled
with cheers. General John O'Neill, the well-meaning patriot in
charge of this insane adventure, was, according to a Canadian
witness, "a gentlemanly man, medium-sized, slightly built, of fair
complexion and one whom I should take to be a dry goods clerk
rather than the general of a marauding expedition." He was dressed
in civilian clothes, with "a small felt hat," and wore no badge or
other distinguishing mark, but he was experienced in war. His fol-
lowers included "old men and some boys of fifteen with muskets
and bayonets." Some had come for reasons of Irish patriotism,
others on the promise of a good Canadian farm if they succeeded.

By nightfall O'Neill had 2,000 men entrenched in the orchard of
a farmer named Newbigging, near Frenchman's Creek. His scouts
mistook a few Canadian farmers on horseback for cavalry, fired at
them, and retreated. As O'Neill soon discovered, there were no
Canadian troops within twenty-five miles.

He, therefore, had time to distribute to Canadians around his
camp a ringing proclamation from General Sweeney. This docu-
ment had a familiar sound to anyone who remembered Hull's in-
vasion of 1812. "We have," it announced, "no issue with the people
of these Provinces and wish to have none but the most friendly
relations." The Fenians' weapons were aimed only at the British
"oppressors of Ireland," and to destroy them "We have registered
our oaths upon the altar of our country in the full view of Heaven
and sent up our vows to the throne of Him who inspired them."
Canada was offered "the olive branch of peace and the honest grasp
of friendship," but if they were refused the Canadians could expect
"the restraints and relations imposed by civilized warfare."

The Canadian country folk seemed strangely unimpressed. The
ten thousand Fenian reinforcements expected from Buffalo failed
to appear, having prudently decided to await the news of victory
from O'Neill. That unfortunate general, isolated in a strange country
very different from Sweeney's blueprints, was compelled to burn

354 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

hundreds of surplus rifles and large stocks of ammunition because
his army could not carry them.

Learning that a Canadian force about the size of his own had
marched from Port Colborne, he decided to meet it on a well-chosen
position known as Limestone Ridge. The Canadians advanced in
ignorance of the Fenians' movements and with the assurance of
reinforcements from Chippawa, which were late in arriving, as a
result of their commanders' mismanagement.

Everything, indeed, was mismanaged in Canada. The church bells
rang in all the river towns. The volunteers poured in, more than
the militia could accommodate in their force of 20,000. The troops
marched off, under a scorching sun, in stifling padded uniforms in-
tended for winter use. Most of them had no food or even water
bottles. They were fed by farmers' wives, drank at roadside creeks,
but with parched mouths sang their brave marching song:

Tramp, tramp, tramp, our boys are marching,
Cheer up, let the Fenians come!

For beneath the Union Jack well drive the rabble back
And we'll fight for our beloved Canadian home.

There was no lack of patriotism. There was lack of all other
essentials, especially leadership. The Port Colborne troops, still
expecting reinforcements, staggered without warning into the am-
bush of Limestone Ridge.

OTMeilTs Fenians met them with a withering musket fire. A few
men fell wounded at the first volley. Some nameless farm woman
and her little girl brought them water until the child cried: "The
pail is leaking!" It was leaking through bullet holes.

The attackers pushed up the hill so resolutely that O'Neill took
them for British regulars and prepared to retreat. At that moment
some lost Fenians rode out of the woods on stolen horses, where-
upon the terrifying cry of "Cavalry!" swept through the Canadian
lines. The raw militia were hastily formed into a red square to
meet a cavalry charge, thus providing a perfect target for the
enemy snipers. But the square held until one company was ordered
to retire from an advanced position on the flank. The sitting ducks
in the square supposed that a general retreat was under way. They
broke and ran. O'Neill pursued them down a choked lane as far
as Ridgeway and saw them board a train for Port Colborne.

Such was the strange little battle of Limestone Ridge. Was it the
beginning or the end of the invasion? O'Neill did not know. He had
won a Pyrrhic victory, killed nine Canadians, and wounded thirty-
seven, but what next? In a few hours, he guessed, the whole country

WILD IRISHMEN 355

would be aroused and his army overwhelmed unless he secured aid
from Buffalo. He ordered a retreat to Fort Erie and the escape route
of the river.

There he found the town occupied by seventy-six confused Cana-
dians who had been brought by steamer from Port Colborne to
await the main army. The Fenians charged down the street with
bayonets, drove the Canadians behind a pile of cordwood on the
riverbank, and captured most of them in the sight of hundreds of
cheering spectators on the American shore. The spectators cheered
and that was all. No reinforcements crossed the river.

Too late, O'Neill, like so many former invaders, saw that every-
thing had gone wrong. A large Canadian force was advancing at
last from Chippawa. The Fenians at Fort Erie were tired, hungry,
and despondent. As night came, but no reinforcements, they began
to slip across the river in any boats they could find. Some paddled
on planks or swam. A few drowned. Retreat turned into panic.
O'Neill shaved off his whiskers to disguise himself and prepared
for flight. The two hired tugs and two canalboats arrived from the
American side to remove the rest of the marooned army and were
promptly taken in tow by the U.S. warship Michigan.

After some delay the American government was enforcing its
Neutrality Act with energy. Its troops guarded the river. Some
eight thousand Fenians massed in Buffalo could not leave the city,
were soon living on public charity, and finally were conveyed to
their homes at government expense.

O'Neill and the other invaders captured by the Michigan were
released on bail of $500 each but never brought to trial. Canadians
might be indignant at this clemency after what appeared to be not
a military action but an organized murder. The British government
was glad to see the prisoners escape. It had trouble enough with
the United States already.

Two days of incompetence on both sides cleared Canada of
Fenians by June 3, General George Meade was in full control of
the American boundary, and M. W. Burns, "Brig. General com-
manding Irish Army at Buffalo,'' issued a farewell address admitting
that "I had hoped to lead you against the common enemy of human
freedom, viz, England, and could have done so had not the ex-
treme vigilance of the United States Government frustrated our
plans. ... Be firm in your determination to renew the contest
when duty calls you forth."

The failure at Niagara had prevented any attack from Ogdens-
burg and the other towns of the St. Lawrence. Farther east a final
bootless outrage was committed. Some eighteen hundred Fenians

356 THE STRUGGLE FOB THE BOKDER

from St. Albans crossed the Canadian boundary on June 4 and
made their headquarters at Pigeon Hill, where their energetic loot-
ing was watched, from a discreet distance, by a hundred frightened
Canadian volunteers.

This raid, like all the others, was hopeless. The United States
Army had seized the Fenian stores in Vermont. No reinforcements
could reach the army of Pigeon Hill. Its officers weeping from
mortification, the invaders tramped back across the line. Sixteen
of them were captured by a party of Canadians and a few shot.
The remainder were arrested by the American authorities.

So ended not the last but certainly the most absurd American
attack on Canada. It had tested Canadian defenses and proved
them, as Macdonald had feared, sadly inadequate in case of actual
war. It had also tested the temper of the American government,
which was correct and diligent after some early fumbles and so dis-
appointing to the Fenians that their General Michael Heffernan
complained bitterly to Meade: "We have been lured by the Cabinet
and used for the purpose of Mr. Seward. . . . They encouraged us
on to this/* Governor General Monck, with sarcasm rare in diplo-
macy, thanked Seward for faithfully enforcing the neutrality law
"after the invasion of Canada had actually taken place."

Heffernan promised to resume the liberation of Canada at the
first chance. William H. Roberts, president of the Fenian Brother-
hood, arrested for conspiracy to break the Neutrality Act, issued
yet another proclamation from his cell: "Stand by the cause. . . .
The struggle must not be abandoned even though our soldiers
should be compelled through the over-zeal of the United States to
abandon the present campaign. There is no turning back for us,
my countrymen/*

Many other Fenian leaders found themselves in American jails.
Some sympathetic politicians pleaded their cause in Congress and
Congressman Ancona, of Pennsylvania, proposed the repeal of the
Neutrality Act as a gesture against Britain for its behavior in the
Civil War. President Johnson's government was unmoved by this
clamor but intimated to Britain that the forty Fenians imprisoned
in Canada should be treated with leniency.

Canadian law took its course. Twenty-two prisoners were sen-
tenced to death. When justice and public passion had been suffi-
ciently satisfied, all the condemned men were released after short
terms of imprisonment. In the pinch the United States and Canada
had shown that, for all their public gestures, they could act with
moderation.

25

The to

[1866-1872]

:AD ALL THE RECENT AMERICAN THREATS BEEN HOLLOW? HAD
Canada's alarms throughout the Civil War been groundless?
Was the border permanently safe?

Macdonald still doubted it. True, the Fenians had proved un-
wittingly the need of Canadian defense and thus the need of con-
federation. They had transferred the problem of union from the
abstractions of the Quebec conference to the concrete evidence of
Limestone Ridge. They had arrived just in time to decide a vital
election in New Brunswick. But Macdonald was thinking longer
thoughts.

He was calculating the chance of holding the West against forces
much more formidable than a few disgruntled Irishmen. Assuredly
the West would not be held without confederation, a railway to
the Pacific, and a Canadian population beside it. The vacuum would
be filled from one side of the boundary or the other. Confedera-
tion, despite the Quebec Resolutions, remained itself a vacuum.
Then the climate suddenly changed.

While Tupper was still marking time in Nova Scotia and watch-
ing the anticonfederationists of New Brunswick, they found, on
defeating Tilley and taking office, that they had no alternative policy
of their own. By opposing the link with the St. Lawrence colony
they hoped to link New Brunswick with the economy of the North-
eastern states by a railway known as Western Extension. The New
Brunswick government could not finance this project, could not find
any private capitalist to finance it, and realized now that it was
useless anyway.

The impending collapse of reciprocity and the resulting loss of
potential railway traffic across the border destroyed the economic

357

358 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

base of the anticonfederation policy so far as the business of New
Brunswick was concerned. When a delegation from the Canadian
colonies went to Washington, in a last desperate effort to save
reciprocity, a Congressional committe offered, in return for the in-
shore fisheries of the Maritimes, to exempt from American customs
duties rags, firewood, unfinished millstones, grindstones, and un-
ground gypsum or plaster. This offer was either a joke or an insult.
The Canadians went home, even the New Brunswickers convinced
that the American market would be hermeticaly sealed if tariffs
could seal it. So it was, with the end of reciprocity in March, 1866.

Under these reverses, conveniently delivered by the United States,
the anticonfederation government of New Brunswick began to fall
to pieces. It lost a decisive by-election, the opposition candidate
being financed by Macdonald and his friends, the government
candidate, so it was alleged, by American railway interests. One of
the joint cabinet leaders, R. D. Wilmot, announced his conversion
to Canadian union. The government resigned in the course of a
confused ministerial crisis and was replaced by Tilley's confedera-
tionists, but Tilley was on shaky ground. He faced a doubtful elec-
torate, a dangerous election, and an empty campaign fund coffer.

Macdonald's friends scraped up some $50,000 and carried it
secretly to Tilley's treasurer in the safe neutral ground of Port-
land, Maine. Even the scrupulous Brown contributed $500 per-
sonally to the cause and promised more, if needed. The great silent
partner of confederation, however— far more potent than campaign
funds— was the United States, which had yet to realize what con-
federation was about.

Everything now depended on the disordered politics of the queer
little capital in Fredericton, and MacdonakTs time was running
out. Brown had resigned from the Canadian government, in which
he had never been happy, still supported its basic policy but in-
sisted that Macdonald make good his original promise to achieve
confederation or to form a federal state of Upper and Lower Can-
ada, on the principle of representation by population. If confedera-
tion was not achieved meanwhile, Macdonald would have to
abandon it and accept the second-best when his Parliament met in
the summer of 1866.

Thus from his new house in the half-built town of Ottawa he
waited with a cheerful front and inward agony the news from
Fredericton, from Halifax, and from his agents among the Amer-
ican Fenians,

The darkness of that dreadful spring was broken first by the
unexpected approval of confederation, despite Howe's philippics,

THE ROAD TO OTTAWA 359

in the Nova Scotia Assembly. Little Dr. Tupper apparently had
cured his fitful patient. Then the mobilization of the Fenians, almost
as if it had been timed for this purpose, alarmed the people of
New Brunswick, turned them against the pro-American policy of
the anticonfederationists, and greatly strengthened Tilley in his
election. Again an American pressure was driving the Canadian
colonies together, this time for good.

That was the old story, beginning in 1775, and often repeated.
Now on a small scale— judiciously exploited by Tilley and his
friends— the foreign danger had recurred at the moment when
confederation hung in the balance.

Well, after this year of perpetual disappointment, Macdonald
could do with some luck. Perhaps, on hearing of Tilley's over-
whelming victory at the polls, a week after the Fenian raid, Mac-
donald's private gratitude included the raiders. Certainly they
had served Canada well.

The colonies, except Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island,
had voted for union, but the timetable remained tight and tricky.
Union must be approved by legislation in London before Tupper
had to meet again an electorate which might repudiate him next
spring under the influence of the furious Howe. The Whig govern-
ment of Britain, long Macdonald's backer in the confederation
scheme, had fallen. Would its Tory successor maintain its policy?
And, as Parliament in London would soon adjourn, what chance
was there of enacting the confederation statute before Tupper' s
deadline?

Tupper and Tilley, too impatient to wait longer, set off immedi-
ately for London and demanded that Macdonald follow them. He
hung on grimly at Ottawa, for he was certain that Britain would
not act before the new year and was now disturbed by rumors of
a second Fenian invasion. He did not take them very seriously
though they spread alarm along the St. Lawrence and caused the
new British government to assemble transports and mobilize troops
for the defense of Canada. It was no time for Macdonald to be out
of the country.

The Maritime delegates chafed vainly in London. Howe was
busy there also with speeches, pamphlets, and finally slanders
against confederation and its chief architect.

Brown, all his old hatred and envy spilling over, had begun a
personal attack on Macdonald's character in the vicious editorial
columns of the Toronto Globe. Macdonald, said the Globe, was a
drunkard, he had been drunk when he should have been repelling
the Fenian raid, he had been drunk in the Assembly, his "utterance

360 THE STRUGGLE FOB THE BORDER

so thick as to be almost incomprehensible," he had been so reeling
drunk that he had clung to his desk for support, and his drunken-
ness made him incapable of performing his duties at a time of
national danger.

To Howe the latest copies of the Globe were precious ammuni-
tion for his fight to kill confederation in the British Parliament by
killing Macdonald's reputation. It was Howe's solemn duty to
convey privately to the Colonial Secretary the truth about the
Canadian leader, the "impropriety and peril" of placing the de-
fense of the Maritimes in the hands of a man "whose habits and
gross neglect of important public duties have thus been rendered
notorious by the Canadian and English Press."

Driving this shameful dagger home, Howe noted that Macdonald
was said to have written most of the Quebec Resolutions and he
added: "Assuming the statement to be accurate, the undersigned,
while charitably attributing to the inveterate habits referred to the
incoherent and defective character of the whole [confederation]
scheme, would respectfully submit to Her Majesty's Government
whether the knowledge of its paternity is likely to make it more
acceptable to the people of the Maritime Provinces, whose institu-
tions it is proposed to disturb." That blow was low, even for Howe
in the worst days of his megalomania. Only a man like Macdonald
could ever forgive it.

On November 14, satisfied that winter would prevent any new
Fenian movement before spring, Macdonald sailed for London, Five
delegates from Nova Scotia, five from New Brunswick, and six from
Canada assembled in the Westminster Palace Hotel under Mac-
donald's chairmanship and, with the aid of British government
draughtsmen, begun to whip the Quebec Resolutions into the British
North America Act, the constitution of a Canadian state.

The work was briefly interrupted. Macdonald fell asleep one
night leaving a newspaper against the flame of his candle and set
the New Westminster Palace Hotel on fire. He was badly burned
in the shoulder but, aided by Gait and Cartier in their nightshirts,
extinguished the flames with jugs of water. The burns gave him
"a merry Xmas in my own room with my dinner of tea and toast."

He was soon around again, the constitution was approved, and
he decided to complete his labors by a second marriage in his fifty-
third year. After nine years of widowerhood he had recently met
on Bond Street a handsome, middle-aged lady and an old family
friend, Susan Agnes Bernard, of Ottawa. His mind was instantly
made up. He proposed marriage a few weeks later and it was
solemnized before eminent witnesses in St. George's Church, Han-

THE KOAD TO OTTAWA 361

over Square. A honeymoon of two days at Oxford began a happy
and lifelong partnership.

The bridegroom still had to await, amid the convulsions of a
British political crisis, the passage of the British North America Act.

There remained as well the choice of a name for the new state.
Macdonald, having envisaged "a great Kingdom in connection with
the British monarchy and under the British flag/' proposed to call
the state the "Kingdom of Canada" and it was so written into the
constitution. The Earl of Derby, leader of the government^ (who,
according to Disraeli, lived "In a region of perpetual funk"), was
terrified lest the touchy American Republic object to even the title
of an outright monarchy on its border.

Possibly he had some ground for his alarm, The British ambas-
sador in Washington reported that the proposed "Kingdom of
Canada" had produced "much remark of an unfriendly nature in
the United States." A conscientious republican, Representative H. J.
Raymond, of New York, introduced a resolution in the Congress
asking the President whether he had protested against the "con-
solidation of all the British North American Provinces into a single
confederation under the imperial rule of an English prince/*

The Congress paid little attention to Raymond's inquiry but still,
in Derby's °mind, there was no point in taking chances. So the
Westminster Palace Hotel conference devised as a compromise the
title "Dominion of Canada," little suspecting that the word "domin-
ion" would be deplored and abandoned some eighty years hence
by a Canadian prime minister as a semantic vestige of colonialism.

The Dominion of Canada it was to be and when Lord Carnarvon,
the young Colonial Secretary, brought the British North America
Act into Parliament he permitted himself a pretty optimistic fore-
cast of the Dominions future: "We are laying the foundations of a
great State-perhaps one which at a future day may even over-
shadow this country. But come what may, we shall rejoice that we
have shown neither indifference to their wishes nor jealousy of
their aspirations, but that we honestly and sincerely, to the utmost
of our power and knowledge, fostered the growth, recognizing in it
the conditions of our own greatness."

The foundations of a new state, yes. Perhaps a great state of the
future. But something much larger— the foundations of a common-
wealth of independent states containing many races, colors, creeds,
and diverse interests. There could be no turning back now from
the first steps taken in Canada, The unprecedented, amorphous, al-
most unbelievable structure of politics thus begun, and soon to cover
white men and black over a large part of the earth's surface, had

362 THE STRUGGLE FOB THE BORDER

been invented-or blindly conceived-and pushed toward its illog-
ical yet curiously logical end by a handful of groping Canadians
along the St. Lawrence, always with the decisive help of their
American neighbors.

Carleton's work at Quebec in the winter of 1775 was almost
completed at London in the spring of 1867, but not quite. The
Dominion of Canada was still under the dominion of an English
queen. Her government would manage its foreign affairs, often very
badly. London even had power to disallow Ottawa's statutes. Any-
one could see, however, that within measurable time those last
vestiges of the old colonial system would become mere antiquities
and historical relics, would quietly atrophy and finally disappear.

The forms of Canada's inferior status must remain for the present.
Macdonald knelt to kiss the plump hand of Queen Victoria, to thank
her for the British North America Act, and to assure her: "We have
desired in this measure to declare in the most solemn and emphatic
manner our resolve to be under the sovereignty of Your Majesty
and your family forever." Canadians' permanent feelings toward the
royal family, as a symbol, were thus accurately expressed. Macdon-
ald knew, however, none better, that the sovereignty of Canada
would rest, sooner or later, with Canada alone.

What were the prospects of the Confederation which, so far,
stretched barely across half a continent? Macdonald thus judged
them in his own earthy style: "By the exercise of common sense and
a limited amount of that patriotism which goes by the name of self
interest, I have no doubt that the Union will be for the common
weal."

Most people in the united colonies seemed to agree with him
now that the great decision had been made. Much intricate and
some sordid work of politics had yet to be done behind the scenes
before a national government could begin to function. Macdonald
inevitably had been chosen to head it as the first Prime Minister
of Canada. It was easy to accept the appointment from the Queen,
no one expected any other choice, but to organize a durable min-
istry before any elections had been held suddenly appeared an
almost impossible task,

Macdonald proposed to continue the Conservative-Liberal coali-
tion, maker of the union. Brown at once vetoed this project. He re-
turned to politics, all his old fury ablaze again, and in a shattering
speech to the electors of the new province of Ontario announced
that he would not permit the "degradation" of the Liberal Party by
any further association with the Conservatives. "Go into the same
Government with Mr. John A. Macdonald?" he cried. (Cries of

THE KOAD TO OTTAWA 363

"Never! Never!" from the faithful ) "It was the happiest day of my
life when I got out of that concern."

Brown's veto failed. Other Liberals, enough for Macdonald's pur-
pose, remained in the concern.

Its manager was rapidly learning how difficult it would always
be to manage. Not only every province but the two main races,
the two main religions, and the various economic pressure groups
must somehow be satisfied by representation in the Cabinet. Geo-
graphical claims must often supersede the claims of real ability.
Great men like Tupper and McGee must generously step aside to
admit inferiors who came from the right place or professed the
right religion. Sometimes despairing of agreement, almost ready at
one point to retire altogether, Macdonald knocked together a
Cabinet at last, not a moment too soon. Cartier was in it, of course,
and Gait and Tilley and nine others, whose names would not be
long remembered.

These disagreeable chores of political housekeeping had barely
been finished on July 1, 1867, when the Queen's Proclamation, the
flags, bands, cannons, parades, speeches, bonfires, fireworks, laughter
and tears, in every village from Halifax to the rim of the Pre-Cam-
brian rock, announced the birthday of North America's second
nation.

In Ottawa the birthday party did not go well among the Fathers
of Confederation. The crowds cheered, the soldiers marched, but
in the new Privy Council Chamber Governor General Monck (he
had not bothered even to change his traveling clothes after arriving
by boat from Montreal) faced a scene of ghastly embarrassment.
His announcement that the Queen had been graciously pleased to
make Macdonald a Knight Commander of the Bath was expected
and well received by everybody. The second announcement of only
a Companionship of the same order for Cartier, Gait, Tilley, Tupper,
and a few others was greeted with a painful silence.

Cartier and Gait, regarding themselves as Macdonald's equals in
the work of confederation, indignantly refused this second-class
honor. Cartier considered the French race insulted. The moody
Gait wanted no royal honors. If he had to take them they must be
as high as any other Canadian's.

Monck, a well-meaning but gauche man, whose advice involved
the Queen in this unpleasant little quarrel, had failed to consult
Macdonald in advance. The harm had been done and the old
physician must patch it up somehow. In the end he got a baronetcy
for Cartier and a knighthood for Gait, the latter accepting it only
after he had bluntly warned the Queen that "I regard the Confed-

S64 THE STRUGGLE FOB THE BORDER

eration of the British North American Provinces as a measure which
must ultimately lead to their separation from Great Britain/'

No thought of separation marred the night of July 1 as the gaping
crowds of Ottawa saw the new Parliament Buildings illuminated for
the first time. No such thoughts had ever entered Macdonald's mind
either, but he still had his troubles with the teething pains of the
infant state.

There was a general election, to begin with, and in one alarming
respect it turned out badly. Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswick
sustained the Macdonald government and confederation by large
majorities. Nova Scotia, under Howe's persistent campaign of
sabotage, voted decisively the other way and elected no confedera-
tionist but Tupper.

This looked decidedly like the beginning of a secession movement.
It quickly came into the open. Howe appeared again at London,
as the newly elected tribune of his people, and demanded Nova
Scotia's exemption from the "Botheration Scheme/' The dauntless
Tupper followed him to argue the nation's case.

Tupper did not need to argue with the British government, for
it would not hear of secession. It was essential to convert Howe lest
Nova Scotia, pushing his course to its inevitable end, should finally
clamor for annexation to the United States and find willing collab-
orators there. Somehow these sparks must be extinguished before
they ignited the Maritimes.

Tupper tracked the old bear to his lair in a London hotel room
and the lifelong enemies met face to face. "I can't say I'm glad to
see you/' Howe growled, "but we must make the best of it"

Tupper made the best of it. He said he would not insult Howe by
asking him to abandon his mission but when he failed, as he must,
"it is important for you to consider the next step."

Howe blustered and threatened. He had 800 men in every Nova
Scotia county sworn never to pay a cent of taxation to the Canadian
government and he defied it to enforce confederation. Very well,
said Tupper, the national government would withhold its promised
subsidies to Nova Scotia, the province would be bankrupt, and its
people would curse the man who had brought them to ruin.

That shook even the great egotist. Perhaps he knew already that
the game was up. If Nova Scotia could not secede legally, it must
either remain in Canada or join the United States, and no man was
more devoted than Howe to the British connection. In the long
and wrenching struggle which had torn his soul between vanity and
patriotism the larger half of Howe emerged to subdue the lesser.
He saw that Tupper's argument was unanswerable, and he saw in

THE ROAD TO OTTAWA 365

the bulldog face of the man he had once called "the little doctor"
a force as great as his own.

Tupper finally offered him, in Macdonald's name, a place in the
Canadian Cabinet. The old man was "completely staggered."

Well he might be. He had reviled Macdonald from Halifax to
London. He had denounced him as a drunkard to the British gov-
ernment. He had exhausted all his adjectives, eloquence, and venom
upon the man who now tendered him forgiveness and honor. It
was a hard choice. To join the government was to swallow his whole
past, quarrel with all his friends, and admit that Joe Howe could
be wrong.

Nonetheless, Howe made that choice after he came home and
found Nova Scotia talking openly of secession and annexation, the
cockatrice hatched by him. Confronted by Macdonald in all his
roguish charm, Howe joined the national government.

It was a greater victory than his friends or enemies suspected.
Howe had conquered himself. Tired, sick, discredited, cut on the
street by his friends, jeered at and hissed by a people who had
worshiped him, the broken figure staggered from platform to plat-
form, noble in its ruin, still magical in its power. Howe and Tupper
carried their province, all but one constituency, for the Conserva-
tive Party and confederation in 1872. When Howe died as lieuten-
ant governor of Nova Scotia, his people had forgiven their greatest
son and accepted the nation of Canada.

A nation, yes, in form, in constitution, in natural wealth, in sprawl-
ing geography, but not in fact. It could not be in fact until it had
leaped the Pre-Cambrian shield, settled the prairies, tunneled
through the Rockies, and grasped the Pacific coast.

26

The Five-Ring Circus

[1869-1870]

ON OCTOBER 11, 1869, A PARTY OF CANADIAN GOVERNMENT SUR-
veyors was running a line across the Red River farm of
Andre Nault, a French-Canadian half-breed. Sixteen horse-
men suddenly circled the surveyors and reined in their horses. A
young man leaped to the ground and placed his moccasin firmly on
the survey chain. He said in a quiet voice; "You go no further." The
Canadian government's control of the West had been challenged.
The surveyors went no further.

Thus emerged upon the crowded continental scene one of its most
bizarre and tragic actors. Louis Riel had begun his adventure. It
would lead him inevitably to the gibbet. It would also halt the last
northern thrust of Manifest Destiny, nail down Canada's control
in the West, and drive Macdonald's Liberal-Conservative Party into
the wilderness for some half a century.

The agent of these events had barely reached manhood when he
launched them. He was a youth of striking looks— brown, curly hair,
pale skin, drooping mustache, and disquieting, hypnotic eyes. Mac-
donald had never heard of him.

Two years after Canada's national birthday Old Tomorrow's
skilled hands were full enough without a rebellion on the prairies.
He had long been a tightrope walker in a three-ring circus stretch-
ing between Ottawa, Washington, and London. A fourth ring had
been added on the coast of British Columbia, where the inhabitants
talked candidly of joining the United States. A fifth was now added
by Riel beside the Red River.

Finally a side show of mysterious contents was under way in the
far north. Seward, having recovered from the wounds of the assassin
ring which murdered Lincoln, had purchased Alaska from Russia

THE FIVE-KING CIRCUS 367

and now observed, with a fine impartiality, that all North America
must soon become the property of the Republic; though he was
kind enough to add that Canada had built some useful and thrifty
provinces well deserving the chance of statehood in the Union. Like
many eminent predecessors, Seward was mistaken. But, between
south and north, he had pinched Canada in a giant nutcracker.

Things were moving too fast even for the nimble mind of Mac-
donald. What was one to think of an American government which
demanded some of Canada's most valuable resources without pay-
ing for them; of a British government apparently ready to give the
Americans all they asked, at Canada's expense?

And what could any sensible man make of the wild and frantic
figures now loose on the frontier—a prairie rebel who evidently con-
sidered himself a king or perhaps a deity; a legless American who
rode the plains on horseback and fomented annexation; a Canadian
governor who obviously had lost his mind in the wide-open spaces
was forging Queen Victoria's name to official proclamations and
reading them by lanternlight, outdoors, to a half dozen shivering
witnesses, in the teeth of a western blizzard; a Fenian youth busily
organizing a vast army of invasion which, when ordered to march,
included exactly thirty-nine men; and, to complete this gallery of
freaks, the dominant leader of British Columbia, named Smith, who,
tiring of commonplace English, signed himself Amor de Cosmos,
the Lover of the World?

Such assorted lunacy, threatening the life of a Canada hardly two
years old, was almost too much for Old Tomorrow when he must
perform in all the five circus rings simultaneously today. For the
moment the master of equilibrium lost his balance in the western
ring. As Macdonald faltered, Kiel took charge of the prairies and
for ten unbelievable months bestrode the continental boundary in
his moccasins.

This most deadly and improbable of enemies in Macdonald's life
of perpetual alarms was like all the great figures of the boundary,
an accident— the accident of a personality part genius, part mad-
man, part statesmen and part mystic, and yet altogether a patriot
by his own strange lights. If he was an accident, the forces that
produced him had been implicit in the life of the West since the
first French Canadian burst out of the Pre-Cambrian badlands into
the empty plains. Kiel made those forces explicit, organized them,
set them in sudden motion, and on the way to his own ruin, pre-
served the keystone of the continental Canadian arch.

His race called themselves the Metis, or the Bois-BruUs, the men
with skins of singed wood. They had been bred, since Verendrye's

368 THE STRUGGLE FOK THE BOKDER

time, by the union between the voyageurs of Quebec, the Scottish
settlers, and the Indians. Some thirty thousand of these people lived
north and south of a boundary. They completely disregarded this
unmarked line while farming their narrow plots along the Red River,
hunting buffalo, trapping fur and smuggling it, in defiance of the
Hudson's Bay Company, to the Yankee market of "Pig's Eye"
Parent's grubby town, St. Paul.

Their chief settlement was Pembina, just south of the boundary,
and they had begun to regard it as the capital of a new nation. The
Metis were, indeed, almost a nation, more numerous and powerful
than many Indian nations of the past— a nation of mixed but dis-
tinctive blood, of religious unity under the Catholic Church, of
common nomadic ways, a language combining French, English and
Indian, and a living racial myth.

That myth of nationhood had begun with the massacre of Seven
Oaks. The half-breed M6tis had there drawn white man's blood
and driven Selkirk's settlers back to Hudson Bay. In the flush of
their victory and its barbarous celebration they had learned the
lesson long taught by the empires and republics of the world— that
no little nation could endure unless it was strong, wary, and ruthless.

The Metis were hopelessly weak against the strength of the
British Empire and the American Republic but they were not help-
less, for they alone occupied and controlled the most flexible, vul-
nerable, and strategic area in the final contest for the continent—the
central and weakest link of Macdonald's proposed transcontinental
state, the half-open gate through which the United States might
enter the north and seal Canada off at the Great Lakes.

The Hudson's Bay Company, ruling Rupert's Land for Britain in
King Charles's broad fief, from the Lakes to the western sea, had
never been able to tame the Metis. They wandered, hunted, trapped,
smuggled as they pleased.

On the established smugglers' roads from Fort Garry to Pembina
and St. Paul the screeching wooden axles of their Red River carts,
heavily loaded with contraband fur, could be heard for miles. It
was a hideous, ear-splitting, and important sound. It announced to
those who grasped the geopolitics of America that the central
Canadian West had become an economic and might well become a
political suburb of the United States.

Red River had no connection with Canada except the old appall-
ing route of canoe and portage. It had direct access by oxcart to
the neighboring American Territory of Minnesota and, after 1869,
to the new transcontinental line of the Union Pacific Railway. The
land of the Metis thus offered attractive pickings to the American

THE FIVE-RING CIRCUS 369

annexationists. They had failed in the St. Lawrence Valley after a
century of effort. They saw their last and best chance in the valley
of the Red. This time they would avoid their earlier mistakes. And
in Kiel they thought they had found a perfect instrument against
Canada.

They had misjudged the Metis nation and its prophet but they
had good apparent reason to trust Kiel. He was bred, as it appeared,
for their purposes. His father, a man of strong character, was edu-
cated for the priesthood in Quebec, returned to his native land and,
across the Red River from Fort Garry, near the Catholic mission of
St. Boniface, built a flour mill. There he watched the operations of
the Hudson's Bay monopoly and learned to detest it.

In 1849 the company arrested four men for smuggling pelts across
the line. Riel the elder led a grim, well-armed crowd of Metis into
the courtroom of Fort Garry and threatened to remove the prisoners
by force. The prisoners were released. After that the company made
no attempt to stop the illegal fur trade and the name of Riel was
marked for leadership from Red River to the Rockies.

The miller's son, one-eighth Indian and grandson of the first white
woman to spend her life on the Canadian prairies, was sent to Mon-
treal for education as a priest, He impressed his teachers by his
piety, his handsome looks and brooding eyes, his loneliness, his
long silences and sudden passionate outpourings of speech. Though
devout, he was happy to leave the seminary and return to his
widowed mother at St. Boniface. He found his people on the verge
of explosion.

In dealing with them the Macdonald government had bungled
everything. It was purchasing Rupert's Land from the company—
$1,500,000 for something like a quarter of a continent. The Gentle-
men Adventurers had grown weary of their long epic and judged
that Canada's plan to settle the West would "sequester our very
Taproot." On December 1, 1869, the new Dominion would hold
title to all land between the Atlantic and the vague boundaries of
British Columbia, which was expected to enter confederation in a
year or two. Macdonald, a master of men, had quite overlooked the
men of Red River. They thought of themselves as a distinctive race.
Wholly ignorant of the West, Macdonald called them "those miser-
able half-breeds." That was a dangerous, almost a fatal mistake.

The mistake began when the Canadian government, months be-
fore the legal transfer of Rupert's Land, dispatched surveyors to
lay out townships along the Red River in preparation for large-scale
Canadian settlement. As supervisor of this work it chose almost the
worst possible agent, Colonel John Stoughton Dennis. He had

370 THE S1BUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

made a wretched mess of his command against the Fenian raid at
Fort Erie and had been cleared of cowardice, at his own demand,
by a very doubtful court-martial.

The government was capable of a worse error. To the vital office
of lieutenant governor in charge of Rupert's Land it appointed
William McDougall, minister of public works in the Macdonald
Cabinet and a man destined to prove the most comic and pitiable
figure of the western boundary.

The impetuous McDougall set out for Red River while it was
still outside Canadian jurisdiction. He was preceded by Dennis,
who immediately began his surveys. The Metis, Dennis reported,
were sullen and suspicious. They had been given no voice in the
London negotiations transferring Rupert's Land— their land—from
the company to Canada. No attempt was made to explain the deal
to them. Nor had they been given any assurance that their land
titles were safe. When they saw the surveyors striding with compass
and chain across their farms they concluded that the alien author-
ities of Ottawa intended to destroy their way of life.

The Metis' narrow holdings, running from the river back for two
miles, in the fashion inherited from their French-Canadian an-
cestors of Quebec, had been used mostly for pasturing cattle while
the owners hunted and trapped. Now, it appeared, the rich black
muck of the Red River valley was to be redivided, by the American
system of rectangular townships, among new immigrants. Like their
Indian ancestors, the natives would be pushed aside by the march
of the white men. But they were not Indians. They were not squat-
ters or mendicants. In their own eyes they were a nation with a
history of a hundred years on this land and must be treated as
such by the nation of Canada.

The one man who could express the fierce, confused, and hopeless
instincts of these people was Riel. Only twenty-four years old, he
already seemed to possess the maturity of age. He was well edu-
cated. He spoke French, English, Indian dialects, and the Metis
patois derived from them. His orations were attuned to the ears of
his folk. He could write constitutional documents of impressive
sound. His private talk, as he paced nervously back and forth, had
a ring of action, The brooding eyes held a mystery. The saturnine
presence summoned up the old memories of the voyageurs canoes,
the Indians' campfires, the buffalo hunts, the far horizons of Metis
life.

Such a man might do much and go far. Rupert's Land was with-
out any legal government. The company had surrendered its power.
Canada, under the casual arrangements of London and Ottawa, had

THE FIVE-RING CIRCUS 371

yet to receive any authority west of Ontario. During the inter-
regnum—complicated by the old quarrel between the Metis and the
English-speaking settlers, between Catholic and Protestant, between
company and smuggler, and now irritated by the Metis* fear of
Canada— even Dennis saw the need of conciliating the Red River
people. His reports were disregarded. So were the pleas of Bishop
Tache from St. Boniface. The Canadian government made no effort
to reassure the Metis or explain its policies, though Joe Howe had
visited Fort Garry and, with experienced nose, smelled trouble.

Driving homeward through the United States, Howe met Mc-
Dougall and warned him that until the transfer of the West to
Canadian control, timed for December 1, 1869, the new governor
lacked any legal power. Mere warnings and footling legal technical-
ities would not stop McDougall. He moved northward from St. Paul
in October with a train of sixty wagons, carrying his baggage and
300 rifles. All the way he was watched by Metis scouts.

Meanwhile the Metis at Fort Garry had formed a National Com-
mittee and chosen Riel as its secretary. Its first decision was com-
municated to McDougall by letter on the trail. He was ordered not
to enter "the Territory of the Northwest" without the permission of
the committee. That order carried the authority of 500 armed sharp-
shooters north of the boundary.

McDougall was too dense a man to understand that the commit-
tee was not proposing a rebellion but simply did not recognize Cana-
dian authority, for it had yet to be legally proclaimed, The M6tis
had not even forbidden McDougall to enter Rupert's Land. They
said only that he must not enter without the consent of the people
who were ready to negotiate with him and with Canada.

McDougall disregarded this message as the pretentious hairsplit-
ting of ignorant half-breed sea lawyers and moved on toward the
boundary.

Captain D. R, Cameron, of the Royal Canadian Artillery, reck-
lessly drove ahead with his wife and two servants. Nine miles south
of Fort Garry he found a barrier across the road, beside it nine
silent Metis. Without a sound or any sign of violence they turned
his horses around and started them southward. When McDougall
appeared next day he was met by an armed Metis guard. It gave
him until nightfall to leave Rupert's Land. He was enraged but he
obeyed. Back in Pembina he and his viceregal entourage settled
down in any log cabins they could find.

The Canadian government had been defied, its representative
humiliated. American newspapers jubilantly announced that the
M6tis would set up their own government or join the Union. Enos

372 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

Stutsman, of Pembina, a lawyer and journalist, who had been born
without legs but on crutches and horseback constantly shuttled
across the boundary and had made himself the Metis' trusted ad-
viser, reported that the chances of Manifest Destiny in Red River
were ripening fast. James Wickes Taylor, an annexationist, later an
American government secret agent but always a man of peace,
persuaded the St. Paul Chamber of Commerce to pass a resolution
declaring that the new nation of Canada must end at the Great
Lakes. All the rest of the continent must belong, by common justice,
to the United States.

After reading the memorial from St. Paul, the Senate asked the
State Department to ascertain whether the United States could buy
the old Hudson's Bay empire. A price of $10,000,000 was suggested
as against the Canadian price of $1,500,000, already accepted. This
proposal might appear insolent in Ottawa but was milder than
General N. P. Banks's bill, introduced in the House of Representa-
tives two years before and suggesting the annexation or Canada
entire— a proposal quietly dropped, in the face of strong Canadian
protests.

The situation at Red River was now out of Washington's hands,
and Ottawa's. On November 2, the day of McDougalFs retreat to
Pembina, Riel and 120 armed men marched through the open gates
of Fort Garry, found the Hudson's Bay factor, William Mactavish,
in bed with tuberculosis and seized the capital of Rupert's Land.
The Metis nation now had its own capital, 390 new rifles, and
thirteen little cannons. Mactavish protested but without enthu-
siasm. He liked the Metis, he hated the company for selling out its
faithful servants, and he regarded McDougall with contempt. Any-
way, he was dying.

So far everything had been easy for the young man of twenty-four
years. Riel could claim, with some color of legitimacy, dominion
over a region larger than many of the world's great nations. His
armed men patrolled the muddy streets of the Red River town. He
made them take an oath of temperance. He censored all outgoing
mail. And to prove that his government was not only legal but
democratic, he created a legislative assembly.

The Metis elected twelve delegates and, surprisingly enough, the
English-speaking settlers did the same. On November 16 this strange
parliament met in the fort with a salute of cannon and drafted a
Bill of Rights. This was not the act of rebels but of men who asked
only for the right of responsible provincial government within
Canada, fair representation in the Canadian Parliament, and the
ownership of their own land.

THE FIVE-RING CERCUS 373

The Metis delegates proposed to negotiate with McDougall. The
British objected that McDougall was not legally in office and could
not negotiate for Canada. President Kiel, strutting in starched white
shirt, frock coat, black trousers, and beaded moccasins, found his
parliament deadlocked. But there had been no rebellion. The Union
Jack flew over Fort Garry.

To the hotter heads of Pembina, St. Paul, and Washington— mis-
informed by a well-organized espionage net— the puzzled assembly
of Fort Garry took on the hopeful look of a Philadelphia Congress.
The indefatigable Stutsman wrote President Grant urging "instant
and decisive action" of a sort unspecified.

Though misinformed, Washington knew more about events at
Red River than did the floundering government of Canada, which
heard little, heard it late, and could not understand it. Still, Mac-
donald's Cabinet could understand at least that it had made a
botch of its triumphal entry into the West, that McDougall, its
representative, was denned up in a Pembina shack, that RieFs
parliament was passing laws apparently obeyed by the Red River
people, and that somehow, very late, they must be placated.

Macdonald did not fear any overt act by the American govern-
ment, only the same sort of unofficial raids that had endangered the
boundary in 1838 and again in 1866. They had been easily repelled
on the St. Lawrence because the Canadian people were united
against them. What would happen in Red River, where there were
no Canadian soldiers, where the people might well support the
raiders, and where overnight Canada might be faced with a local
fait accompli, accepted and ratified in Washington?

This seemed a very real possibility. Donald Smith, head of the
Hudson's Bay Company in Montreal and one of the shrewdest minds
in Canada, told Macdonald that the annexationists of Minnesota
were ready to finance such raids and could recruit among the root-
less "border banditti," camp followers of the American railway
builders, thousands of men quite capable of seizing Fort Garry.

Congressman Ignatius Donnelly had assured his St. Paul con-
stituents in a public speech that, within a few months, they would
see the Stars and Stripes waving over the whole territory from Red
River to the Pacific. American newspapers heralded the natural
unification of the continent, already ordained (as the St. Paul press
announced) by God. The Senate asked the State Department for a
report on McDougall's purposes at Pembina, remarking with virtu-
ous horror that he apparently planned to take over Red River
against the wishes of its inhabitants.

These were mere gestures and not frightening to Macdonald. He

374 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

had been through the process before. More serious was the pro-
posal of Senator Alexander Ramsey, of Minnesota, for a^ northern
railway to the border at Pembina— a lure which the Metis could
hardly resist. At last grasping all the possibilities that he should
have grasped before, Old Tomorrow was thoroughly roused. The
Americans, he wrote, would do anything "short of war" to secure
the West, "and we must take immediate and vigorous steps to
counteract them." The vigorous steps were the appointment of a
delegation to pacify the Metis and the postponement, if necessary,
of the Rupert's Land transfer.

Even Macdonald, for all his skepticism of human nature, had
yet to realize the unplumbed depths of McDougall's stupidity.
After fuming for some days in his squalid hut, that furious empire
builder had conceived his own insane coup fietat. He took pen in
hand and sat down to compose a lengthy proclamation in which
Queen Victoria announced that, reposing complete confidence in
her well-loved servant, she herewith authorized McDougall to
annex Rupert's Land. The author forged the signature of his
sovereign.

Copies of the proclamation were smuggled to Fort Garry and
pasted by McDougalFs agents on the walls of the fort. Kiel de-
nounced them as a fraud. Erratic as he was himself, Riel could not
conceive McDougalFs next move.

On the night of December 1, the date fixed by McDougall in the
Queen's name for his assumption of power, few men in the West
ventured outside their doors. The thermometer stood at 20° below
zero and a blizzard rumbled down from Hudson Bay. The people
of Pembina, crouched around their fires, did not see McDougall
and six companions harness a team of horses and drive into the
darkness, followed by two faithful pointer dogs. The self-authorized
servant of the Queen advanced, half frozen, into his kingdom, but
not far.

At an abandoned Hudson's Bay fort just north of the boundary
he hitched his horses to an empty building and there performed the
highest act of comedy in the record of the North American strug-
gle. The pocket of his overcoat yielded a little Union Jack, which
one of his companions held up, flapping wildly in the wind. He
fumbled in his pocket again and produced his forged proclamation,
written on parchment. While another man held a guttering lantern
overhead, the lieutenant governor of Rupert's Land read aloud the
words inserted in the mouth of his queen. None of the six men
around McDougall could hear his voice. Its sound was whipped
from his lips by the gale. The two dogs, only sensible members of

THE FIVE-RING CCRCUS 375

the expedition, cowered in the lee of a wall. No, there was one
man of judgment present. He took shelter behind a building and
drank a quart of whisky.

Having performed his duty and shouted his sovereignty into the
blizzard, McDougall crawled into his carriage and drove back to
his log cabin in Pembina. The American telegraph lines carried that
fascinating news next day to Washington and Ottawa. McDougall's
comedy became the jest of the English-speaking world. The Metis
at Fort Garry composed a merry song to celebrate the retreat of
the bogus governor. And a horrified Macdonald fired him.

It was not all comedy, however. McDougall had commissioned
Dennis as his "Lieutenant and Conservator of Peace," with orders
to put down an imaginary rebellion. Dennis thereupon seized the
idle stone fort of Lower Fort Garry, twenty miles down the river
from Kiel's capital, and, unable to recruit white men, began to
assemble a band of Indians. The annexationist press of St. Paul,
instantly arousing the Americans* oldest border memories., accused
Dennis of fomenting a new Indian war.

Actually he was powerless in his stone fort, and Kiel knew it. But
Dennis, his handful of Indians, a little band of loyal Canadians arm-
ing themselves at Portage la Prairie, west of Fort Garry, and the
extreme Canadian party in Fort Garry itself might provoke Kiel to
desperate action. He could subdue his own local rebels. He was
powerless to defy for long the power of Canada— if it could be
transported to the prairies— but he could invite the Americans to
come and rescue him when he was pressed too far.

Such was exactly the course that the American agitators at Fort
Garry were urging. They offered Kiel both blandishments and
bribes. They promised liberty and justice for his people under the
American Constitution. What was he waiting for?

Kiel, under his outward bluster, his postures and orations, had
become a very confused young man. He could not foresee his next
step but he remained sure about one thing— he was a subject of
the Queen. On him, the odd fulcrum of the continental balance,
the Americans had counted without knowing their man. They had
made the same mistake many times before.

However he might regard the large international affairs tem-
porarily in his hands, Kiel had made his word law in Rupert's
Land.

On December 7, Dr. John Christian Schultz, the burly and vocif-
erous leader of the Canadian party at Fort Garry, barricaded him-
self with forty-five companions in his house and defied Kiel to arrest
him. A force of 300 M6tis, armed with rifles and two cannons,

376 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

promptly surrounded the Insurgents. Kiel read McDougall's proc-
lamation and stamped it scornfully into the snow. He gave Schultz
fifteen minutes to surrender. Schultz surrendered. The forty-six
prisoners were marched to the fort.

Dennis, Conservator of Peace, urged the "Loyal Party" to "cease
further action," slipped out of his stronghold in the Lower Fort,
and fled to Pembina.

As master of Red River, Riel posted a proclamation announcing
that the Metis had been abandoned by their lawful government,
were "exempt from allegiance" to it, refused to recognize the author-
ity of the "despotic" government of Canada, and would repel "all
invasions from whatsoever quarters they may come/' Probably by
the inspiration of his American friends, Riel's Declaration of Inde-
pendence pledged "Our lives, our furtunes and our sacred honor/'
Nevertheless, he was ready to negotiate with Canada for "the good
government and prosperity of this people/' It was not to be that
easy.

True, the Canadian government had been forced to negotiate.
The American annexationists apparently were poised ready to
answer RieFs beckoning finger. Senator Ramsey was asking Grant
for $25,000, which the Metis would use to continue their defiance
of Canada. Grant refused and Riel's finger did not beckon. When
he printed his own newspaper, the New Nation, and its editor pro-
posed union with the United States, Riel dismissed him. Everything
at Fort Garry appeared in good order.

Now the Canadian government tacitly admitted RieFs authority
by sending as ambassadors to him the grizzled Donald Smith,
Lieutenant Colonel de Salaberry, and Vicar-General Thibault, a
Roman Catholic cleric of Montreal. They were to seek an amicable
agreement and their instructions repudiated Canada's former "acts
of folly and indiscretion/'

It was a heady moment for Riel as he called a mass meeting of
his people on January 19 in the open field outside the fort and from
the platform beheld a thousand Metis, stamping in the snow and
huddling around bonfires to keep warm in a temperature of 20°
below zero. Beside him sat the wily Smith, a master of small in-
trigues and big business, who noted Riel's own flag, a fleur-de-lis
on a white field, over the fort.

Riel translating his words into the M^tis dialect, Smith appealed
for peace, offered to resign from the Hudson's Bay Company if that
would help, and talked so long that the benumbed listeners finally
adjourned in the icy dusk to reassemble on the morrow.

Another and larger meeting followed and, six days later, a con-

THE FIVE-RING CIRCUS 377

vention of forty elected delegates to consider Smith's offer of
union with Canada.

Kiel appeared confident before the delegates but he was having
trouble with his government. It had split between those who sought
admission to Canada and those, led by a young Fenian, William
O'Donoghue, who demanded annexation to the United States. Kiel
proposed that Red River enter confederation as a full-fledged prov-
ince, not a territory. Voted down, he angrily denounced his
opponents as traitors. Smith intervened to propose a compromise.
Let the Metis send representatives to Ottawa and negotiate a
satisfactory settlement.

Kiel at once seized on this official admission that his own govern-
ment was legal. He asked the convention to give him a vote of
confidence and create a permanent legislature. The convention
agreed. That night the formal establishment of a cabinet, with Riel
as its president, was celebrated by a peal of cannon and the dis-
charge of rockets, long hoarded by the Canadian party for appro-
priate celebration. The Red River delegates started the long journey
to Ottawa.

If Riel could have stopped there, at the peaceful summit of his
power, he might have become a Canadian hero. He could not stop.
He would never stop until he reached the gallows.

His downfall began with a series of small, deceptive accidents.

The dauntless Schultz, a prisoner in an upper room of the fort,
had received a penknife, smuggled to him by his wife. He cut a
buffalo hide into strips and wove them into a rope. On a night of
blinding blizzard, when the guards hugged their fires indoors, he
fastened the rope with a gimlet and crawled through the window.
The strands of hide parted and dropped him two stories into the
snow. He lay unnoticed for some time, fainting from the agony
of a twisted leg, then managed to drag himself four miles down
the river to the house of a friend. There he lay secreted while RfeFs
troopers scoured the countryside, with orders to shoot him on sight.
Finally he escaped to the United States by dogteam through the
worst of the winter cold and, arrived in Ontario, preached a crusade
against the "rebels."

The resulting anger in Canada was serious for Riel and it was
only the beginning.

Major C. W. Boulton had assembled at Portage a hundred men
of the Canadian party. They began to clamor for the chance to
assault Fort Garry and release RieFs prisoners. Boulton knew this
to be madness against the M6tis sharpshooters but his counsel of
caution was impatiently rejected. Since he could not stop them, he

378 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

led his reckless followers through a blizzard on the trail to the iort.
The company included a young man named Thomas Scott. This
chattering, volatile Orangeman from Ontario, who had been ar-
rested by the Metis and had later escaped, was to be the martyr
of the rebellion and the ruin of Kiel.

As it moved slowly eastward with a single cannon, dragged by
oxen, the Portage expedition was swelled by recruits along the
way to the number of 500. They were ill armed and no match foi
Kiel's 600 riflemen. Their spirits cooled by the march, they decided
not to attack the fort on learning that Kiel had released all his
prisoners as a gesture of peace.

Close to their camp, north of the fort, a half-witted and terrified
Metis boy fled from the white men. On his way he shot a Scots
settler. Boulton's men captured this youth and chopped him to
death. It was a familiar story of casual killing, repeated a thousand
times on the plains. Now it was destined to have continental con-
sequences.

Forty-eight of the Portage party started homeward without firing
a shot, and foolishly passed within sight of the fort. The Metis, sus-
pecting an attack, rode down on these men and captured them.
Thereupon the taut brain of Kiel snapped.

Boulton must die for killing the half-wit and committing the first
bloodshed of a peaceful revolution. This verdict terrified even the
president's friends but they protested in vain. Kiel coldly rejected
the pleas of the Canadians, the Catholic clergy, and Donald Smith,
until he beheld on her knees before him the mother of the Scots
settler slain by the Metis boy. At this sight Kiel broke down in
tears and reprieved Boulton.

One danger had passed only to be succeeded by another.

Scott had been arrested with Boulton and, always talkative,
abusive and profane, had been cursing Kiel, denouncing his jailers,
and promising vengeance. When the president visited the prison
one day Scott leaped upon him and was dislodged with difficulty
by the guards. This was too much. Kiel called a court-martial. Act-
ing himself as prosecutor, he secured a conviction by a narrow vote
of four to three.

Scott was led into the courtyard next morning, blindfolded, and
ordered to kneel in the snow. The six Metis marksmen facing him
were well fortified with liquor against their ordeal. Three of their
rifles had been secretly loaded with bullets, three with blank car-
tridges, so that no man would ever know who fired the killing
shots.

THE FTVE-BING CIRCUS 379

A single explosion crackled in the cold dawn. Scott slumped for-
ward, wounded but still alive. A revolver was quickly fired point-
blank at his head.

Such was Scott's end and the beginning of Kiel's— an obscure
killing in a remote prairie fort hundreds of miles from anywhere,
the gesture of a frightened dictator, the act of a burlesque govern-
ment; yet few more decisive shots had ever been fired in Canada.
Kiel had killed only one man in ten months of power. His four
bullets had killed the Metis nation.

Not since the Rebellion of 1837 had Ontario boiled in such a
passion. An innocent Canadian, an Orangeman, a Protestant, and a
patriot had been murdered by a half-breed Catholic madman in
Red River. As the tale traveled along the St. Lawrence to the distant
homesteads, Scott became a national martyr, almost a saint Old
Tomorrow's delays had caught up with him.

There was nothing for it, then, but a display of military force,
with all the risk of bloodshed, a Metis appeal to the United States,
and American intervention. Twelve thousand soldiers were mobil-
ized under Colonel Garnet Wolseley, a British officer of future
fame. Since the United States, in its present temper, would not
allow Canadian troops to pass through its territory or even through
the Sault Ste. Marie locks, Wolseley's expedition struggled over-
land by the old uoyageurs trail and the half-built Dawson Road,
westward from the Lake of the Woods—the largest force ever seen
in the West, one of the hardest marches in American history.

While ostentatiously exhibiting its force, the Macdonald govern-
ment prepared to meet the M6tis delegates in friendly fashion.
Senator Zachariah Chandler demanded that the United States rec-
ognize Riel's government and invite it into the Republic. That
government continued to function peacefully, ignorant of the On-
tario storm. Riel had even lowered his own flag and unfurled the
Union Jack in its place, at which his dashing young Fenian lieuten-
ant and treasurer, O'Donoghue, raised a second pole to bear the
fleur-de-lis.

So they fluttered together in the icy wind as the M6tis delega-
tion—at first arrested by the zealous Ontario police and quickly
released on Macdonald's orders—met the Ottawa Cabinet and
quickly negotiated an agreement. Red River was to enter confeder-
ation under the name of Manitoba. This, the delegates explained,
meant "the God that speaks/' The Bill of Rights drafted at Fort
Garry was substantially accepted. Riel was to govern until a
lieutenant governor arrived to establish the new province.

380 THE STRUGGLE FOI\ THE BORDER

Moreover, Kiel's representatives understood definitely from Cartier,
acting in Macdonald's absence, that there would be a complete
amnesty for everyone concerned in the recent troubles.

These terms, as drafted by Kiel and approved in Ottawa, were
confirmed by the government and legislature of Fort Garry. The
Metis apparently had won their struggle.

Appearances, however, were misleading. The struggle would not
end for fifteen years or without a second and this time a bloody
rebellion, fatal to the Metis, ruinous to Macdonald's government
and party.

Kiel waited confidently for the arrival of Wolseley's army. It
was coming in peace, and with his approval. Soon his scouts, watch-
ing the soldiers wallow in misery through rivers, swamps, and
hordes of mosquitoes, brought back disquieting news. Only fifty
men in this army were French Canadians. The others talked around
their campfires of congenial fighting at Fort Garry, vengeance for
the murder of Scott, and the hanging of Kiel What of the promised
amnesty? No one seemed to know whether Cartier's word was good
or bad.

Kiel's hotheads and the American agitators urged him to ambush
Wolseley in the jungle and destroy him before he reached the open
land of the prairies. Kiel refused. He was still a subject of the
Queen. Wolseley would be welcomed in peace to Fort Garry.

After forty-seven portages and ninety-six days of marching from
dawn to dark, Wolseley's army coasted down the Winnipeg River
in its heavy boats, emerged upon Lake Winnipeg, and staggered
toward the fort in the clinging gumbo of an August rainstorm.
Canadian power had reached the West at last. Nothing would dis-
lodge it now. But Wolseley found no scene of war, no sign of rebel-
lion. He was greeted only by "a half-naked Indian, very drunk/'
and did not know yet that the Metis government had collapsed in
quarrel and terror.

Riel stood out to the last for union with Canada. Many of his
followers, doubting Canada's good faith and the assurance of
amnesty, were determined to fight. Some of them, led by O'Don-
oghue, still demanded annexation to the United States. In this
schism the government melted and disappeared overnight. As the
army lurched up the muddy riverbank, only Riel and O'Donoghue
stood watching it, from a window in the empty fort. The brave
dream was finished. Another little North American nation had
found, as the Indians had in their time, that it could not resist the
Manifest Destiny of the white man's empires.

The first soldiers had reached the wall of the fort when Riel and

THE FIVE-BING CIRCUS 381

O'Donoghue slipped out the gate, tied some fence posts together
with their belts, and rafted across the Assiniboine. They heard from
its southern bank the cannons of their lost capital booming the
triumph of Canada.

Fort Garry endured a few days of excitement, a little looting,
much drinking, and the informal killing of a few Metis leaders.
Then Wolseley's army started eastward again, leaving a hundred
men to guard the West.

Kiel was safely across the American boundary. He had become,
as he told a friend who fed him on the trail, "a homeless wanderer
with nothing to eat but two dried fish." The immediate game of
this talented megalomaniac was not quite played out and a larger
game was to follow. At this time few Canadians, perhaps not even
Macdonald, realized that already, for all his arrogance, delusion
and postures, he had served his country well. His refusal to sur-
render to the Americans may well have saved the West for Canada.
A few weeks hence Canada would need him again.

There had been far more violence and bloodletting at Fort Garry
in the first few days of Wolseley's occupation than in Kiel's ten
months of government, which had killed only one man. But Adams
Archibald, first Canadian lieutenant governor of Manitoba, and a
man of sense and humanity, immediately won the respect of the
Metis.

Kiel was now in St. Joseph's, O'Donoghue in Pembina, thirty
miles to the east. Kiel was beaten, heartbroken, and quiescent.
O'Donoghue, the lean, gangling friend of Irish freedom, still lived
in his Fenian fantasies, was cocky, ambitious, and full of great
plans. First he intended to seize from Kiel the leadership of the
American M6tis. Later he would arouse the Fenian Brotherhood to
its ultimate invasion of Canada.

Kiel was not to be easily pushed aside. A M6tis convention at
St. Norbert supported him and rejected O'Donoghue's resolution
urging the United States to annex Rupert's Land. As a compromise,
the convention asked President Grant to examine the betrayal of
the M6tis by the Canadian government. Kiel opposed even this
gesture. Canada, he said, would treat Manitoba justly. The conven-
tion adjourned and, Kiel safely out of the way, the O'Donoghue
faction quietly changed the agreed formula and petitioned Grant
to make sure that the M6tis secured a government of their own
choice or, failing that, union with the Republic.

O'Donoghue discussed this proposal directly with Grant and
found the President disappointingly unimpressed. After his rebuff
in Washington O'Donoghue carried his plan of Canadian invasion

382 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

to the Fenian Brotherhood in New York. Still reeling from its re-
cent disasters, it could offer him only "its prayers." These, com-
bined with a few resolute invaders and a Metis uprising in Red
River, would be sufficient for O'Donoghue's purposes.

He was joined now by the dauntless O'Neill, recently released
from an American jail. The two undertook a speaking tour in
Minnesota, raised a little money, but found few followers ready
to accompany them across the border. Riel advised his friends to
avoid this hopeless adventure and he assured Bishop Tach6 that
"we detest the Fenians,"

Governor Archibald was a worried man. With only a hundred
troops at his command, he knew that a Fenian invasion, joined to a
Metis uprising, could take his province, at least temporarily. He
therefore guaranteed in writing an amnesty for any M6tis rebel
who helped him to repel the expected raid.

This danger had begun to look formidable. It was said that the
Fenian army numbered 2,000 men. A few days later it had grown
to 3,500 and was still growing. If these numbers were accurate,
Archibald judged his position critical.

He found an unexpected ally in Riel. The exile urged his people
in Canada to resist the Fenians. Two hundred armed Metis pre-
sented themselves at Fort Garry and offered to fight. Archibald in-
spected this motley little contingent as if it had been a picked
guard of honor. His eyes traveled along the line and fastened on a
handsome sallow-faced young man with dark, brooding eyes. He
knew Riel at a glance, but neither registered any recognition. The
exile's service in arms, though welcome, could not be admitted
publicly. What would Ontario say if it heard that a Canadian
governor was employing the rebel, the murderer of Scott? Riel was
solemnly introduced to Archibald without a name, merely as the
man chosen by the Metis to lead them. RieFs tragedy had turned
for the moment into a rather solemn farce.

Afterwards Archibald confessed that if the M&is had been hostile,
and if the Fenians had mobilized an effective raid, he could easily
have lost Manitoba. As it turned out, he had no reason for alarm and
no use for RieFs sharpshooters.

The Fenian invasion was launched on October 5. It consisted of
OTDonoghue, O'Neill, and thirty-seven followers. The oddest army
ever seen in America had hardly walked across the border before it
was pursued and surrounded by a single company of United States
soldiers. The Fenian designs on Canada ended forever in Pembina's
crowded jail.

O'Donoghue soon escaped. The Metis captured and handed him

THE FIVE-RING CIRCUS 383

back to the American authorities. Brave, intelligent, and deluded
young man, he settled down as a schoolteacher, to die young.

Kiel had some fifteen more years and a final tragedy before him.
At present he was a grave political liability to Macdonald. If the
French-Canadian rebel were punished, Quebec would be outraged.
If he were allowed to remain in Manitoba, Ontario would explode.
Either way the cost in votes at the next election would be ruinous
to the government.

Always a practical man, Macdonald arranged to pay Kiel $1,000
out of a secret fund, provided the exile remained in the United
States. For once Kiel was practical also. He said quite truthfully
that the sum was not enough to support him, his lieutenant, Maxime
Lepine, and their abandoned families at Red River. Smith— a cam-
paign fund expert who soon would be operating on a much larger
scale— raised £600 from the treasury of the Hudson's Bay Company,
to be repaid by the government on a less conspicuous occasion. His
offer was accepted. Riel and Lepine retired to obscurity south of
the border.

The rebellion of Red River— or so it would be called by the Cana-
dian people—had ended. Not its leader. Riel had acquired the most
dangerous asset that such a man could possess. He had become a
racial myth.

27
The World's Lover

[1867-1871]

IF MACDONALD HAD FIRST MISJUDGED EVENTS IN THE WEST AND THEN
settled them more by good luck than good management, it was
not surprising in his circumstances. For Red River provided
only one ring in his swarming political circus. The Washington ring
appeared much more alarming and presently would compel him to
execute the most painful performance of his life, an almost impossi-
ble balancing act, followed by a humiliating somersault. Meanwhile
the central arch of the transcontinental state had been saved, but its
far western pier was not even in Canada's possession and seemed
likely to slip by natural gravity into the United States.

Vancouver Island and the Pacific mainland, now joined in the
single colony of British Columbia, contained some ten thousand
white inhabitants, a thin sedimentary layer of permanent population
left by the receding tide of the gold rush.

By every logical calculation their future lay with the thriving
American territories beside them. They had no links of trade, geog-
raphy, or transportation with Canada, which lay on the other side
of a continent behind the Rockies, the prairies and the Pre-Cambrian
dike; no links of memory, or sentiment either, and little interest in
the doubtful experiment called confederation. Moreover, they were
now sandwiched, by Seward's purchase, between American Alaska
to the north and the Pacific territories and states to the south. British
Columbia lay on the continental map as the obvious corridor joining
the Pacific possessions of the Republic.

Naturally enough, practical men in the tiny colonial capital of
Victoria saw no future for themselves except within the United
States, for it surely must soon join the remote limb of Alaska with
the body of the Union if it did not secure the whole continent.

Besides, the Americans now possessed a transcontinental railway

384

THE WORLD'S LOVER 385

while there was not even a wagon road from British Columbia to
Canada. A short northern spur from the American line would give
British Columbia access to the great markets of the Eastern cities
and Victoria could become a large entrepot of American business,
a major port on the Pacific. Finally— so the formidable argument
ran among the annexationists of Victoria— the United States, in tak-
ing over British Columbia, would also take over the alarming
colonial debt of $1,500,000.

Thus, as Elgin had found in Canada, annexation obsessed many
British Columbians as the solution to every problem. It had become
a crudely organized movement even in the days of the Cariboo
rush. It was now supported not only by Americans who had come
to find gold and had remained as residents but by hardheaded
British settlers whose nostalgia for Britain was outweighed by their
British instinct for profitable business.

They did not lack friends in the United States. American news-
papers were generously suggesting that the cession of British Colum-
bia might compensate the Republic for the Alabama Claims. A bill
introduced in the Congress proposed that the Pacific colony be
admitted to the Union as a territory, to become in due time a
prosperous state.

The Victoria annexationists could argue pretty convincingly that
Britain no longer cared whether British Columbia remained in the
Empire or withdrew. Had not the London Times— a Homer who
sometimes nodded— recently announced, doubtless with official in-
spiration, that nothing should be done to prevent annexation?

The annexationist argument seemed airtight and unanswerable
in practical politics. Accordingly, it was presented to the Colonial
Office by a group of British Columbians in 1867, the year of confed-
eration. Since London was unmoved by this suggestion, the annexa-
tionists turned directly to the United States with a second petition
asking President Grant to arrange British Columbia's admission to
the Union. The American government, while willing to countenance
unofficial penetration, was unwilling to risk official acts possibly
involving a serious quarrel with Britain.

The down-at-heel colonial government at Victoria made no seri-
ous effort to discourage this agitation. Its officials received their pay
from London but it was depressingly small, hardly enough to support
them in genteel poverty, and doubtless would never increase so
long as the miserable colony was isolated by an artificial line from
the booming United States.

Governor Seymour complained to London that his dilapidated
mansion overlooking Fuca's Strait needed furniture and "the walls
no paper to hide the cracks which the settlement of the older

386 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

parts of the building have entailed upon them/' London was brutally
unsympathetic. It advised Seymour to pay more attention to his
depleted sinking funds and less to his sinking residence.

In the listless and sickly person of the Governor, Macdonald real-
ized that confederation was supported by a bioken reed. "It is quite
clear," the Canadian Prime Minister wrote to the Colonial Office,
"that no time should be lost ... in putting the screws on Vancouver
Island, and the first thing to do is to recall Governor Seymour, if his
time is not yet out. We shall then have to fight only the Yankee ad-
venturers and the annexation party proper, which there will be no
difficulty in doing if we have a good man at the helm."

MacdonakTs judgment proved better in British Columbia than in
Red River. The annexation movement on the Pacific, as on the
Atlantic, was producing the historic Canadian reaction and a power-
ful new continental figure to lead it, He had been bom plain Smith
but such a name could not long satisfy a man of his soaring ambi-
tion, high abilities, and cosmic dreams. To proclaim his true dimen-
sions before mankind he legally acquired the signature of Amor de
Cosmos.

The self-styled Lover of the World had a prophetic look worthy
of his title. His face was long, narrow, lengthened by a black spade
of whisker, and strikingly handsome. His eyes burned with frenzy,
his tongue was never still, his restless pen scribbled ferocious edi-
torials in his queer little newspaper, the British Colonist, and he had
his teeth into an issue that his readers could understand. It was the
oldest issue in North American life, common to Canadians and
Americans alike— the issue of Responsible Government.

De Cosmos had conducted a lengthy and bitter feud with the
official oligarchy first established by Douglas and inherited by
Seymour. In the British Colonist and in de Cosmos's perpetual ora-
tions on public platforms or at Victoria's street corners, the western
counterpart of the eastern Family Compact was charged with
despotism, mismanagement, and financial sharp practice.

This was the old fight of York, Quebec, and Halifax all over again,
the same fight waged by Sam Adams in Boston, Jefferson in Virginia,
and countless North Americans from Jamestown and Plymouth
onward. De Cosmos and his ardent little coterie had replaced, upon
a small but strategically vital stage, such actors as William Lyon
Mackenzie, Papineau, Baldwin, and Kiel.

The Lover of the World, though violent in speech, was a man of
peace. He counted on the intelligence of the people at the ballot
box. And, against all apparent logic, he viewed British Columbia as
the final and decisive ingredient of the Canadian state.

Such was Macdonald's erratic, theatrical, but brilliant ally in the

THE WORLD'S LOVER 387

struggle to complete confederation. The older master of Canadian
politics heard with approval that de Cosmos, scorned by the Gov-
ernor, had organized the Confederation League and was stumping
the country. Then he had called a convention at Yale, on the Fraser,
roused the handful of delegates with his antique style of eloquence,
and formed a Confederation Party. Seymour died at this opportune
moment and a successor could be appointed to "tighten the screws."

The official recommended by Macdonald for this essential work
was Anthony Musgrave, a genial fellow, quiet but firm, with a hard
eye, a walrus mustache, and a bare, pugnacious chin. Evidently, in
appointing Musgrave, London had made up its wavering mind at
last in favor of holding the Pacific colony.

The new Governor's instructions put in more discreet terms the
screw-tightening policy urged in Macdonald's more candid dis-
patches: "Her Majesty's Government anticipate that the interests
of every province of British North America would be more advanced
by enabling the wealth, credit and intelligence of the whole to be
brought to bear on every part than by encouraging each in the con-
stricted policy of taking care of itself, possibly at the expense of its
neighbor." In plain terms, Musgrave was to push British Columbia
into confederation without further delay.

He quickly plied his screw driver. His Legislative Council was
assembled in the preposterous red wooden pagodas of Victoria
(known locally as the Bird Cages) to be acquainted with the policy
of the British government. Unhappily, at this great turning point of
1870, the Governor could not appear personally with his message
from London, having fallen from his horse and broken his leg. He
lay in his cracked and moldering mansion while his speech was read
to the Council and excited galleries by the Colonial Secretary,
Philip Rankin.

The breathless Lover of the World and his friends found the
speech anticlimactic. It did not grant responsible government as
they had hoped but promised merely to add two elected members
to the Governor's Council. The stingy concession was greeted by the
Confederation Party in "stony silence." But when the Governor pro-
posed that British Columbia join the new Dominion the fragile Bird
Cages shook with applause.

As Macdonald had always suspected, the annexationists were a
minority in British Columbia, as in Canada. The majority needed
only leadership and a reasonable offer from Ottawa.

Terms of union proposed by Musgrave had been written by the
Canadian government but now issued as the official recommendation
of London. Canada would take over the colonial debt; would sub-
sidize the colonists at the rate of 80 cents a year per head; pension

388 THE STRUGGLE FOE THE BORDER

off the local officials who opposed confederation lest it destroy their
jobs; and, unbelievably, would start building a railway to the
Pacific coast within three years, meanwhile finishing a wagon road.
These were brave terms, almost incredible to the fluttering Bird
Cages, perhaps too generous for Canada's resources, and altogether
better than de Cosmos and his friends had any right to expect,

By promising a railway across the Pre-Cambrian wastes, the
empty prairies, the Rockies, and the Pacific jungle, Old Tomorrow
had staked the future of Canada on the wildest gamble since the
American Revolution, It would make or break the new nation.
Within three years it would break Macdonald's government.

Even a railway could not impress the annexationists of Victoria.
They crammed the bursting Bird Cages—grim men, hardheaded,
stubborn, and all unknown to the busy Republic twenty miles across
the strait. Yet their victory or defeat must prove decisive to the future
of Manifest Destiny, for it would determine the final division of the
continent— if the continent could be permanently divided, which
the annexationists doubted.

Dr. J. S. Helmcken, the annexationist leader, put the Confedera-
tion issue in a nutshell of geopolitics: "However we are in favor of
consolidating British interests, our own interests come first. Imperial
interests can afford to wait. Whatever may be the result of the pres-
ent vote, it is impossible to deny the probability of the less being
absorbed by the greater, and it cannot be regarded as impossible
that ultimately not only this colony, but the whole Dominion of
Canada may well be absorbed by the United States/*

"No! No!" cried de Cosmos, but who could deny this plain con-
tinental logic? "It is dangerous,*' Helmcken retorted, callously rub-
bing in the facts, "to place ourselves at the disposal of superior num-
bers, who must necessarily legislate for the greater number, the
people of the Atlantic provinces. No union on account of love need
be looked for/'

"No! No!" de Cosmos cried again, but before he had time to ob-
serve that the Americans offered no union of love either, and would
also legislate for the greater number, W. T. Drake leaped up to re-
veal the ultimate horror of confederation: "We should be transferred
from the rule of statesmen at Downing Street to that of politicians at
Ottawa!" What kind of rulers he expected to find in Washington was
not clear.

These were the last despairing shrieks of the colonial mind, of the
economic determinists, the faint hearts, men of the same sort who
had signed the Annexation Manifesto of 1849. They must lean on
some outside power, either British or American.

As the Bird Cages fluttered anew, Canada found its voice in John

THE WORLD'S LOVER 389

Robson, lieutenant to de Cosmos and a mainland newspaper editor
of hawk's face and cutting pen, who had once been jailed by Judge
Begbie for contempt of court and thus became a popular hero,
British Columbia, said Robson, could not always cling to Britain's
skirts "like a mendicant's child." Better annexation to the Sandwich
Islands or Hindustan than the present dismal plight of a colony
whose "progress has been like that of the crab— backwards/' The
hopeless colony must become an exploited appendage of the Repub-
lic or a prosperous, manly province of Canada.

The Lover of the World had waited impatiently for his chance,
and now it had come. Standing on this watershed of Canada's life
and his own, the prophetic, whiskered figure surveyed his work and
found it good. "I have assisted," he said, "to make history and this is
a page of it! ... We are here laying the cornerstone of a great
nation on the Pacific coast!" It was no time for false modesty. When
he had finished his ponderous and able speech the decision of the
Bird Cages had been made. Confederation was approved almost
unanimously by the same assembly which had opposed it only a
year before.

Eloquence, however, and a few votes cast in a wooden shack
beside the Pacific, would not build a railway across a continent. If
the railway was not built, British Columbia must soon tire of con-
federation and accept the only alternative— annexation.

No one knew that better than the government of Canada as it met
the delegates of British Columbia in Ottawa.

Cartier (Macdonald being ill) quickly accepted the terms of
union proposed by London through Musgrave and already cleared
at Ottawa, and managed to improve them in detail. The railway
would be started within two years, not three, and finished within
ten. That night the delegates sent a triumphant telegram to Vic-
toria: "Terms agreed upon. The delegates are satisfied. Canada is
favorable to immediate union and guarantees the railway." The
telegram itself bore witness to the Canadian crisis. It was carried
westward by American wires.

On the twentieth day of July, 1871, British Columbia entered
confederation by unanimous vote of its assembly. Canada stretched
from ocean to ocean. Its completed boundary described the north-
ern rim of Manifest Destiny. But the boundary was still only a line
on a map. Old Tomorrow had yet to transform it into hard railway
steel and all his energies were otherwise engaged. He was hurrying
toward an unforeseen crisis, the deepest of his life.

28

Defeat on the Potomac

[1871-1875]

IN THE SPRING OF 1871 MACDONAX.D FOUND HIMSELF ABOARD A
yacht on the Potomac River, listening with feigned interest to
the homely wife of an American senator. She had taken the
genial stranger for one of her own people and felt safe in repeating
their folklore. The unfortunate Canadians, she said, were governed
by a "perfect rascal" named Macdonald.

"Yes," said the stranger imperturbably, "he is a perfect rascal."
"Why/* she asked, "do they keep such a man in power?"
"Well," said Macdonald, "they can't seem to get on without him."
At that moment the lady's husband appeared and introduced her
to the Prime Minister of Canada. After enjoying her confusion for
a moment, Macdonald added, "Don't apologize. All youVe said is
perfectly true and well known at home."

This sort of badinage would do for a weekend yachting party.
Grave matters had brought Macdonald to Washington and would
send him home a sadder and a wiser man.

His personal crisis was two years off and inconceivable, but he
had long foreseen a new crisis in Canadian-American affairs. As
early as April 9, 1867, he had written to a friend in Calcutta
(whether seriously or in fun, no one ever knew): "War will come
some day between England and the United States, and India can
do us yeoman's service by sending an army of Sikhs, Ghoorkas and
Belochees &c, &c, across the Pacific to San Francisco and holding
that beautiful and immoral city with the surrounding California as
security for Montreal and Canada."

He had been worried increasingly of late by what one of his col-
leagues called "the pacific hostility of the United States, a judicious
alternation of bullying and coaxing/* This process was tidal, rising

390

DEFEAT ON THE POTOMAC 391

and falling with events and reaching its highwater mark in the
sixties and early seventies.

Confederation at first had alarmed some Americans but now
seemed to be grudgingly welcomed as a sure sign that Canada was
drawing away from Britain and, without its old overseas support,
would fall the sooner into the American orbit. Nevertheless, in many
horrendous speeches a minority of Congressional politicians con-
tinued to protest that an embryonic Canadian nation was, in the
words of Governor Chamberlain, of Maine, "a part of the great con-
spiracy against liberty on this youthful continent" when, of course,
it was an attempt to protect the liberty of Canadians from both the
United States and Britain.

The American government had not resisted confederation openly;
it rejected all the urgings of Fenians and other annexationists to
interfere openly in Canadian affairs, but in day-to-day matters of
commerce it expressed, at every chance, the lingering resentments
of the Civil War years.

Now that the Civil War was over, the reunited, bustling, self-
confident nation emerging from it looked more dangerous in Cana-
dian eyes than ever, and in some American eyes the absorption of
Canada appeared to be the natural sequel of the victory over the
South. This calculation, like many before it, was fallacious. The first
sproutings of Canadian nationalism already were too strong to be
suppressed except by naked force, which the United States had no
intention of using.

Coaxing had recently replaced bullying, but Macdonald found it
equally perilous. Secretary of State Hamilton Fish, for example, had
suggested, perhaps seriously, that Canada might hold a plebiscite
on annexation. President Grant apparently had considered this proj-
ect and dismissed it as desirable but hopeless. Anyway, despite all
the speeches of the Congress and the short-lived bills permitting
Canada to enter the Union, the American people as a whole had
little interest in their neighbors, except at a few specific points of
friction. It was these that had brought Macdonald to Washington.

The current trouble centered in trade across the border.

The collapse of the Reciprocity Treaty at first had seemed a blow
at the primitive Canadian economy more severe than the loss of the
protected British market, yet even against high customs duties
Canadian goods still moved into the American market. The impend-
ing commercial disaster had been exaggerated. As in the case of the
passport dispute, Macdonald refused to seek American concessions,
concealed the alarm of his government, and waited for the United
States to change its mind.

392 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BOEDER

In 1869 the State Department had suggested a new trade agree-
ment with reduced tariffs all round. It could not convert either the
Grant government or the Congress.

Canada still held a few of the blue chips in this large gamble. It
owned the St. Lawrence canals, needed by American shipping, and
the best of the Atlantic coastal fisheries, needed by American fisher-
men.

The American shippers and fishermen had lost free access to both
on the repeal of reciprocity. They were eager to recover their old
privileges by a new treaty. The protectionists and annexationists,
on the other hand, had originally hoped that reciprocity would lure
Canada into the United States and, that failing, now hoped that the
lack of reciprocity would drive Canada toward the same refuge.

So far the Congressional protectionists were in the saddle and
riding high. Without understanding it, they had now encountered
one of the basic facts of American life— Canadians, often disputing
among themselves, would always choose the tariff policy which,
regardless of immediate cost, appeared most likely to prevent po-
litical union.

In the first days of confederation they played the only trump card
in their hands by gently discouraging American fishermen in the
waters of the Maritime provinces, within the three-mile limit, by
imposing a charge of 50 cents a ton on all foreign fish boats. The
charge was later doubled and finally raised so high that the Amer-
icans began to evade it. Canada then forbade Americans to buy bait
or to land their catch in Canadian ports for quick shipment to the
American market.

This was a grave blow to the American fishing industry. It was
followed in 1870 by the dispatch of six Canadian cruisers to enforce
the new regulations. Four hundred American vessels were seized in
three months.

As expected, overt pressure brought a quick response from Wash-
ington. Turning an angry soldier's eye on Canada, President Grant
told the Congress: "This semi-independent but irresponsible agent
has exercised its delegated powers in an unfriendly way." Strong
words from a friendly power. Grant proposed to buttress them by
the cancellation of the bonding privileges enjoyed by Canadian
goods in transit through the United States and by closure of Amer-
ican ports to Canadian ships.

The codfish of the Canadian coast, long the prize of international
quarrels, had launched the old anti-British sentiment of the United
States into full cry again. It found a braying voice in General Ben-
jamin Franklin Butler, a former general of the Northern Army,

DEFEAT ON THE POTOMAC 393

somewhat tattered in reputation and remembered mainly for his
famous order in New Orleans, where he had instructed his occupa-
tion troops to treat any female showing contempt of Union arms
"as a woman of the town plying her avocation." Butler's attacks on
Canada and Britain were expressed in similar terms of violence.
They found no echo in the American government, though they might
be useful for bargaining purposes.

Actually the government, behind all the alarming gestures of the
Congress, was determined to settle the fisheries question before the
fishing season of 1871 led to more serious trouble. Washington had
come at last to the conclusion that all the postwar issues standing
between it and the British Empire should be settled on a friendly
basis. Thus the inarticulate codfish, more successfully than the
garrulous statesmen like Butler, had introduced a sense of sanity
into the affairs of the English-speaking world.

The agenda of any settlement would be crowded.

To begin with, there were the Alabama Claims— a resounding
phrase of great semantic power, loosely embracing all the United
States' grievances against Britain. Having built that unprofitable
cruiser for the South, Britain must pay through the nose for deliber-
ately joining a revolt against the lawful American government; to
which Lord John Russell had made the typically righteous reply of
the stiff British upper lip: "Her Majesty's Government are the sole
guardians of their own honor." No breach of neutrality was admitted
in London. Britain was anxious, however, to make a deal and, if
possible, end a lingering transatlantic ill-will now a hundred years
old.

President Johnson was agreeable. He had negotiated an agree-
ment by which a joint commission would consider, and an arbitra-
tion board would settle, all disputes arising out of the Civil War.
The Senate, of course, would never approve anything likely to bring
credit on Lincoln's lonely heir. Apparently the futile Johnson proj-
ect had only widened the field of argument to almost comic pro-
portions. Britain, said Senator Sumner, had not merely helped to
arm the South; it had doubled the length of the war and, therefore,
should pay half the cost, or two billion dollars.

Such figures might appear ridiculous in London but Sumner was
not to be brushed off by mere calculations of arithmetic. Before the
Civil War this courageous opponent of slavery had been attacked
in the Senate chamber by an enemy, knocked unconscious to the
floor and confined to his bed for three years, but nothing could daunt
a man who said of himself: "The slave of principles, I call no party
master.**

394 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

If the Grant government was to settle the Alabama Claims, Sum-
ner somehow must be undermined since he could not be tamed.
He was, therefore, deposed as chairman of the Senate Foreign Rela-
tions Committee. His demand for two billion dollars of compensa-
tion was not to be taken seriously in practical politics. What he and
the men around him really wanted, of course, was not cash but terri-
tory. Sumner was prepared, with openhanded generosity, to accept
Canada as the full price of the Alabama Claims— a modest price, he
seemed to think, taking no account of the people who would pay it,
the people of Canada.

Senator Zachariah Chandler followed Sumner with a more candid
proposition. He proposed that the United States negotiate with
Britain for the cession of Canada and added a striking purple patch
of eloquence: "I put on file a mortgage on the British North Amer-
ican provinces for the whole amount, and that mortgage is recorded
and the security is good . . ." Not as good as Chandler supposed.
He, too, had overlooked the Canadians. They recognized no mort-
gage incurred in Britain,

On second thoughts, Sumner put the case more specifically in a
memorandum to the government, noting that the "greatest trouble,
if not peril" was Fenianism, and Fenianism was aroused by "the
proximity of the British flag in Canada." The solution was beautiful
in its simplicity: "The withdrawal of the British flag cannot be
abandoned as a condition or preliminary of such a settlement as is
now proposed."

In short, Canada, the infant state, was to inherit the sins of its
parent and pay the wages in full,

Next in die American bill of particulars was an irritating little
wrangle over the far western boundary, as fixed by the Oregon
Treaty, from the mainland, at the 49th Parallel, southward through
the Strait of Georgia and thence through the Strait of Juan de Fuca
to the Pacific.

The prolonged and sometimes absurd San Juan Island dispute,
as it was called, had arisen from an ignorance of geography in Lon-
don and Washington. According to the Oregon Treaty, the bound-
ary, on leaving the mainland, would lie in "the middle of the
channel which separates the continent from Vancouver's Island."
It was easy to determine the middle of the Strait of Georgia but, to
the surprise of American and British statesmen, the line thus drawn
cut through a swarming archipelago and its islands suddenly seemed
desirable to both parties. Who was to possess them?

They were separated by three natural channels— Haro Strait,
nearest to Vancouver Island; San Juan Channel and Middle Channel,

DEFEAT ON THE POTOMAC 395

splitting the archipelago roughly in half; and Rosario Strait, hug-
ging the mainland American shore.

The United States naturally favored the westernmost passage and
claimed all the islands east of it. They contained about 170 square
miles of questionable economic value but, in current military judg-
ment, were strategically important as a cork in the bottle of the
inland passage leading on the north to the mouth of the Fraser, on
the south to Puget Sound.

The largest island, San Juan, had been occupied by the Hudson's
Bay Company in 1845 and British possession reinforced by some
shepherds and a herd of sheep. Ten years later the United States
asserted its rights through the enterprising sheriff of Whatcom
County, who, failing to collect taxes from the Hudson's Bay men,
seized thirty-four breeding rams before the shepherds arrived to
stop him. The British government claimed damages from the Amer-
ican Treasury. After some solemn exchanges, both nations agreed
to avoid any more clashes on San Juan until the boundary was
finally determined.

The Joint Boundary Commission of 1856 could not agree on the
line through the Strait of Georgia. However, the British repre-
sentative, Captain James C. Prevost, R.N., insisted, with a weather
eye turned on the American Navy, that Britain must hold San Juan
lest its surrender "prove fatal to Her Majesty's possessions in this
quarter of the globe."

While the Great Powers exchanged their interminable memo-
randa, an American squatter on the island, finding himself in need
of meat on June 15, 1859, shot a pig belonging to the Hudson's Bay
Company. The value of the single pig in those days was not high
but high enough to provoke the stern anger of Governor Douglas, at
Victoria. He ordered a magistrate, John Fitzroy de Courcy, to San
Juan, transporting him ostentatiously on the British corvette Satel-
lite.

That same day the United States landed sixty soldiers on the
island, under command of Captain G. E. Pickett, who had been
dispatched by Brigadier General William S. Harney, the over-
zealous commander of the Department of Oregon. Harney blandly
informed his government that San Juan was a vital steppingstone
to Vancouver Island, which, being "as important to the Pacific
States as Cuba is to those on the Atlantic," must eventually fall into
American hands.

As soon as he heard of Pickett's arrival, the wrathy Douglas sent
a British ship of war, the Tribune, to San Juan with orders to prevent
any further landings. His ardor cooled when he saw that the Arner-

396 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

leans were in earnest. Nevertheless, he proposed a joint military
occupation until the boundary was fixed and was angry when the
British naval officers refused to bite off more than they could chew.
Britain, they said, would be sure to surrender the island, as it had
surrendered Oregon, and there was no use making trouble in the
meantime. So the Canadian civilians and the American soldiers on
San Juan were left alone and seemed to get along amicably, the dead
pig eaten and forgotten.

Still, President Buchanan, already worried by the threatened
split of the American Union, was further alarmed by the prospect of
a quarrel with Britain. To prevent it, he sent the ubiquitous General
Winfield Scott to Washington Territory. Scott's instructions were to
preserve the peace and, if he thought wise, to seek a joint military
occupation. This was arranged in correspondence between Scott
and Douglas. Two corporals' guards of American and British sol-
diers settled down to enjoy the fishing, hunting, and leisure of the
pleasant little island.

Scott had seen too much of the boundary to feel sure of avoiding
an incident, too much of General Harney to count on his discretion.
If the joint occupation "does not lead to a collision of arms," Scott
wrote to Washington, "it will again be due to the forbearance of the
British authorities; for I found both Brigadier-General Harney and
Captain Pickett proud of their conquest of the island and quite
jealous of any interference therewith on the part of higher author-
ity."

Buchanan took the hint. Harney was recalled before he could
provoke a collision. Pickett replaced him and lived on friendly terms
with the British officers.

After refusing Britain's offers of arbitration, the United States
forgot about San Juan throughout the Civil War. In 1869 the Amer-
ican government signed an arbitration treaty with Britain, but the
Senate refused to ratify it. The boundary between Vancouver Island
and the American mainland remained unsettled, like so many other
of North America's affairs.

Thus Chandler's mortgage was a comprehensive document, its
terms including the Alabama Claims, San Juan Island, free entry
of American fishermen into Canadian waters, and free use of Cana-
dian canals on the St. Lawrence by American shipping.

The bill of costs looked awesome to the virgin Canadian gov-
ernment and it seemed to grow with every speech in Washington.
Surely this perpetual inflation could not continue much longer. The
time had come to forget impossible demands, Congressional rheto-
ric, Fenian raids, heroic postures on a Pacific island, the dead pig,

DEFEAT ON THE POTOMAC 397

tliu imaginary diversion by Indian troops at San Francisco, and
imperial gestures from London.

In September, 1869, Fish got down to cases by sounding out the
British ambassador on the possibility of an omnibus settlement.
Fish's terms were simple: the United States would arbitrate the
San Juan boundary if Britain would arbitrate the Alabama Claims;
the United States might reduce its tariffs on Canadian goods if
Americans were permitted to fish freely in Canadian waters and
use Canadian canals. Britain accepted that offer as a basis of nego-
tiation and both sides met at Washington for a full-dress conference
early in 1871.

Macdonald had come to Washington not as the direct representa-
tive of Canada, since his government still had no right to conduct
foreign affairs, but as a member of the British delegation. British
statesmen of the more thoughtful sort may have realized then that
after this thin opening wedge had been driven into a centralized
British Empire foreign policy, directed by London, Canada eventu-
ally would conduct its own business with other states. For the
moment it could speak only through Macdonald and the other
plenipotentiaries of Britain.

The position of the Canadian Prime Minister was, therefore,
difficult, almost impossible. He could not control the terms of the
prospective Washington Treaty, even where it touched only Ca-
nadian interests, yet he must defend it before his own government,
parliament, and people. His balancing act on the imperial tight-
rope had never required such skill before and the master of the equi-
librium had no illusions about his peril or, as he told the senator's
wife, about himself. No illusions about the British negotiators either.
As usual, he expected them to sacrifice Canada's interests to serve
their own.

Now from Toronto, in the thundering voice of Brown's Globe, he
received a plain warning against any surrender at the expense of
Canada to British politicians "triumphantly ignorant of almost any-
thing connected with this continent and so ready to believe that a
few million acres here or there do not matter much."

Macdonald occupied the hottest seat at the bargaining table. He
had responsibility but no corresponding power. He must do a man's
job while his nation still lived in the swaddling clothes of national
infancy. And he confronted in Washington at first hand the basic
and recurring facts of life in the triangular North Atlantic world—
somehow the affairs of Britain and the United States must be recon-
ciled; Canada must always stand in the middle of them as the only
North American nation linked with Britain yet linked geographically

398 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BOEDER

and economically with the United States; and thus inevitably it was
threatened with destruction by the quarrels of the two great powers.
Thus also, at the Washington Conference, Macdonald began in a
tentative fashion to assume the inevitable Canadian role or burden
as an anxious interpreter between those powers.

The costs of that ambivalent status would always be heavy. Some
he was not ready to pay. He appeared exceedingly stubborn about
the fisheries and instantly collided with Lord de Grey, leader of the
British delegation, who was compelled, as he advised the British
government, to speak "pretty plainly" to the Canadian. If, he said,
Macdonald wrecked the conference over the wretched codfish and
if "difficulties with the United States resulted therefrom, the Cana-
dians will find very little inclination in England to help them get out
of the troubles they had created for themselves." The immigrant boy
from Kingston had been given his first brutal lesson in power poli-
tics, as practiced by a British expert.

Actually Macdonald had neither wish nor power to be unreason-
able. He had never expected to bar American fishermen perma-
nently from Canadian waters. Fishing rights, however, and free
navigation of the St. Lawrence canals were the only cards in his
hand. They must be played close to his vest. He would yield them
only for a downward revision of the American tariff.

The direct pressure came not from the Americans but from the
British. Lord de Grey kept assuring Macdonald that Canadian con-
cessions would surely put the United States in a generous frame of
mind. Though he could not guarantee any American tariff conces-
sions, he pressed so hard for the surrender of the fisheries that, at
one point, Macdonald was ready to resign from the delegation and
go home.

The Americans, for their part, were simply baffled by the Ca-
nadian's obstinacy. Since the United States had undeniable claims on
Britain and Britain was anxious to pay them as an honorable debtor,
why should Canada make itself the dog in the manger? Still, in
candor, Macdonald must admit that the Americans— having won all
previous conferences when bargaining power lay against them—
might well have proved much tougher now when they held nearly
all the winning cards and must satisfy an insatiable Congress with
its mortgage over Canada.

The two pressures now joined against him made these days of
the Washington Conference the worst in Macdonald's life so far.
Worse were to follow. Meanwhile he tried to manage his suspicious
cabinet in Ottawa and hide his troubles under the persiflage of
yachting parties on the Potomac.

DEFEAT ON THE POTOMAC

It proved easy to agree on the arbitration of the Alabama Claims
and the San Juan boundary. The fisheries remained the real stick-
ing point of the conference, for Canada would not surrender them
without a new tariff deal which the American government could not
promise and which the protectionists of the Congress would doubt-
less reject. Instead, the United States offered to pay Canada a mil-
lion dollars for perpetual admission to the fishing grounds and
vaguely suggested reduced tariffs on coal, salt, and fish.

Macdonald refused that offer. To strengthen himself in the face
of increasing British and American pressure he asked his cabinet,
in secret code, for vigorous instructions. The Cabinet obediently
ordered him to stand firm. His Fabian tactics of studied delay threat-
ened to smash the conference.

Then the Canadian Cabinet began to lose its nerve. Obdurate in
public, it privately urged its chief to take the best terms he could
get, lest Canada get nothing but blame for preventing agreement
between Britain and the United States. This advice, he replied, had
placed him in the most disagreeable position of his career (which
was saying a lot) but "the work has to be done and I am resolved

to do it."

Even though Fish had withdrawn his earlier offer to Canada and
the conference stood deadlocked by mid-April, its net, covering
such a wide sea of problems, was elastic enough to provide a chance
of compromise. That chance appeared in a new offer from Fish. He
hinted that if Britain would agree to a reasonable over-all settle-
ment, the United States might modify its demands in the Strait of
Georgia. And perhaps, he added, the value of American fishing rights
on the Atlantic coast of Canada might be arbitrated?

Britain grasped eagerly at this proposal, provided that the United
States removed its duties on fish caught by Canadians. As Britain
and the United States agreed on this formula, Macdonald was effec-
tively isolated. His position was now worse than ever, for his mer-
curial cabinet apparently had changed its mind again and warned
him to refuse any surrender of Canadian interests. Ottawa had ad-
vised London direct that a fishery deal imposed without Canadian
consent would be "a breach of faith and an indignity never before
offered to a great British possession."

This blunt warning began a process not to be completed for
exactly sixty years, but in the meantime Canadian interests were
ground fine between the millstones of the two great powers.

To them the genial Canadian with the whisky nose and disarming
manners still appeared as a stubborn, brittle, and purely negative
objector. Actually he was a man of rubber, as he must be in his

400 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BOEDER

state of weakness. He stretched but he would not break, and his
very flexibility made him all the more difficult to deal with.

The British negotiators asked themselves if a mere colonial was
to stand in the way of transatlantic reconciliation after the original
parting in bad blood and the century of quarrel

The Americans asked why Britain could not discipline her way-
ward child, the colony of Canada.

Perhaps the better minds of London already realized that this
child, as it continued to grow, would soon become quite unmanage-
able. What kind of empire, then, had been hatched by the Canadian
Confederation if the Queen and her government, who obviously
knew best, could not have their own way with their overseas de-
pendencies? Truly, the Canadians were a baffling breed.

Despite the backstage maneuvering of Washington, none of the
suggested compromises seemed to prosper. Somehow, if the con-
ference was to be saved, a new rabbit must be pulled out of the hat.
It now appeared, a Fenian rabbit.

Macdonald had always claimed compensation from the United
States for the damage of the Fenian raids. The United States de-
manded compensation from Britain on precisely the same grounds,
in the Alabama Claims, but denied it to Canada. This was a nice
point, ready made for the skilled diplomats of London, who prob-
ably wondered why they had not thought of it before. At the eleventh
hour they received a sudden inspiration and produced a pretty
formula: Since the United States would not pay for the Fenians*
damage in Canada, Britain would assume this debt of honor-
provided, of course, that Canada would be sensible about the
fisheries.

Macdonald had been driven back step by step to this last ditch.
It was impossible to refuse the final offer from London without
alienating British power essential to Canada. He regarded the new
formula as unfair because it provided no reduction in the American
tariff. His objections were recorded in a message to London but he
knew when he was beaten and accepted the one-sided deal He
refused, however, to put his name on the proposed agreement as a
representative of Canada, signing only as one of the commissioners
of Britain. It was a fine distinction, possibly just enough to mollify
the Canadian Parliament.

Thus in the Treaty. of Washington the deal was made at Canada's
expense. The United States and Britain were to make a fresh start
and undertake a general housecleaning of their old grievances.

As the treaty spelled out the settlement, American fishermen
could fish in Canadian waters for ten years; Americans and Cara-

DEFEAT ON THE POTOMAC 401

dians would enjoy reciprocal bonding privileges in both countries;
American shipping was freely admitted to the St. Lawrence canals;
Canadians (by a somewhat fictitious concession) could navigate
the rivers of Alaska, where they appeared to have no interest; the
American government would recommend to the various states that
their canals be opened to Canadian vessels; the Alabama Claims, the
San Juan boundary dispute, and the cash value of the American
fishermen's rights in Canada would be arbitrated.

However these arrangements might be glossed over in shiny
official language and however useful they might be in curing the
transatlantic quarrel, only two facts mattered to Canadians: the
American tariff was left unchanged (except for the free admission
of Canadian fish) and Britain had put its own interests far above
those of its colony. From now on those facts would never lie far
below the surface of politics in Ottawa and would drastically
affect the future of the British Empire. Macdonald had learned his
lesson in power politics at Washington. He could never hope to play
in the big league, but he was not quite powerless. Canada con-
trolled its own tariff and he was getting set to use that weapon.

The United States Senate naturally ratified a lucrative bargain.
All Macdonald's resources of public argument and secret wirepull-
ing were required to ram the Washington agreement through the
Parliament

The outcome of the three arbitrations did little to mollify Cana-
dian opinion.

In the end the Emperor of Germany (who knew nothing of
American geography and apparently was expected to exercise the
impartiality of ignorance) was chosen as arbitrator of the Pacific
boundary dispute. He fully endorsed the American claim to San
Juan Island and fixed the line west of it, in Haro Strait. The future
nation of Canada had forfeited another spot of territory. It was not
to be the last.

Canada finally received $5,500,000 from the United States for the
opening of the fisheries.

The United States received $15,500,000 from Britain to settle the
Alabama Claims, a handsome price but somewhat short of Sumner's
bill for two billions.

Where did Canada stand after the bewildering events of the last
two years— rebellion, so called, on the prairies; British Columbia's
entry into confederation, soon followed by Prince Edward Island;
betrayal, as it seemed, in London; defeat in Washington; and an
ugly political situation in Ottawa?

Canada stood facing the first great decision of national life. Eco-

402 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

nomically and politically it could pursue, in Macdonald's judgment
and his people's., only one policy, a policy of outright nationalism.

Since the chance of a continental economy, with trade moving
freely across the border, had been rejected by the United States,
despite its long campaign for continentalism, Canada must exploit
any foreign markets it could find but build up its own by pro-
tectionist tariffs. And since it had already assumed the almost im-
possible task of building a transcontinental state, it must link its
remote segments not merely by bonds of sentiment but by rails of
steel The great decision, in fact, had been made already by the
promise to British Columbia of a railway from the St. Lawrence to
the Pacific coast.

In a nation of four million people, all but a handful of them east
of the Great Lakes, that promise might appear to an impartial out-
sider as preposterous. So it appeared to Macdonald's enemies at
home. He was resolved to redeem it just the same, believing that the
railway would make, as its lack would break, the half-formed nation.
He did not foresee that the railway would break him and his gov-
ernment.

Thus mercifully unconscious of the catastrophe ahead, he under-
took a project without precedent, considering Canada's immediate
resources, in the record of nations. Fainter hearts warned him to
build his railway on the cheap, to bypass the daunting and costly
Pre-Cambrian dike north of the Lakes by a detour through the level
American states. The Grand Trunk Railway— already serving the
St. Lawrence Valley, with an auxiliary network running down to
Portland— offered to strike westward to the Pacific through Chicago.
Macdonald would have nothing but an all-Canadian route, for the
whole Canadian future, military, political and economic, depended
on what he would soon be calling a National Policy.

His government offered $30,000,000 and 50,000,000 acres of land
to any company willing to build the transcontinental railway. Sir
Hugh Allan, a Scots-Canadian who had made his fortune in Atlantic
shipping, organized the Canadian Pacific Railway Company on these
terms and agreed, as well, to finance the re-election of the Mac-
donald government in 1872. His generosity was unlimited and
lethal.

Macdonald, of course, had never supposed that elections were won
with prayers. He knew, as he said in a wry phrase, that many men
could be bought but that few were honest enough to stay bought.
Anyway, in its first test of power after the Confederation election,
the government must have money and, by the rules of the game,
expected Allan to supply it

DEFEAT ON THE POTOMAC 403

On July 30, 1872, Cartier was indiscreet enough to commit these
matters to paper in a "private and confidential" letter. "The friends
of the Government/' he told Allan, "will expect to be assisted with
funds in the pending elections and any amount which you or your
company will advance for that purpose shall be recouped to you. A
memorandum of immediate requirements is below."

The memorandum put down Macdonald for $35,000, Cartier for
$50,000, and Sir Hector Langevin, the Quebec party boss, for
$25,000. Macdonald was in urgent need of campaign funds but he
deprecated letters that could be produced as evidence. As he later
told the Governor General, Lord Dufferin, he had been "quite un-
aware of the extent to which Cartier had committed himself in
Montreal . . . Not until after his death were any of his colleagues
aware of his insane course/*

Yet Macdonald, too, in a reckless moment proved quite as in-
discreet as Cartier. On August 26, a few days before the election,
he telegraphed to J, J. C. Abbott, Allan's lawyer, the plea of a
desperate man: "I must have another ten thousand. Will be last time
of calling. Do not fail Answer today," He got the money. The gov-
ernment was triumphantly elected.

Its triumph proved brief. Through a traitor in Allan's paper rail-
way empire, the Liberal politicians secured the ruinous evidence
of Carder's letter and Macdonald's telegram, A few weeks of fer-
reting proved that the Conservative Party had received at least
$350,000 from the men who had been awarded the supposedly
opulent railway contract. Such was the Pacific Scandal, which
burst suddenly upon the virtuous Canadian Parliament, could
not be denied, and forced Macdonald's resignation in November,
1873. To all appearances his career was finished, his policies
dead.

He offered at once to resign his party leadership, but his followers
had sense enough to vote him confidence— with little hope, how-
ever. How could this shattered leader ever rebuild a shattered
party? "If ever there was a man in low water," wrote a friendly
member of Parliament, "it was Sir John as I saw him in the winter
of 1875, coming out of the House into the bitter air, dressed in a
Red River sash and coat and the old historic mink-skin cap, tottering
down the hill to the East Gate alone, others passing him with a wide
sweep."

For the first time since his boyhood in Kingston he was alone, he
was broke, and he owned little now but an invisible leper's bell. His
obvious poverty in the big lonely house beside the river was the
best proof that he had never received a cent of personal graft. He

404 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

had financed his party by the accepted method and apparently
ruined himself, financially and politically.

So it was the end of Old Tomorrow. The Reformers, now called
the Liberal Party, had no doubts on that score when they assumed
office and easily won a national election. Unfortunately the new
government, though full of virtue, was not gifted with imagination.

It had chosen as its leader a former Scots stonemason, Alexander
Mackenzie, a man of unquestioned probity, granite features, and a
literal, stonemason's mind. The genius of the party remained in the
erratic mind of Brown, that scolding oracle of liberalism who was
out of active politics but, through his Globe, seemed to assume the
proprietorship of the government, and in the brilliant, remote mind
of Edward Blake, Mackenzie's chief colleague.

Both the dour Scots instincts of Mackenzie and the mathe-
matical calculations of Blake were staggered by the prospects of a
transcontinental railway. This impossible scheme had broken Mac-
donald. It would break Canada. The new government might build
it in time, but certainly would not be hurried, especially when the
country was entering the first stages of a continental depression.

Mackenzie called the railway "a piece of madness," an "insane
act/* "a piece of deliberate treachery." The cost must bankrupt
Canada, and Mackenzie, the Scot, had a strong prejudice against
bankruptcy. So had Blake. As Canada's leading lawyer he was
ready to break the legal bargain with British Columbia and see it
leave confederation before he would fulfill Macdonald's prodigal
promise to complete the railway in ten years.

The work, therefore, would be done gradually, in convenient
segments. The West must be satisfied at present with a series of
separate lines, joined by lake and river steamboats. Macdonald
regarded this policy as wasteful, useless, and absurd but was in no
position to offer serious criticism. He remained alone with his mink-
skin hat, his Red River sash, and his leper's bell. Yet he had friends,
more than he realized, and Mackenzie was rallying them behind him.

29

Railway and Rebellion

[1875-1885]

A ALWAYS, SINCE THE FIRST DAYS OF QUEBEC, THE COMFORTABLE
calculations of the populous East were soon wrenched out of
joint by the leverage of the empty West.

Beyond the Rockies strange affairs were under way, inconceiv-
able to Ottawa's stonemason. He had been in office only a few
months when he learned that, on February 7, 1874, the usually law-
abiding citizens of Victoria, eight hundred strong, had burst into the
Bird Cages, demanding the completion of the railway. They had
insulted the British Columbia Legislature, driven the speaker from
his chair, and called their night's work the "Rebellion."

This was serious enough to impress even Mackenzie. The news
from Victoria could mean only that Canada's hold on the Pacific
coast had become exceedingly precarious and might well be broken
if it was not soon reinforced by bands of railway steel. The seeds
of a still graver crisis had been quietly planted along the banks of
the Saskatchewan River by Riel's half-breed race, the Metis. And
in Ottawa it appeared that Macdonald, that man of rubber, while
stretched thin, was not really broken, as his enemies supposed.

Mackenzie's ears were attuned to abstract theories and the classic
symphonies of liberalism. Macdonald's heard the faintest whispers
and secret mutterings of common men. He knew that the British
Columbians, already talking openly of secession if the railway was
delayed, could smash confederation and his lifework at the moun-
tains. Those sounds were disturbing to the patriot. The grumblings
of Ontario and Quebec manufacturers against imported American
goods, the protests of factory workers against unemployment, were
sweet music to the politician.

For reasons of patriotism and politics, then, all these elements of

405

408 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

discontent must be mobilized against the government, It was time
to bring the discredited policies of the Conservative Party into the
open again, to give them a home and habitation. A new name also
would help. Thus emerged the most enduring fact of Canadian
politics. Macdonald, with his sure sense of semantics, called it the
National Policy.

But it must be eased in gradually and urged with discretion, lest
its protectionist color disturb the exporting and importing interests,
especially the farmers. Macdonald had preached as vigorously as
anyone against the heresy of high tariffis; he had fought for reci-
procity at the Washington Conference; he still wanted it, if he could
get it; if not, he was ready for the alternative of protection even if
it might "sin against this or that theory of political economy." In
short, as a pragmatist and therefore a typical Canadian, he remained
entirely free of consistency, the hobgoblin of little minds, and
favored any policy, however inconsistent, if it seemed likely to
work.

His mind had been clarified by these years of disaster, though he
had not yet opened it to the public. He no longer believed that the
Americans would accept reciprocity. Therefore, the alternative of
protection must be made to appear better, after all. What all his
vague speeches really meant was that the Canadian nation lacked a
national economy and it could be built only by tariffs, a railway,
and the settlement of the West.

Macdonald worked hard for his National Policy and his own
vindication. He could hardly have succeeded, however, without the
help of the unfortunate Mackenzie government. It seemed unable
to make up its mind on fundamentals and, besides, was powerless
to cure a North American depression, that most reliable ally of Ca-
nadian opposition leaders.

Brown had been sent to Washington, sublimely confident that he
could convert the Americans to something like free trade. All he had
secured from President Grant was a draft agreement, reducing cer-
tain tariffs, and a presidential message virtually advising the Con-
gress to reject this bargain. Brown's handiwork never escaped from
the pigeonhole of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Mac-
kenzie was thus left without a workable policy in these hard times,
while the business community cried for "Reciprocity of Trade or
Reciprocity of Tariffs" and the unemployed for jobs.

The government yielded somewhat to such pressures by raising
the tariff in 1874. Then, after a sentimental journey to Britain,
Mackenzie remembered that "the principles of Richard Cobden are
the principles of civilization" and an expected further tariff increase

RAILWAY AND REBELLION 407

was canceled. The principles of Cobden and civilization could not
rescue a drowning ministry.

Macdonald had risen from obloquy by now, his sins swallowed up
in the depression and the obvious failure of the government. He
insinuated his National Policy into politics so subtly that the voters,
as he intended, could never be sure what it intended. But it sounded
good.

He favored a somewhat higher tariff to increase the state's dwin-
dling revenues and only "incidental protection"— riot actually higher
duties at all but only a "readjustment." And on this formula of the
squared circle he was swept back to power in the election of 1878.

The National Policy accompanied him, and with it, as an added
dividend, a brief, deceptive return of good times. Protection was
immediately unfurled in the government's budget. Customs duties
were sharply increased, not for "incidental" but for direct aid to
Canadian industry. After that the tariff moved up and down within
a pretty narrow range under all succeeding governments. The basic
protective principle, core of the National Policy, was never repealed.
American restrictions on trade and Macdonald's retaliation have
split the North American economy to this day— a reflection and, as
Macdonald believed, an essential buttress of the political division.

The other contents of the National Policy were the settlement of
the West and the construction of a railway to the Pacific, each
being dependent on the other. As a result of Mackenzie's cautious
tinkering, the railway was only a few disjointed patches of track in
the wilderness. Its completion would be doubtless the most formi-
dable project ever undertaken by four million people anywhere.
Nevertheless, Macdonald was resolved to plunge immediately into
that gamble.

With one hand he placated the British Columbians, who, after
their unsuccessful "Rebellion," appealed direct to Queen Victoria
and, that appeal also failing, declared in 1878 that they would leave
Confederation if the railway was not finished in two years.

With the other hand he directed the organization of the Canadian
Pacific Railway.

No business enterprise in America had ever produced a more
notable company of men than the first directorate of the C.P.R. At
its head was George Stephen, a Canadian and a genius of finance.
Its general manager was William Cornelius Van Home, an Ameri-
can and a genius of organization. James J. Hill, born in Guelph,
Ontario, had moved to Red River, then to St. Paul, and made a for-
tune there in local railway promotions. He had met Donald Smith
on a prairie trail after that subtle negotiator had harangued the

408 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

Metis crowds at Fort Garry, and these two buccaneers of businesss
had formed a highly profitable partnership. It brought them both
into Stephen's Canadian Pacific Railway syndicate.

Hill had his own large fish to fry and soon found himself in con-
flict with the Canadians. Winnipeg, he said, should be the eastern
terminus of the C.P.R. From there its traffic would be diverted
southward to St. Paul on Hill's own line, the St. Paul, Minneapolis
and Manitoba, and thence eastward on other American lines. There
was logic in that plan. It would enable the C.P.R. to avoid the
profitless barrens north of Lake Superior.

Logic never had any place in Macdonald's calculations. He was
not building a railway to make money or to help Jim Hill. He
was building "an Imperial highway across the continent of America
entirely on British soil." He was opening, in fact, the long-sought
Northwest Passage.

Van Home agreed with him and guaranteed to drive through the
cliffs, muskeg, and Pre-Cambrian rubble of the North Shore as he
would drive through the Rockies. Unable to halt a plan which he
considered crazy— even worse than crazy, unprofitable—Hill soon left
the C.P.R. in disgust and built the Great Northern to the Pacific.
The lifelong quarrel between him and Van Home now began, a war
of tracks, locomotives, finance, and politics far more costly than the
old border wars of arrow and musket.

As Van Home's railway moved west, the steel tentacles of Hill's
Great Northern thrust northward to suck Canadian traffic into the
United States. All the way to the coast Van Home found his enemy
forestalling him with these strategic branch lines—into the mines of
the Kootenay country in British Columbia, up the eastern slope of
the coast range, and finally into Vancouver. The struggle of the
boundary was taking a new form. Its weapons were money, manage-
ment, and imagination, but it was essentially the same old struggle,
begun in Talon's time— the struggle to grasp and direct the flow of
wealth from the West.

The continental duel between Hill, a Canadian turned American,
and Van Home, an American turned Canadian, lay some years
ahead. On Macdonald's return to office the question was whether the
C.P.R. could be built at all.

Stephen's syndicate undertook to lay tracks from Ontario to the
Pacific within ten years. It was granted $25,000,000 by the govern-
ment; the steel fragments left by Mackenzie; 25,000,000 acres of
land; perpetual exemption from taxes; and a promise that no com-
peting American lines would be allowed to cross the boundary
throughout the huge new railway monopoly of the West (a promise
soon to be repudiated).

RAILWAY AND REBELLION 409

Even with these concessions the scheme had barely got under
way before it began to look impossible. So it might have proved but
for the many-sided genius of Van Home.

This Gargantua of the Illinois prairies was the son of an indolent
lawyer who had once argued cases with Abe Lincoln. Left with a
mother and two sisters to support, young Van Home delivered tele-
graph messages, learned the Morse code in his spare time, and soon
was managing an American railway. He had become a huge and
portly figure, with the square face of his Dutch ancestry, a close-cut
black beard, and heavy-lidded stoic eyes. Early in life he proclaimed
a philosophy certain to serve him well: "Oh, I eat all I can, I drink
all I can, I smoke all I can, and I don't give a damn for anything,"

He didn't give a damn for the swamps, muskeg, and solid rock
bluffs along the north shore of Lake Superior. He didn't give a damn
for the prairie Indians, diverting Chief Crowfoot of the Blackfoot
tribe, by conjurer's tricks and the production of little pink rubber
balls from his ears. Nor for the financiers and politicians of Montreal
and Ottawa, whom he regaled with feasts cooked by his own hands
in some dingy bunkhouse, and with the music of his violin while
he drank them under the table, beat them at all-night poker and
billiards, or painted their portraits as his humor moved him. Yet he
was a shy man, as interested in geology and his collection of Chinese
porcelain as in railways. He trembled and stuttered on a public
platform. When an orchestra in a Paris restaurant took him for
Edward Prince of Wales, and played "God Save the King/' he fled
in boyish embarrassment. It was only for practical affairs that he
didn't give a damn.

Among them he didn't give a damn for the daunting pinnacles of
the Rockies. Refusing to follow the easy Yellowhead Pass to the
northward, as recommended by the great engineer, Sanford Flem-
ing, he struck straight west from Calgary, close to the American
border, though he had found no pass through the Selkirks.

Nothing like the prodigy of the C.P.R. had ever been seen on
earth before. The Union Pacific had built 1,100 miles of railway by
known and relatively comfortable routes, backed by the resources
of a great power. Van Home had to build 2,500 miles with no known
passage through the Rockies, backed by four million people who
could hardly call themselves a nation yet, by a depleted national
treasury, by grudging financiers in London, and mostly by his own
faith and Macdonald's. But he didn't give a damn.

He drank, he smoked, he ate (usually ordering two complete
meals for himself and informing the London Times that his family
coat-of-arms was a "Dinner Home, Pendant, upon a Kitchen Door");
he shuttled from coast to coast by canoe, on horseback, or on foot;

410 THE STRXJGGLE FOU THE BOEDER

he once drove an engine over a mountain chasm where no engineer
would venture; he fed his army of laborers like kings, and systemati-
cally shattered all previous records of railway construction.

In his first summer he laid 500 miles of track. In the next summer
800. Along the nightmare stretch of Lake Superior he drove 9,000
men, built two dynamite factories, and spent $700,000 for supplies
on a single mile, only to see it sink seven times in the muskeg ooze.

By the first months of 1885 Van Home had all but mastered the
geography of the continent His railway lay across the prairies and
was crawling into the defiles of the Rockies to join its western link,
already pushed from the Pacific coast. A gap still remaining north of
Lake Superior would soon be closed. And after its prodigious labor
the C.P.R. was bankrupt.

Unable to pay his laborers, but hiding his anxiety behind a
wooden face and an expensive cigar, Van Home hurried to Montreal
for funds. He found the C.P.R. directors in tears, They had pawned
their fortunes, sought aid in London, and vainly appealed to Mac-
donald for another subsidy. Macdonald's unequaled patience seemed
to have run out. Even his alchemy could not extract more gold from
a skeptical Parliament. Was the railway, then, to collapse in three
disjointed segments a few hundred miles from its goal?

The answer came from an improbable quarter. It came from the
United States in the person of Louis Kiel. In his march of steel across
America Van Home had encountered more than the eastern muskeg,
the gullies of the plains, and the barrier of the mountains. He had
collided with the incalculable human stuff of the West.

Many men of note had lately made the same discovery. General
George Armstrong Custer, for example, had been lured to destruc-
tion by the cunning dummies and empty tepees of an abler soldier
named Sitting Bull.

The massacre of the Little Big Horn had started another of those
ceaseless Indian migrations over the border. When Sitting Bull and
his tribe sought sanctuary on the western Canadian prairie they
found it ruled by soldiers of a new kind in red coats, calling them-
selves the Northwest Mounted Police.

Their army was small, even for those times, a mere 300 men in
the vacuum between the Great Lakes and the mountains. But the
wily American chief saw at a glance that their commander, a stern,
friendly man, Major James F. Macleod, knew his business much
better thpn Custer. An Indian nation driven into exile but still armed,
ferocious and numbering four thousand, meekly surrendered to
Macleod and a handful of his constables. The terrible Sioux never
committed a crime in Canada-

RAILWAY AND REBELLION 411

North of the 49th Parallel, the West was in firm Canadian posses-
sion without an Indian war, while the United States Army still
grappled with the last remains of native power, conducted its own
massacres, and suffered frequent massacre in return. The contrast
was explained in part by the different attitude of Americans and
Canadians to the law and to life in. general, but mainly by the char-
acter of the Mounted Police.

This unique band of men had made themselves the Indians'
friends, councilors, and idols. American whisky traders, who had
demoralized the western tribes on both sides of the line with the
unspeakable havoc of drunkenness, poverty, prostitution, and vene-
real disease, had been driven out of Canadian territory.

The old days, the centuries of unchallenged Indian control, the
hundred years of French and English traders, and even the countless
millions of buffalo that had always supported men's lives on the
central plains, were dying. And dying also was the Metis nation,
amalgam of Indian and white.

The Metis of Red River had once been able to mobilize hunting
parties of a thousand men, women and children, disciplined and
deployed like an army, to bring home a million pounds of buffalo
meat and finally to erect their own government at Fort Garry. After
fifteen years of slaughter by the railway builders of Canada and the
United States, the buffalo—undamaged by centuries of Indian hunt-
ing—were almost extinct, would number hardly a thousand before
the end of the century. The economic base of the half-breed nation
was gone. The Metis accepted Canadian law in Manitoba or moved
west to the banks of the South Saskatchewan, where their leader,
Gabriel Dumont, conducted at his village of Batoche a government
of sorts, too remote to be questioned by the government at
Ottawa.

The two thousand half-breeds of the Saskatchewan were not left
alone for long. White settlers trickled into a new river town of Prince
Albert. Then came the hated government surveyors, who had pre-
cipitated the Red River uprising. As before, the Metis saw their
narrow river farms being redivided into the white man's rectangular
townships, they feared expulsion from their lands, they petitioned
the Canadian government for firm legal titles, and year after year
they were given no satisfaction. Their government of Red River had
lasted only ten months but it had settled the land problem. Perhaps
another such demonstration would settle the same problem on the
Saskatchewan?

Dumont and his council thus brooded at Batoche while far away
in Montana the only man who could hope to revive the Metis nation

412 THE STRUGGLE FOB THE BORDER

was teaching Indian children to read and write at a backwoods
Catholic mission,

Kiel had traveled far since his brief days of glory. He had been
twice elected to the Canadian Parliament by his loyal followers of
Red River, had gone secretly to Ottawa and signed the parliamen-
tary register before the government clerks realized that he was a
fugitive with a price on his head.

As a scandalized Parliament refused to seat him and made his
banishment official for five years, he wandered about the eastern
states, preached a French and Catholic prairie state among the
French-Canadian immigrants in New England, and even discussed
this plan with President Grant, who evidently thought him a little
mad.

Mad he undoubtedly was, so mad that his friends smuggled him
into an asylum, under a false name, near Quebec City. His madness
appealed strongly to Bishop Bourget, of Montreal, the intransigent
ultramontane advocate of a French Catholic state in Canada. "You
have a mission to fulfill," Bourget wrote to the inmate of the Quebec
asylum. This and other letters Kiel carried in his pocket for the rest
of his life. In them his ruin was assured.

Returning to the American prairies, apparently sane again, he
earned a mean living as a woodchopper, a trader, a negotiator be-
tween white men and Indians. Now he began to see visions, inher-
ited the miraculous powers of David, and signed himself by that
name.

His devout Catholicism, mixed with the superstitions of his Indian
ancestors, his heavy brown beard, his ceaseless outpouring of docu-
ments, prayers, poems and oratory, his sudden rages, long silences
and hysterical laughter, gave him, among the American Metis, the
undoubted air of prophecy. His fatal myth, born at Red River and
almost forgotten these fourteen years, had come alive again. In their
crisis at Batoche, Dumont's half-breeds remembered the messiah
of their race.

Riel was no longer celibate; he had married the daughter of a
Metis hunter without benefit of clergy, in the western fashion, he
had begotten two children, and had become an American citizen,
but his mystical powers were said to be stronger than ever. He
might rescue his people in Saskatchewan. Dumont resolved to seek
him out

A ride of nearly seven hundred miles brought Dumont to the
prophet at his Montana Indian school in June, 1884. Riel realized at
once that his divine mission was at hand. Having prayed for guid-
ance and received the desired answer, he set out with his wife and

KAILWAY AND REBELLION 413

children for Saskatchewan, seeing on the way a vision of himself
hanged from a gibbet.

That vision, though accurate, was soon blotted out by his wild
welcome in Batoche. Even the English-speaking settlers of nearby
Prince Albert rejoiced at his return. They, too, had grievances
against the government and Kiel perhaps could bring Ottawa to
terms.

The affairs of the prairies had always been Macdonald's blind
spot. He feared trouble there, as everywhere else, he assured Parlia-
ment that the Red River rebellion must not recur, but he expected
"the present effervescence to subside." Though he had misjudged
Riel, the prophet, and Dumont, the soldier, he decided to take no
chances. The Mounted Police were secretly ordered to increase their
forces on the Saskatchewan,

That news traveled fast to Batoche by the moccasin telegraph
and infuriated the M6tis. The government, then, refused to settle the
land question, it intended to coerce the law-abiding half-breeds, it
had ignored the lesson of Red River, and nothing apparently could
change its policy but force.

Riel so far had resisted any overt act. His public speeches were
discursive, religious, and mild. Yet the white settlers of Prince Albert
rightly began to suspect that beneath his pious air he was meditating
violence. In his own mind he was not ready to repeat the Red River
adventure; he proposed only a demonstration to bring the govern-
ment to its senses.

He may have overlooked and certainly refused to face the fact
that Saskatchewan was not Red River. He had not rebelled at Fort
Garry, for there had been no existing government to oppose. Sas-
katchewan was under established Canadian authority. Any attack
on it would be rebellion. If Riel's deteriorating mind understood
that» it had not realized Canada's new power in the West or the
meaning of Van Home's railway.

Thus by anger, by megalomania, and by his visions the prophet
was dragged hourly deeper into his people's tragedy and his own.

On March 10, 1885, he ordered ten days of fasting and prayer to
invite the will of God. As the Catholic priests of Batoche inter-
preted it, the will of God was against violence. They refused to bless
the provisional government proclaimed by Riel. They threatened to
withhold the sacraments from rebels.

The prophet rebuked the clergy as traitors, pulled Bourgefs
travel-worn letters from his pocket, and on their authority an-
nounced that he would perform the Mass himself. "Rome," he cried,
"has fallen!"

414 THE STRUGGLE FOB THE BOEDER

His people were sorely troubled by this intricate theological
dispute. They did not trust their priests less, but their prophet more.
When, on March 18, they heard that 500 Mounted Police were
coming to the prairies they decided to follow him.

Macdonald had recently moved to settle the land problem by the
appointment of an investigating commission. He was too late. Al-
ready the Metis of Saskatchewan had seized their rifles, mounted
their horses, galloped into Batoche, and demanded that Kiel lead
them. He was ready for his mission of madness. While Macdonald
was telling Parliament that the disturbance out west was temporary
and minor, Canada plunged overnight into civil war.

It was to be a minute war of few soldiers, about a hundred dead,
some twoscore wounded, but it would finally confirm two con-
tinental facts and change the whole course of Canadian politics.
The facts were that Van Home's railway at last had established
Canadian power from coast to coast; that the United States had
abandoned for good the theory of forcible annexation. The con-
sequences in Canadian politics were the ruin of Macdonald's
government (though he would not live to see it); the repeated
disaster of his party for the next half century; the triumph of his
enemies; and, worst of all, a new antagonism between the two
Canadian races.

And so the tragedy of Kiel, the Metis, and the nation began at
the village of Duck Lake in a spring snowstorm.

Dumont, the last Canadian master of frontier war, the Napoleon
of the rebellion as Kiel was its Robespierre, had hidden 200 sharp-
shooters, his entire army, on a hillside. A Mounted Police detach-
ment of some hundred men, approaching in sleighs, found them-
selves ambushed by an unseen enemy and helpless before a deadly
fire. Dumont, his scalp torn by a stray bullet, his eyes blinded by
blood, coolly directed the battle, and with the aim of the surest
marksman in the West picked off the easy red targets. Kiel, on
horseback, clutched aloft a wooden crucifix two feet long and
prayed for guidance as the police bullets— an obvious miracle-
whistled harmlessly by him.

The police, after half an hour of hopeless resistance, were lucky
to escape in their sleighs. Dumont ordered his army to pursue and
exterminate them. "In the name of God," shrieked the shaken
prophet, "let them go! There's been too much bloodshed already."

There were, in fact, twelve policemen dead in the snow and
eleven wounded out of ninety-nine; five Metis killed and three
wounded out of two hundred. Small casualties, to be sure, but they
announced a rebellion.

KAILWAY AND REBELLION 415

Kiel might clutch his cross and pray, the Metis celebrate their
victory with feasting at Duck Lake. There was no drawing back
now. Old Tomorrow had another war on his hands. Canada remem-
bered Red River and the murder of young Scott. The militia volun-
teers of Ontario clamored for action and revenge. The racial heart
of Quebec went out to the half-breed French-Canadian Catholics of
the West.

A raw Canadian army of 3,000 men was placed under the com-
mand of Major General Frederick D. Middleton, a brave, stuffy,
and uninspired veteran of jungle warfare in India and New Zealand.
He could easily subdue these miserable natives if he could only get
at them, but they were half a continent away and no one proposed
to repeat Wolseley's appalling overland march if it could be avoided.

It was Van Home, no soldier but a supreme commander of men,
who saw at once the way out of the nation's military dilemma and
the threatened ruin of the C.P.R. With two days* notice, he told the
government, he would guarantee to carry its troops to Saskatchewan
in eleven days. That sounded ridiculous. The C.P.R. had not been
finished around Lake Superior. The spring weather was colder than
midwinter. No matter, said Van Home, his promise stood and was
accepted.

By bedding down the soldiers in hay-filled flatcars, hauling them
by sleigh across the railway gaps, laying tracks on the snow and
running locomotives over the ice of frozen rivers, he transported
the army to Qu'Appelle, Saskatchewan, in less than eleven days.

Now the dullest man in Ottawa could see the miracle of the
C.P.R. It was more than a steel track. It was the custodian of
national power. As such it must be completed without delay. Mac-
donald got his appropriations through Parliament. The railway
was rescued on the edge of collapse.

Middleton, however, had no interest in these dull political
matters. Foolishly splitting his advance forces into two detachments
of some five hundred men each, on either side of the South
Saskatchewan, he marched toward Batoche and plunged into an
ambush at Fish Creek.

There Dumont and fifty-four M6tis, concealed in a gully, firing
up at the Canadians against the skyline and chanting the old battle
songs of France, taught the British general the old lesson of border
war, reinforced by a bullet through his fur cap. His advance was
stalled. Ten Canadians had been killed and forty wounded before
the Metis withdrew with their four dead and two wounded. Dumont
had won his second victory.

The prophet of Batoche meanwhile was establishing the Living

416 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

Catholic Apostolic and Vital Church of the New World and in-
forming the frightened women and children of his miraculous dis-
covery that they had nothing to fear from heresy, since hell might
last millions of years but not forever.

The old nightmare of Indian massacre reappeared after long
absence. The handsome and intelligent Indian chief, Poundmaker,
had decided, at long and anxious tribal debate, to join Kiel's
rebellion and secure justice for his race. Some thousand Crees rode
down on the white settlement of Battleford, west of Batoche, drove
the inhabitants into the Mounted Police fort, looted the houses,
danced in women's stolen gowns, and finally burned the town. Five
hundred whites huddled within the palisades for a month, awaiting
rescue.

The dozen settlers at Frog Lake, between Battleford and Edmon-
ton, beheld a grisly spectacle on the morning of April 2. A priest
celebrating the Mass in the village church found an Indian named
Wandering Spirit on his knees before the altar, in a parody of
devotion, a rifle grasped in his hand. His face was smeared with
yellow war paint. His insolent stare never left the priest's eyes.
Chief Big Bear and his braves, crowding the back of the church,
watched in silence.

The dauntless priest took no notice of these intruders and quietly
closed the service. As the congregation left the church and Big Bear
vainly tried to hold the Indians in check, Wandering Spirit fired
point-blank at the head of a Hudson's Bay agent. His bullet opened
a general massacre. Nine men, women, and children were shot
down in as many minutes. Only three of Frog Lake's population
escaped. Wandering Spirit finished his work by dancing before the
flames of the burned hamlet. He would soon dance again at the
end of a rope.

The Mounted Police post of Fort Pitt— a few buildings without a
palisade— was under the command of Inspector Francis Jeffrey
Dickens, whose father's fiction was hardly more surprising than the
adventures of the son.

Young Dickens had been afflicted by nervousness, deafness, an
incurable stammer, and a red beard, but not by cowardice, A
formidable Indian war party found him, twenty-two policemen,
and a crowd of terrified civilians helpless in Fort Pitt The civilians
decided to surrender, on promise of safety. Dickens boldly led his
men to a hastily built scow and carried them through the grinding
spring ice, half frozen and under heavy fire, to the besieged fort
of Battleford,

Middleton had recovered from the ambush of Fish Creek and was

RAILWAY AND REBELLION 417

moving at last in a three-pronged offensive. He would take Batoche
with 900 men. Lieutenant Colonel W. D. Otter, with 400, would
relieve Battleford. Major General Bland Strange, with 600, would
hold Edmonton in case of an Indian uprising there.

Strange found no serious trouble in the Northwest. Otter's march
lifted the siege of Battleford, but when he attacked Poundmaker's
Crees at Cut Knife Creek he barely managed to extricate his
defeated army after seven hours of fighting.

So far the rebels had won every battle. Yet Dumont, that happy
warrior, knew they were losing the war. Five hundred half-breed
riflemen and a thousand Indians could not long withstand a nation
of four million Canadians, who had twice resisted an American
nation much more powerful. Still, by swift guerrilla attacks, he
hoped to inflict heavy losses on the enemy. Kiel, dreading more
bloodshed, rejected this strategy and waited in Batoche for a
miracle.

No miracle appeared; instead, only the clumsy, overloaded
steamer Northcote wallowing laboriously down the shallow Saskatch-
ewan, first and last ship of war to navigate the western prairies.
She carried a strange cargo, including a company of Canadian
volunteers, Lieutenant Hugh John Macdonald, son of the Canadian
Prime Minister, Lieutenant Arthur L. Howard, of the Connecticut
National Guard, and the beloved Catling gun which he had brought
all this way to be tested in a real war.

The end of the Northcote, despite Middleton's hopeful amphib-
ious strategy, was inglorious. Dumont dropped a ferry cable in
front of her, tore off her smokestack, and set her afire. She drifted
out of control, stuck on a sandbank, and whistled plaintively for
Middleton's assistance.

He was too busy now to answer her appeal. His army had reached
the hill above the dusty little town of Batoche and began to
destroy it systematically by shellfire. This was not so easy as the
British general had supposed. His first advance down the hill was
met by such an accurate fire from the invisible Metis gun pits
that he ordered a quick retreat. It probably would have turned into
a rout but for the Connecticut marksman and his Catling gun.

No soldiers had ever fought better than Dumont's handful of
half-breeds in the whole history of North American war. For four
days, short of ammunition, knowing themselves doomed, they held
off 900 men, armed with cannon, modern rifles, and the miraculous
American machine gun. Their town was leveled behind them. Their
wives and children hid in mud caves by the river. Kiel, grasping
his heavy wooden crucifix, prayed, exhorted, and dashed off a plea

418 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

for assistance to the United States government. His message could
not be taken through the Canadian lines. Chief Poundmaker and
his Crees failed to arrive,

Middleton hesitated to attack for fear of heavy casualties. The
disgusted Canadian volunteers agreed secretly to end this stalemate
for themselves. Ordered to execute a short advance, they charged
down the hill, deaf to their general's screams of protest, drove the
Metis from the gun pits, and captured the town.

That was the end of the mad civil war, an end assured from
the beginning.

Dumont tried to find Kiel but he had disappeared somewhere
in the confusion. Not to be taken alive, Dumont escaped on his
horse and, by a long detour, reached safety in Montana. He did not
learn until his arrival there that Kiel had walked quietly into
Middleton's tent and surrendered.

"How do you do, Mr. Riel? Pray be seated," said Middleton,
correct to the last

Poundmaker, Wandering Spirit, and their braves then appeared.
Having first insulted Middleton with delicate irony, they laid down
their arms. Only Big Bear remained at large, alone with his eight-
year-old son in the northern bush and pursued for weeks by the
Mounted Police.

Middleton, a systematic man, now reckoned up the war's casual-
ties. Seventy whites were dead and thirty wounded. Some thirty-five
M&tis had been killed and eleven wounded. The Canadian govern-
ment had spent $5,000,000 for its failure to understand the half-
breed mind. That was only a first small installment on the ultimate
cost to Macdonald's party and to Canada's racial unity.

In the newly built Mounted Police headquarters of a town called
Pile o' Bones, but lately rechristened Regina, the trial of Louis Riel,
American citizen, frontier statesman, prophet and beholder of
visions, was the most remarkable and perhaps the most moving in
the record of the North American West.

The stipendiary magistrate, the jury of six white men, and some
of the ablest lawyers in Canada beheld a trapped and beaten man.
But the visions had not quite left him. If he must die, Riel would
die in dignity.

His defense rested entirely on the argument of his lawyers-
retained by his friends in Quebec— that he was insane. He would
not accept this last humiliation. Again and again he cried out that
he was sane, that the stigma of madness must not be inflicted on his
wife and children. His chief counsel could not restrain him and
threatened to throw up his brief.

RAILWAY AND REBELLION

419

It was a pitiable business, this trial, in which all the formalities
and real safeguards of British justice, transported across half a
continent into a frontier barracks, could not hide the tragedy of
doomed man and doomed race. And when the last witness had been
heard, when the doctors had argued interminably that the prisoner
was sane or insane, when he had delivered his last jumbled speech,
madly protesting his sanity and his mission, when he had knelt in
the prisoner's box and prayed in French and Latin for a final
miracle, the jury retired and returned with a verdict of guilty.

The eyes of the civilized world were on the Regina barracks
during those last months of Kiel's life, Every avenue of appeal, to
the Privy Council in London and to the Queen herself, was ex-
hausted. American opinion was incensed, but the Washington
government refused to intervene. Quebec was inflamed by the
pending judicial murder of a French-Canadian and Catholic martyr.
At a furious mass meeting in Montreal a young politician named
Wilfrid Laurier declared that if he had lived on the banks of the
Saskatchewan he, too, would have been proud to shoulder his
musket with Kiel, and in that single speech Laurier had made him-
self the future master of the nation.

Macdonald had seen enough of rebellion, on the St. Lawrence,
on the Red River, and on the Saskatchewan. Whatever the con-
sequences-and they were to be far larger than he dreamed-justice
would be enforced. Riel had been judged in fair trial and must die.
Perhaps justice, certainly the politics of English-speaking Canada,
demanded his death.

He was ready to die. He had written a vain appeal to President
Cleveland, denying Canada's legal title to the West and urging the
United States to annex it. Fifteen years earlier Kiel's government
of Red River might have delivered the West to the United States.
Now he was a helpless prisoner, convicted of treason, and the
Americans had abandoned annexation. He had recanted his mission,
confessed his sins to a friendly priest, returned to the Catholic faith,
said farewell to his mother (his wife then lying ill at St. Boniface),
and written a rambling testament to the Canadian people.

On a crisp November morning he mounted the gallows with
firm step, a silver crucifix pressed to his lips, and was muttering the
Lord's Prayer as the trap opened. A few nights later his friends
carried his stiff and frozen body from a secret hiding place to one of
Van Home's boxcars. Riel traveled to a grave in his native St.
Boniface on the railway which had smashed his rebellion and his

nation.
Van Home had no time to meditate long on these things. He was

420 THE STRUGGLE FOB THE BORDER

making his ultimate assault on the mountains and his American
engineer, Major A. B. Rogers, had found a practicable pass through
the Selkirks in the nick of time. Nothing could stop the C.P.R. now.

On November 7, 1885, in Eagle Pass, and at a point called
Craigellachie, after the assembly place of Stephen's clan in Scot-
land, the last spike was driven home by Donald Smith. That spike,
said Van Horne, was "just as good an iron one as any there is
between Montreal and Vancouver," and no better.

As Van Horne watched critically, "Smith's blow merely turned
the head of the spike over. Roadmaster F. P. Brothers yanked the
twisted spike out and replaced it with another." Smith's clumsy
hands managed to hit the second spike squarely. The bashful Van
Horne was called upon for a speech and could only mutter that
"the work has been well done in every way."

Well done, indeed. Van Home's ten-year contract was complete
in five. The shores of Canada were joined. The Northwest Passage
was open after three centuries of labor.

When the first wood-burning locomotive labored down from the
mountains to the sea, it carried a curious freight, including the
dreams of countless Canadians from Champlain onward. Now at
last, as never until that day, a Canadian nation could be pronounced
viable. Like the railway that spanned it, the nation had crossed
what appeared to be its final watershed and anchored the boundary
for good and all. But there were other daunting watersheds to
cross. And the boundary was not quite fixed.

30

Soft Voice, Big Stick

[1855-1904]

THE YOUNG TWENTIETH CENTURY FOUND A NEW GIANT ON EITHER
side of the border. The American was resolved to speak softly
and carry a big stick. The Canadian spoke softly also but, as
he would soon find, had no stick to carry. Two men could not have
been more unlike in look, in character, and in philosophy than
Theodore Roosevelt and Wilfrid Laurier. Their collision was in-
evitable.

Roosevelt's short, burly figure, massive Dutch head and familiar
grin, his courage and friendliness, his unquestioning faith in his
nation and himself, his assured optimism in human affairs and his
determination to improve them, stood as the bridge between the
two centuries, ushering out the old and welcoming the new with
huge and boyish gusto. In him the American people had reproduced
their accurate image, an average American writ large.

Laurier's Old World elegance— the tall, slender body, the plume
of white curls, the sensitive and beautiful face, the delicate hands
—his immaculate speech, his scholarship, and his air of grandeur
were all French. His mind was all Canadian. The accident of birth
on the St. Lawrence, among French Canadians who had lived there
for nearly three hundred years, had placed him in a limited area,
but nature had equipped him with all the native qualities of great-
ness, and, in addition, a streak of Machiavellian subtlety, a certain
polished ruthlessness useful to a master of politics. In any country,
large or small, he, like Roosevelt, would have risen to the top. He
was born to rise.

Yet the climb had been slow. It began in Riel's Saskatchewan
rebellion. No doubt political calculation would have directed that
course in any case, but he had rushed to the defense of the French-

421

422 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

Canadian and Catholic rebel by sheer racial instinct. A little enclave
of his own people out west had been mistreated by the national
government, their prophet had been sentenced to hang in Regina,
the British conqueror, in the latest incarnation of Macdonald, was
reasserting the conquest. The young Montreal lawyer dared to say
in public that the Metis had a case, that he would have fought with
them on the banks of the Saskatchewan.

Spiritually Laurier's reaction to the rebellion may have been
automatic. Politically it was a master stroke. It made him the spokes-
man and would soon make him the father image of the French-
Canadian people. For some time, however, the future master of
Canada lingered in obscurity, under the restless shadow of Blake,
the Liberal Party's ill-starred leader. While Laurier aroused Parlia-
ment now and then with oratory such as it had never heard before
and probably would never hear again, brooded over musty books in
the library or lolled in the House of Commons, his long finger
tracing out the words of an English dictionary (his favorite litera-
ture), the Macdonald government was dying.

To Laurier, who succeeded Blake, its death was unconscionably
prolonged, its narrow escapes at the polls unjust and inexplicable.
It was dying, nevertheless, and its quarrel with the French-Cana-
dian race, in the execution of Kiel, had inflicted a deep, enduring
wound on the future of the Conservative Party. Only two Conserva-
tive governments of brief tenure would be elected in the nearly
sixty years from 1896 onward.

The happy twilight of Macdonald's career did not reveal the
barren road ahead. So long as he lived his government and party
lived with him. He was the institution which the courtly French
Canadian on the opposition benches would become. He hardly
needed to fight any more. His lieutenants could carry the struggle
of Parliament while he capped their arguments with some jaunty
witticism and rested securely on his past triumphs.

Few men seemed to notice that his raillery and the government's
confident exterior covered a growing vacuum of ideas and policies.
That few included one of the greatest of all Canadians— a giant of
tousled red hair and rough-hewn face named John Wesley Dafoe,
who had Just arrived from a log schoolroom in Bully's Acre, up the
Ottawa, and would go on to become the nation's leading journalist
and, in time, its conscience. The youthful Dafoe entered the Ottawa
press gallery as a hereditary Conservative. After listening to Mac-
donald and Laurier in the unequal struggle of debate, he became
the hot-gospeler of liberalism and the chief advocate of free trade
in the economy of North America.

Macdonald, even in old age, had never quite made up his mind

SOFT VOICE, BIG STICK

423

on that issue. He had announced the National Policy because he
could not wring reciprocity from the United States, but he was
always ready to reverse himself if the chance offered. The chance
was never offered in his time.

Though the United States had outlived its old feeling of hostility
toward Canada and the annexation fever of the sixties and seventies
was replaced by solid friendship, the protectionist system designed
to restrict trade across the border was not relaxed. If Canada
refused political union, why should it be granted, gratis, the benefits
of the American market? What mind in Washington could foresee
the day, not far off, when Canada would be the United States'
largest customer and essential source of foreign supplies?

Senator John Sherman no doubt spoke for a large group of
thoughtful Americans when he said, in 1888: "Our whole history
since the conquest of Canada by Great Britain in 1763 has been a
continuous warning that we cannot be at peace with each other
except by political as well as commercial union. . . . This union
is one of the events that must inevitably come in the future; it will
come by the logic of the situation, and no politician or combination
of politicians can prevent it."

Such men did not know Macdonald or Canada. They did not
know Laurier either— the Canadian who would attempt commercial
union and wreck his government on Canada's fear of resulting
political union.

Meanwhile the United States was doing very well behind its tariff
walls. Its exports to Canada quadrupled in the last thirty years of
the century. It bought hardly more than half as much from Canada
and bought mainly raw industrial materials that it could not con-
veniently produce itself. This adverse trade balance supplied the
best argument for Macdonald's tariff retaliation, since, as he said,
"we can ring the changes on National Policy, paying the United
States in their own coin etc." This he continued to do with a wizard's
touch.

Still, remembering Brown's humiliating failure to secure a new
trade deal at Washington, Macdonald always kept the door open to
any new American proposal. His tariff law permitted the govern-
ment to remove duties on natural products whenever the United
States did the same. Reciprocity thus remained a nostalgic memory
in Canada and the National Policy an unavoidable, inferior alter-
native. Could reciprocity ever be revived? That seemed unlikely,
but there were two men who would try to revive it-Laurier in
Canada and William Howard Taft in the United States. They would

fail.
The inferior alternative of the National Policy, to tell the truth,

424 THE STBUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

was not working out exactly as Macdonald had hoped. It could not
in a world depression. The railway had been finished, but the West
did not fill up, After a brief boom, hard times returned. The farmers,
who paid the tariff but as exporters got no protection from it, were
growing restive. The Maritimes were prostrate. Nova Scotia was
talking of secession from a Canada which divorced it from its
natural markets in New England. The provinces were quarreling
with the Federal government. A nation not yet twenty years old
looked already exhausted.

Macdonald made up his mind, in the midst of Kiel's rebellion, to
risk one more attempt at a sensible trade bargain in Washington.
The expiration of the fisheries agreement arranged at the Washing-
ton Conference gave him the chance.

President Cleveland seemed willing to broaden the new fishery
negotiations to include trade in general, he encouraged the Cana-
dian government in preliminary private discussions, but when a
formal conference opened in 1887 he was quarreling with a pro-
tectionist Congress and could offer no change of tariff policy.
Fisheries alone would be considered, and even the new agreement
on that narrow issue was rejected by the Senate, mainly because
it involved free trade in Canadian fish in return for American
fishing rights on the Canadian coast.

Protectionism in the United States appeared stronger than ever.
A few intellectuals in both countries still agitated for a North
American customs union and that imported British oracle, Goldwin
Smith, continued to assure Canada that its economic and political
future lay inevitably within the United States, but these theories
soon encountered the hard facts of American politics, and the
brutal McKinley tariff of 1890.

Economic continentalism refused to die, however; the Liberal
Party still stood for "unrestricted reciprocity," whatever that might
mean, and the Canadian government was in trouble. Having
promised to make some dent in the American tariff and failed,
Macdonald executed another of his skilled somersaults by denounc-
ing the Liberal pledge of reciprocity as surrender of the nation's
political independence. On that issue he decided to stake his last
election.

As the old man staggered through the winter campaign of 1891
he saw not only his government but his lifework in peril. "Shall we
endanger our possession of the great heritage bequeathed to us by
our fathers . . . with the prospect of ultimately becoming a portion
of the American Union? ... as for myself, my course is clear. A
British subject I was born-a British subject I will die. With my

SOFT VOICE, BIG STICK 425

utmost effort, with my latest breath, will I oppose the veiled treason
which attempts by sordid means and mercenary proffers to lure our
people from their allegiance."

That might be campaign oratory, but it struck deep and reached
the vitals of Canadian life, If the people believed that the issue was
Canadian nationality, there could be no doubt of their answer.

It was hard to return a government in these dark and bitter
times— impossible, indeed, without Macdonald's three major assets.
Above all, he was himself the image and, as it seemed, almost the
creator of nationality. He had become less man than myth. Sec-
ondly, his opponent, the young Laurier, was little known outside
Quebec and his Liberal Party was inwardly split on reciprocity.
Blake refused to run because he agreed on this issue with Mac-
donald, his old enemy, and could offer Laurier nothing but his
silence.

Finally, by one of those happy strokes of chance which had saved
him so often before, Macdonald carried with him to the hustings
a remarkable document, the stolen proof of a pamphlet printed
secretly, in only twelve copies, by Edward Farrer, editor of the
Toronto Mail. In it Farrer, a leading advocate of reciprocity, out-
lined the steps by which the United States might successfully lure
Canada into commercial and then political union. It was not much
of a pamphlet, it certainly did not represent the views of Laurier
or the Liberal Party, but it was good enough for one election.

These three weapons Macdonald wielded with the last dwindling
strength of his nearly seventy-six years. From province to province
and town to town he somehow dragged his sick old body, joked as
usual, drank, thundered, and in public seemed as good as ever, but
the rusty sword had worn out the scabbard. He won his election
singlehanded and it killed him. When they took his body back to
Kingston, his government and party also were ready for burial.
But not his National Policy or his dream.

The verdict of 1891 apparently had destroyed unrestricted rec-
iprocity for all visible time. The gloomy Blake emerged from his
silence to agree with Macdonald that the tariff policy of the Liberal
Party did mean annexation. Laurier's sensitive fingers quietly
dropped that hot political cinder.

Reciprocity was not dead, after all. It was only sleeping and
would awaken, at Laurier's touch, exactly twenty years hence to
destroy him.

The election appeared accidental at the moment— the accident of
Farrer's pamphlet and the last dying prodigy of Old Tomorrow.
It was no accident. As Macdonald had known all along, as Laurier

426 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

would discover too late, the theory of economic continentalism
must founder on the fact of political division. The Canadian people
voted, as they would vote again on the same issue, against any
policy, however sound in economics, which seemed to threaten
their national independence. Macdonald had skillfully managed and
the Liberals had clumsily tampered with something much more
potent than economics—the instincts of a race.

Even Macdonald's skill and his opponents' blunder could post-
pone the inevitable for only five years. Three successors each tried
in vain to replace the Old Tomorrow magic until Tupper was
called home from England to perform the final obsequies of the
government. It finally floundered into the Manitoba School Ques-
tion and its end was assured by a cruel paradox.

The Manitoba Legislature established a system of nonsectarian
schools; the Catholic Church challenged the provincial statute; the
case entered years of complex litigation; the Federal government
at last decided to back the church, coerce Manitoba, and thus lay
the ghost of Kiel by a reconciliation with Quebec.

This was an act of courage. It seemed to be also a subtle stroke
of politics. Unfortunately the government had underestimated
Laurier and misunderstood his French-Canadian people. Knowing
that he could hold Quebec on any policy, he supported the pro-
vincial rights of Manitoba and made himself the champion of
Protestant English-speaking Canada. As he foresaw, Quebec voted
for him because he was its son and idol. He broke the Conserva-
tives' hold on the other provinces because they saw in him a
Catholic able to resist the hierarchy and because they were tired of
an aged ministry. Seldom had a circle been squared so neatly. This
contest of race and religion had an added advantage for the Liberal
Party— it submerged the issue of reciprocity and the fatal mistake
of 1891* The poll of 1896 carried Laurier triumphantly into
office.

The majestic figure in pearl-gray top hat and tail coat towered
unchallengeable over Ottawa. His political breach with the church
was quickly forgiven. His own people were solidly behind him on
any policy he cared to follow. Quebec had never forgotten the
hanging at Regina nor forgiven the Conservative Party, which per-
mitted it. That racial anger would linger on for years yet, would
repeatedly defeat the Conservatives, elect the Liberals, and yet in
his final tragedy would destroy Laurier's power.

Laurier thus could introduce an era of ease and elegance un-
known before to the brawling politics of Canada and soon fulfilling
—so subtly that it passed unnoticed—the classic dictum of John W.

SOFT VOICE, BIG STICK 427

Dafoe: That power turns any prime minister into an autocrat as
surely as a diet of royal jelly turns an ordinary bee into a queen.

Ottawa's beehive buzzed pleasantly and swarmed with many
strange inmates destined to leave their several marks on the conti-
nental border. The foremost Canadian figure of the future was
then a moon-faced college boy named William Lyon Mackenzie
King, grandson of Mackenzie the rebel. Young King already had
sensed the flavor as he would later gorge upon the substance of
royal jelly. At the moment he was receiving his first lessons on the
problems of the border from Goldwin Smith, who assured him that
they would be solved by nature's laws and political union.

A boy of fourteen, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, lived in the Hud-
son River aristocracy of Hyde Park and seemed unlikely to rise
above it. But the lives of these two youths had a rendezvous with
destiny, oddly enough at the St. Lawrence town of Ogdensburg.

Their generation was a long way from power yet.

Meanwhile Laurier was outwardly the antithesis of Macdonald.
The earthy, hard-drinking, skeptical Protestant of Scottish blood
was replaced by a French-Canadian Catholic of lofty mind, austere
habits, and gentle speech.

A second look showed, even in appearance, a curious resemblance
between these human opposites. Their lean figures, their mass of
curly hair cut in the same fashion, their stylish clothes, and their
genial manners were strangely alike.

The likeness was deeper than their friends suspected. It went to
the heart of politics. Before he had finished Laurier would be com-
pelled, while always denouncing Macdonald's methods, to imitate
them; while always attacking his policies, to follow them; while
always deploring the weaknesses of humanity and the dismal side
of politics, to accept them.

All that was inevitable. For beneath the surface of politics and the
quarrels of election campaigns both these men and all their suc-
cessors must grapple with exactly the same facts of Canadian life
and necessarily reach almost identical conclusions.

Nowhere was that logic so apparent as in the case of the con-
tinental boundary and the trade flowing across it.

Unrestricted reciprocity, which had carried the Liberals to defeat
in 1891, was quietly dropped because, as Laurier blandly observed,
the Canadian people apparently didn't want it. Anyway, Canada no
longer required such painful remedies. The world had emerged
from a long period of hard times. It was hungry for Canada's raw
materials.

Laurier's long reign, therefore, opened in the sunshine of a boom

428 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

and the government, of course, claimed most of the credit before it
would begin to influence events. The future looked so bright as the
twentieth century approached that Laurier said it would belong to
Canada. His hope was to be deferred and sometimes mocked but,
long after its author's death, would be substantially vindicated
within his meaning.

The first Liberal budgets altered the emphasis, not the contents
of Canadian trade policy. A final offer of tariff reduction was made
to the United States, As anticipated, it was rejected by the McKinley
government, for the Republicans had promised to fill the American
dinnerpail with the plenty of protectionism and were now con-
triving the sky-high duties of the Dingley Tariff.

Laurier did not propose to invite another rebuff. There would be,
he said, no more "missions to Washington." Not long ago, he added,
"The market of the great cities of the Union was the only market
we had for any of our products. But, thank Heaven, those days are
past and over now!"

His view would change later, For the moment the government
reduced the Canadian tariff within narrow limits while making
appropriate gestures toward the distant goal of free trade; granted
Britain a substantial tariff preference; and significantly dropped
from the law the long-standing offer of reciprocity to the United
States. With only a slight change, Maedonald's National Policy had
been confirmed by its old enemies because it was more than a
policy— it was a fact of continental life and must remain so as long
as the United States insisted on splitting the continent into two
economic segments. And when the United States finally changed its
mind the change would come too late.

Nevertheless, behind the uninterrupted tariff contest, the Amer-
ican and Canadian economies were being steadily integrated in a
rough, makeshift, and piecemeal fashion. Canada continued to sell
almost half its exports to its neighbor and only a little more to
Britain. The United States was becoming yearly more dependent
on certain raw and semi-raw Canadian materials, like metals and
forest products, especially newsprint. American manufacturers were
breaking a hole through the tariff wall by establishing branch fac-
tories north of the border to supply the growing Canadian market,
American capital was investing heavily in Canadian industry.

Such methods enabled the United States to have something like
the best of two possible worlds. It could tap the Canadian products
it required without admitting inconveniently competitive goods. It
could share the Canadian boom without any political responsibility
in a foreign country. The first continental fact of political division

SOFT VOICE, BIG STICK 429

remained and the United States at last was reconciled to it. The
second continental fact of natural economic unity was oozing
through the artificial tariff barriers.

Full economic sanity in America was a long way off, to be sure,
and might never be reached since, in Canadian eyes, it seemed to
involve political union and, in America, to imperil prosperity.
Political sanity, at least, had dawned.

As the twentieth century opened, memories of the old quarrels
were fading. Once the fact of Canadian sovereignty was finally
admitted by the United States, the two nations rapidly learned to
live as friends. An era of goodwill unique in human history had
begun. It was the richest era that either nation had ever known.

Laurier's affairs floated on a flood tide. He had found in William
Stevens Fielding, the little gray premier of Nova Scotia, a com-
petent director of the nation's finance; in Clifford Sifton, a young
prairie lawyer of iron look and will, perhaps the ablest Canadian
organizing brain since Talon. The Prime Minister dwelt in a higher
sphere of politics, with a strong aversion to facts and figures. Field-
ing managed the budget and the tariff. Sifton proceeded to revolu-
tionize the West.

After three hundred years of white man's labor, the West was
still virtually unpopulated, a vacuum cut by a lonely line of steel. It
would remain empty unless wheat would grow on the semi-arid
plains and mature in a brief summer season. That problem had been
solved by a little-noted miracle or accident.

In the spring of 1843, Duncan Fife, a farmer living near Peter-
borough, Ontario, asked his neighbor, George Essen, who was visit-
ing England, to send him some samples of wheat. Essen forgot his
promise until he was about to sail for Canada. Observing a foreign
grain ship at the Glasgow docks, Essen begged a handful of wheat
from her captain and carried it to Peterborough. Fife sowed this
seed but only three sprouts appeared. They were enough to change
the history of the West. For those sprouts ripened ten days earlier
than any wheat ever harvested in Canada, and ten days was the
margin between the early frost of the prairies and a mature crop.

Thus arrived on the North American earth— its origin never dis-
covered—the wheat called Red Fife. Crossed with other varieties
from all over the world, it produced the early-maturing Marquis
strain at the very moment when Canada undertook to populate the
West. Fife, the forgotten bush farmer of Ontario, had served his
country better than many of its famous statesmen and soldiers. Their
policies and conquests might pass. Fife's wheat, and its offspring,
would always grow between the Great Lakes and the mountains.

430 THE STBUGGLE FOR THE BOEDER

The ensuing wheat boom, by which the Laurier government
fleshed the skeleton of Macdonald's transcontinental state, was or-
ganized by young Sifton as a single gigantic business. He scoured
Britain, Europe, and the United States for immigrants. While he
preferred British and American settlers, he regarded "a stalwart
European peasant in a sheep-skin coat . . . with a stout wife and
half-a-dozen children [as] good quality." European peasants, over
sixty thousand of them between 1898 and 1904, poured into the
prairies and plowed them. More than twice as many immigrants
came from Britain, nearly three times as many from the United
States.

This was not only a transatlantic but a major continental migra-
tion. The free lands of the United States frontier were now taken up.
Land hungry, as always, the American farmer turned north to a
virgin frontier, quickly forgot an imaginary political line and be-
came a Canadian. The human current of America, flowing cease-
lessly for three centuries, suddenly reversed itself. It had flowed
north out of New England into Canada after the British conquest.
Then it had turned south as the impoverished Canadians of the
nineteenth century sought wealth in the booming United States.
Now the tide set northward again. Expatriates came home and with
them Americans at the rate of nearly fifty thousand a year— a mere
trickle in American measurement, a revolution in Canadian.

The West filled up so fast that the C.P,R. soon could not carry all
its grain. The elevators were bursting. The Great Lakes and Atlantic
ports were jammed with ships. The farmers' appetite for goods
created a new industrial complex in the St. Lawrence Valley.
Finally the Laurier government—whose party had attacked Mac-
donald's C.P.R. as madness— subsidized two more transcontinental
railways at far larger cost.

For the first time it dawned on the United States that an almost
independent state and a thriving economic system lived on its flank
and probably would remain there.

This fact had some disadvantages. It fastened down the northern
rim of Manifest Destiny for good unless the United States resorted
to war, and that was now unthinkable. Moreover, the Canadians
appeared much more difficult to deal with, in their affairs of vital
self-interest, than distant and pliable British negotiators had ever
been. The United States government deliberately discouraged
Canada's increasing independence and much preferred to deal with
Ottawa through the easier-going channels of London, where British
statesmen had long since recognized American friendship as the
first premise of foreign policy.

SOFT VOICE, BIG STICK 431

That shortsighted American view soon passed as the advantages
of a strong Canada revealed themselves. People able to manage half
the continent in their own way, to exploit its resources for United
States' benefit as well as their own, to assist at least in the con-
tinent's defense and willing to be good neighbors, offered the United
States probably its largest asset outside its own boundaries. Knowl-
edge of that asset grew slowly, would not be complete even half a
century hence, but it was growing. Nothing could stop it, or the
growth of Canada.

Still, many fag ends of old border disputes remained unsettled
as Roosevelt's soft voice boomed through the White House and his
big stick appeared in such odd places as the Isthmus of Panama and
the seashore of Alaska.

The Maritime fisheries question had dragged on interminably. It
had been settled in 1871 but the agreement of the Washington Con-
ference was abrogated by the United States ten years later and
Canada began to seize American vessels fishing illegally in its
waters. A new agreement was rejected by the Senate in 1888. By
this time, however, American fishermen were losing their interest
in the old fishing grounds. Anyway, Canada admitted them by a
temporary licensing system, renewed year by year. Finally, in 1909,
all these tangled legal issues were submitted to the Hague Tribunal,
whose compromise judgments resulted three years later in a Perma-
nent Mixed Fisheries Commission able to settle existing and future
disputes. The United States' sensible attempt to conserve the seal
herds of the North Pacific, outside the territorial waters of Alaska,
involved long arguments with other interested nations and was not
settled until 1911, when the United States, Britain, Canada, Russia,
and Japan agreed to share the sealing industry.

Much more important in an expanding continent was the con-
trol of waters running across the Canadian-American boundary. To
solve this problem the two nations invented the International Joint
Commission of 1909. It was to deal specifically with boundary
waters, but by consent any other question could be submitted to it
This extraordinary new instrument-probably the most successful in
the record of international relations-was even more important than
it looked. It revealed at once, in the unanimous findings of three
American and three Canadian members, how disputes could be
settled amicably by friends and by the increasing will on both sides
to settle them.

Fisheries, sealing regulations, use of boundary waters, and many
other matters of less difficulty were adjusted, or on their way to
adjustment, before the century was three years old, The big un-

432 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

settled issue— far bigger for Canada, Britain, and the Common-
wealth than the United States could imagine— was the boundary of
Alaska. Its settlement, apparently a technical question of legal
documents and surveyors' calculations, was to prove a watershed in
the affairs of the British peoples. And on the affairs of North Amer-
ica it would leave an enduring scar.

Theodore Roosevelt was not the first president to interest himself
in the vague boundaries of Seward's northern purchase. He was the
first to decide that they must be fixed— and on American terms.
Since 1821, when Russia tried to close Bering's Sea, Alaska had
remained a secondary point of contention among the Great Powers.
Roosevelt was determined to end this wrangle forthwith.

A treaty of 1824 fixed 54:40 north latitude as the line between
Russian Alaska and the United States* ambitions on the Pacific coast.
That line was inherited by the United States with the title deeds
bought by Seward. What of the line between Alaska and Britain's
interior possessions directly eastward of the Panhandle?

A British-Russian treaty of 1825 attempted to define this
boundary. It began at Prince of Wales Island, followed the Portland
Canal to the 56th Parallel and then "the summit of the n ountains
situated parallel to the coast" to 141° longitude which carried it to
the Arctic Ocean. If the mountain summit proved to be more than
ten marine leagues (about thirty-five miles) from the coast, the
boundary would parallel "the windings of the coast and shall never
exceed the distance of ten marine leagues therefrom."

Though this arbitrary arrangement, like others in America, was
made in ignorance of geography, it caused little trouble until gold
was discovered on the Stikine River, in 1872, and in the Klondike
twenty-four years later. As Alaska and Yukon Territory beside it
evidently contained richer treasure than the old Russian fur trade,
the United States and Canada must determine where their zones of
power, and profit, lay.

The United States controlled the seacoast. The gold rush must
pass through American territory to the Yukon, owned by Canada.
A half dozen Northwest Mounted Police faced, in 1896, the first
wave of gold seekers trickling through the coastal mountains into
Canadian territory and at Ottawa Laurier faced a quarrel with
the United States.

Sifton, Laurier's young minister of the interior, set out next spring
to see the North for himself. He conceived an all-Canadian route
into the Yukon via the Stikine (where Canada had navigation
rights) and a railway from its headwaters, but hoped that the
United States would give Canada a port on the Panhandle coast

SOFT VOICE, BIG STICK 433

Meanwhile he instructed his police to hold the mountain range
because, in the Canadian view, it marked the legal eastern boundary
of the Panhandle.

The United States replied that the mountains mentioned in the
1825 treaty did not exist, that the boundary lay at Lake Bennett,
thirty-five miles from Dyea. "The difficulty," wrote Sifton, "was
that the officers of the United States Government asserted their
jurisdiction down to and including the lower half of Lake Bennett,
and a military force of the United States Army was being detailed
to go to Skagway. This force was gathered at Portland, and in
another ten days would have been in possession of the territory
down to Lake Bennett, and it would have taken twenty years of
negotiating to get them out, in fact I doubt if we would ever have
got them out, To prevent the loss of territory I sent secret orders to
Major Perry to ... plant out posts in the Passes just under the
Summit, and had them there with a supply of provisions before the
other party knew what we were doing, It is a case of possession
being ten points in the law, and we intend to hold possession."

A handful of Mounted Police thus watched the rush of '98 tramp-
ing through the Chilkoot Pass, The United States charged customs
duties or inspection fees, collected in the Alaska ports, on the outfits
of foreign miners to protect the lucrative business of Seattle.
Canadian business, in Victoria, anxious to share this trade, clamored
for reprisals and urged Sifton to close the trails against Americans
and American goods. Sifton denounced this proposal as "un-
precedented'* and "highhanded." He said the American authorities
in Alaska were generally co-operative and he pleaded for patience.
But obviously Canada and the United States had moved uncom-
fortably close to a dangerous incident. To forestall it, the line of the
boundary must be fixed.

All previous efforts to fix it had failed through twenty years of
sporadic negotiation and ad hoc arrangements.

In 1898 Canada suggested to the Joint High Commission, then
considering other border problems, that the Alaska Panhandle
boundary should follow the general curve of the coast, cutting
across the heads of the long fiords. This would give Canada a port
on Lynn Canal and direct access to the Yukon.

The United States would hear of no such arbitrary arrangement,
it stuck to the letter of the old treaty and "the windings of the coast,"
but it was ready to consider a Canadian port at Pyramid Harbor on
a fifty-year lease. Even that compromise brought angry protests
from the interested Pacific Coast states, while Canada wanted more
than temporary tenure.

434 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

Britain (still in charge of Canada's foreign affairs) suggested
arbitration. After all, had not President Cleveland recently com-
pelled Britain to arbitrate the boundary of Venezuela and British
Guiana?

Besides, there was the matter of the Panama Canal, where Britain
had behaved, as it thought, with extreme generosity to the United
States. By the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850 the two nations under-
took to build and operate the canal jointly, but by the Hay-Paunce-
fote Treaty of 1900 Britain (then strained by the South African
War) abandoned those rights. Surely, thought London and Ottawa,
the United States owed them a little gratitude in Alaska?

Roosevelt felt no such obligation. "Our case," he wrote afterwards,
"was ironclad, and the chief need was a mixture of unyielding
firmness in essentials and a good-humored courtesy in everythingl"
The Canadians, on the other hand, had come "dangerously near
blackmail" in the Yukon when real trouble with the United States
"would be death to them/' The President, therefore, would consider
neither a negotiated compromise nor a settlement by arbitration.

He proposed, instead, a mixed "judicial tribunal" consisting of "six
impartial jurists of repute, who shall consider judicially the ques-
tions submitted to them, each of whom shall first subscribe an oath
that he will impartially consider the arguments and evidence
presented to the tribunal, and will decide thereupon according to
his true judgment"

Since friendship with the United States was the highest priority
in its foreign policy, Britain accepted Roosevelt's proposal in the
convention of 1903. Laurier knew at once that these polite arrange-
ments would probably mean another surrender of Canadian inter-
ests. The judicial commission, said Sifton, "was agreed to, simply
to give effect to a decision which had already, in fact, been made.
The proceedings from the American point of view were to be simply
a matter of form."

There was no doubt about that from the beginning. Roosevelt had
made up his mind to enforce the original boundary definition to
the letter, to gain a maximum strip of territory in the Panhandle,
and to bar Canada from the coast. "In the principle involved/* he
said, "there will of course be no compromise."

To make sure of it, he instructed the War Department to send
more troops to southern Alaska "as quietly and unostentatiously as
possible," and he packed the committee of "impartial jurists" with
three Americans who were already committed fully and publicly to
his views. They were Elihu Root, Secretary of War, Senator Henry
Cabot Lodge, and Senator George Turner, of Washington State.

SOFT.VOICE, BIG STICK 435

Only on the assurance that these men would not yield an inch of
territory did the Senate ratify an arrangement which looked crudely
biased even to John Hay, Secretary of State.

"When," wrote Lodge, "Mr. Hay heard of the three men whom
the President had selected he was extremely displeased and pro-
tested in the strongest way to the President against Mr. Root, and
even more strongly against me, taking the ground that our opinions
were already well known, which was also true of Senator Turner."

The Canadian government was simultaneously protesting to Lon-
don and was blandly assured that "it would be useless to press the
United States to withdraw the names put forward." Britain there-
upon ratified the agreement without waiting for Canada's consent.

Laurier (who had accepted the mixed tribunal against his own
inclinations and a previous promise to Sifton) was furious but
powerless. London insisted that no discourtesy to Canada had been
intended and was surprised, in the loftiest British manner, at the
Canadian objection. Since it had decided to yield to the United
States for imperial reasons, far more important than a few acres of
Canadian snow and placer gold, the best Britain could do was to
appoint two Canadians, Sir Louis Jette and A. B. Aylesworth, to the
British panel of three. The third was the unhappy Lord Alverstone,
Lord Chief Justice of England, an eminent jurist but in this
assignment inevitably an agent of British policy. And thus the
"judicial" settlement got under way in London, with Lodge in-
dustriously managing the American and Sifton the Canadian case.

Lodge was being prodded, quite unnecessarily, by his president
On July 16 Roosevelt wrote that the dispute must be settled before
the Congress met in November, or otherwise he must recommend
appropriate action. The "last chance" of agreement "by the free act
of both parties" would soon pass. In Lodge's judgment, however,
the Canadian representatives were so "perfectly stupid" that "they
seem to fail utterly to see that a disagreement deprives them of their
only chance to get out of the matter creditably." Since they could
not win against the solid American panel, they should be intelligent
enough to pretend that they agreed with the inevitable decision,
thus avoiding the stigma of defeat.

Things were not going well in London. On August 30 Lodge had
abandoned hope of Canadian intelligence. Would Alverstone prove
equally stupid? "Very possibly," said Lodge, Alverstone would vote
with the Americans, yet "England is in such mortal terror of Canada
that I feel more than doubtful in regard to it!"

Roosevelt was growing doubtful also. He decided to use Mr.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes as a private messenger to the British

436 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

government. Holmes was told in a candid letter from the President
that, failing agreement, he would ask authority from the Congress
"to run the line as we claim it by our own people, without any
further regard to the attitude of England and Canada," and would
support this enterprise with American troops. Roosevelt added: "If
you happen to meet Chamberlain again you are entirely at liberty
to tell him what I say, although of course it must be privately and
unofficial"

Holmes showed the President's letter to Joseph Chamberlain, the
British Colonial Secretary. The British government now realized
what it was up against in Washington and, as Roosevelt said later,
it "tipped the wink to the Chief Justice/* Alverstone.

The President and his impartial jurists would not have been so
troubled if they had seen Sifton's private dispatches to Laurier.
Sifton knew in advance that he was beaten: "The British Govern-
ment deliberately decided about a year ago to sacrifice our interests
at any cost for the sake of pleasing the United States. All their pro-
ceedings since that time were for the sake of inveigling us into a
position from which we could not retire. I am bound to say that we
have been pretty easy prey, but the result probably would have
been the same in any event, as it simply gets down to a very
narrow question. The United States would not recede, and Eng-
land would not take any chances of a quarrel.

"It is, however, the most cold-blooded case of absolutely giving
away our interests, without even giving us the excuse of saying we
have had a fight for it, which I know of. ... It may just as well
be decided in advance that practically whatever the United States
demands from England will be conceded in the long run, and the
Canadian people might as well make up their minds to that now."

The method of settlement justified Canada's anger, but anger did
not make a case in law. The United States' case, indeed, was so
good in law that it hardly required Roosevelt's big stick and soft
voice. The Canadian case, while it might be sound in politics and
good-neighborliness, was based more on a reasonable interpretation
of the 1825 treaty than on its letter.

According to the Canadian view, the old treaty meant that the
Panhandle boundary would not run anywhere more than ten marine
leagues from the sea and, in common sense, should not follow every
sinuosity of the coast. Certainly where an obvious mountain sum-
mit existed close to the sea it should form the boundary, as the
treaty provided. If that version was accepted, Canada would have
a seaport on Lynn Canal and that, in fact, was all it really wanted.

The United States had bought Alaska from Russia and Russia

SOFT VOICE, BIG STICK 437

had never intended to allow any settlement on the coast, Russia
had always bottled up the Hudson's Bay Company in the interior
and would never yield its position under strong British pressure.
Official maps, in Russia and Britain, showed the boundary skirting
the coastal inlets and confirming the American case.

Alverstone was too experienced a lawyer to imagine that he was
dealing with only a legal case. He knew he was the fulcrum of a
contest between two great powers. His Canadian colleagues in the
tribunal demanded that he support them. His own government was
determined to defeat them. Torn between Canadian and imperial
interests, he tried to patch up a compromise. The United States, he
suggested, might receive an unbroken coastline if it did not insist
on its lisiere being everywhere thirty-five miles wide and if Canada
were given four little islands, supposed to be strategically impor-
tant, at the mouth of the Portland Canal.

Clearly the possibility of war in the future weighed on some of
the minds assembled in London,

The Americans replied that they would withdraw before agree-
ing to narrow the Panhandle, but in the end accepted the line
patiently worked out by the Chief Justice and agreed also to let
Canada have two of the worthless islands. Such sops failed to
satisfy the Canadians. The Alverstone line, Sifton wrote, was
"drawn so far back that the United States gets practically all she
seriously contended for/' What Canada wanted was a coastal port,
and Alverstone could not hope to squeeze that out of the United
States in its present humor.

The Canadians, new to international politics, might be surprised
at these maneuvers and angry at their own impotence in the solemn
charade of London; in actual fact Canada had collided not with a
question of contract but with the only Great Power of the continent,
and Laurier with a president who intended to exercise that power
as he saw fit In the real politique of power, disguised by cere-
monial gestures and "good-humored courtesy in everything'9 what
could Canada expect but the loss of a case questionable in law
and rejected by both England and the United States regardless of
its possible merits?

Few Canadians stopped to realize that they were witnessing, on
the Alaska boundary, the emergence of another primary continental
fact. Roosevelt might brandish his big stick, he might threaten to
run the boundary as he chose, failing an agreement he might pack
the jury and even order troops to Alaska, but the United States had
actually renounced war against Canada as unthinkable. And this
fact was hardly forty years old.

438 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

In any case, the United States could not lose the dispute in
London. At worst it could only face a stalemate, since its three
representatives would not compromise. The two Canadians, at best,
could only hope for such a stalemate, provided Alverstone stood
with them.

Everything thus depended upon the lonely British jurist— on his
sense of politics more than his sense of law. Given the British
government's policy of agreement with the United States, at almost
any cost, the outcome could not be doubted.

Alverstone voted with the Americans, who accepted his line. The
Canadians refused to sign the verdict. The Panhandle, inlets and
all, belonged to the United States. Canada's North was isolated
from the sea.

Roosevelt at once revealed, in a momentary indiscretion, that the
proceedings of London had not been judicial or impartial. The
award, he said, was the greatest American diplomatic success in a
generation. It was precisely that.

Neither London nor Washington saw then the price that must
be paid for a simple deal in power politics.

The price paid by Britain was immediate and massive. By ap-
proving the Alaska Boundary Award it had undermined, more than
by any previous event, Canada's confidence in the government of
the motherland. Canadians' anger was directed at London rather
than Washington. They had expected nothing better from the
Americans. They had not expected (save for a few insiders like
Sifton) what they considered a betrayal by the British.

Yet for Canada there were large gains to be set against the losses.
Defeat on the northern boundary stimulated Canadian nationalism
even more than the annexation fever of the sixties and seventies on
the southern boundary. When Britain clearly would not protect
Canada's interests if they conflicted with those of the United States,
Canada must protect them itself. And whereas anger against Amer-
ican invaders and raiders had quickly cooled, Canada's new deter-
mination to manage its own foreign affairs was permanent. Nothing
could now satisfy it but complete autonomy within the Empire.
The alternative, if autonomy was refused, must finally be separa-
tion. Doubtless autonomy would have been secured anyway in the
end. The Alaska award greatly speeded this process and became a
leading factor in changing the Empire into the Commonwealth.

The graceful Laurier, smarting under the neighborly tap of
Roosevelfs big stick, revealed his immediate bruises and his long
thoughts when the verdict on Alaska was announced: "I have often
regretted . . . and never more than on the present occasion, that

SOFT VOICE, BIG STICK 439

we are living beside a great neighbor who, I believe I can say
without being deemed unfriendly to them, are very grasping in
their national actions and who are determined on every occasion to
get the best in any agreement which they make. I have often re-
gretted also that, while they are a great and powerful nation, we
are only a small colony, a growing colony, but still a colony, I
have often regretted also that we have not in our hands the treaty-
making power which would enable us to dispose of our own
affairs. . . . It is important that we should ask the British Parlia-
ment for more extensive powers so that if we ever have to deal
with matters of a similar nature again, we shall deal with them
in our own way, in our own fashion, according to the best light
that we have."

That demand staggered the statesmen of London, for did it not
mean a constitutional revolution in the Empire? It did, but the
revolution was assured without Laurier or Alaska. What was im-
perial heresy in 1903 would become orthodoxy twenty years later
under Laurier's heir. From then on it would be commonplace.

Roosevelt had won his first two foreign adventures, on the
Isthmus of Panama and on the passes of the northern gold fields.
His nation, too, would pay a price, under his successor, within
eight years. According to Dafoe, the Canadian people's anger at
the Alaska award was a vital factor in defeating the United States*
reciprocity scheme in 1911.

The boundary of Alaska had produced an avoidable and rather
absurd quarrel. Happily it was the last quarrel of boundaries be-
tween the American neighbors. All the political lines were now
complete after three centuries of struggle in war and peace. The
two nations had largely mastered the art of living together and
sharing the land of the continent. As events would soon show, they
had not learned to share its wealth for their joint benefit.

31

Taft's Orphan Child

[1910-1911]

ON MARCH 20, 1910, AN AMERICAN AND A CANADIAN MET PRI-
vately at Albany, New York, for two purposes— to integrate
the economy of North America as the laws of geography
intended; and to save two governments which had suddenly smelled
the whiff of their own decay. Probably neither man at Albany knew
which purpose was the stronger.

President William Howard Taft had inherited the estate of his
mentor, Theodore Roosevelt It was a rich heritage, including a
prosperous nation, a regnant Republican Party, and the respect of
mankind. But the stout and genial gentleman who appeared at
Albany had found himself suddenly in trouble— worse trouble than
he yet knew.

So far his two enemies were hidden from him. Woodrow Wilson
was as yet only a professor and local politician. Roosevelt had re-
tired to the hunting grounds of big game and the sprawling com-
fort of his home at Oyster Bay, after wishing his heir and protege
well.

Lately, however, the supine Democrats had come alarmingly
alive. The Republican Party rumbled with discontent and would
soon split openly under the last blow of Roosevelt's big stick.

The Taft government, in fact, was dying, despite its outer look
of rude health and the obese jollity of its leader. Like most govern-
ments, it did not foresee its demise and denied every symptom of
its malady. Taft knew enough, however, to realize that it was a
time for extraordinary remedies. Such a remedy could perhaps be
devised at Albany with the assistance of a distinguished Canadian.

Fielding, Laurier's minister of finance— the quiet, gray little man
from Nova Scotia— had come to Albany in similar circumstances.

440

TAFT'S ORPHAN CHILD 441

His government, for all its surface signs of well-being, also was
dying of old age, though no one at Ottawa had detected its senility.
The hive of the Queen Bee had never appeared more harmonious
and invulnerable, Still, Laurier had detected certain vague intima-
tions of mortality at various by-elections. A powerful group of
rebels had challenged him in his own bailiwick of Quebec. Clearly,
therefore, some new dish of honey was required to sweeten a rather
sour electorate.

Thus Taft and Laurier had hit simultaneously on a joint solution
of both economic and political problems. They decided to revive
reciprocity.

Contact between them was established by a fortunate accident.
The Reverend James A. Macdonald, a clergyman now editing
Brown's Toronto Globe in the old tradition of free trade, had gone
to Washington for a holiday, had met Taft and learned from him
that the American government wanted a new trade deal with
Canada. Macdonald was so excited by this disclosure that he hur-
ried to Ottawa and reported that "Tart was almost in a panic over
what he could do to secure exemption for Canada from the effects
of the bill the high-tariff gang are forcing on the country. He
wanted to know if I thought Sir Wilfrid would meet him ^to con-
sider a reciprocity measure. So I am here to find that out."

Laurier was not ready yet to associate himself publicly with his
original principles, the cause of his early defeats. He sent Fielding
to Albany.

As Macdonald said, Taft had been converted to reciprocity by the
Payne-Aldrich tariff law. This remarkable protectionist device
equipped the United States with two tariff schedules. By April 1,
1910, the government must apply, besides the ordinary tariff, extra
duties of 25 per cent on the goods of any nation which did not
admit United States imports at its lowest rates. The supertariff
must be levied on Canadian goods, since Canada had not granted
to the United States the preference rates applied to Britain.

The Canadian government did not intend to be intimidated
by this threat, nor did Taft wish to enforce it. His public already
was restive under existing tariffs, the Democrats were attacking
them, and if higher barriers were erected against Canadian goods
Canada would certainly retaliate in kind. A man of peace, Taft
deplored the prospect of a new tariff war with the United States
neighbor and friend. It was avoided for the moment by a technical
adjustment of the Canadian tariff, but the old problem of sanity
in the distorted trade of North America still remained and Taft's
opponents were making the most of it. For the first time since the

442 THE STRUGGLE FOB THE BORDER

Civil War, he judged, the United States was ready to consider a
new deal on the border. He was right about his own people, He
had misjudged the Canadians.

So had Laurier. In returning to reciprocity he was executing,
with customary grace, the second complete reversal of his career,
He had advocated reciprocity in the election of 1891 and thus
given the Conservative government a last lease of power. Burned
once, he avoided the flame for a long time afterward. While the
Joint High Commission considering border disputes in 1898 and
1899 had toyed with reciprocity, nothing had come of it, and
Laurier apparently was well satisfied with the lack of result.

"We are not," he said complacently, "dependent on the American
market now." In 1903 he added: "I have found . . . that the best
and most effective way to maintain friendship with our American
neighbors is to be absolutely independent of them."

As late as 1907, only three years before the Albany conference,
he told the people of England: "If we were to follow the laws of
nature and geography between Canada and the United States, the
whole trade would flow from south to north and from north to
south. We have done everything, by building canals and subsidiz-
ing railways, to bring the trade from west to east and from east
to west, so as to bring trade into British channels. All this we have
done, recognizing the principle of the great advantage of forcing
trade within the British Empire. There was a time when we wanted
reciprocity with the United States, but our efforts and offers were
put aside. We have said good-bye to that trade and we have now
put all our hopes in British trade."

This was one of Laurier's smooth oversimplifications. Actually
Canada enjoyed a large business with the United States and could
not do without it. And Laurier had no intention of confining Can-
ada's trade within the British Empire.

Since the beginning of the century he had consistently fought
off the campaign of Joseph Chamberlain and the tariff reformers
of Britain to ring the Empire with a picket fence of tariffs in a
vast and, as Laurier believed, an impossible British Zollverein, The
Chamberlain policy was designed to control not only the trade but
the foreign policies of the overseas colonies, to give the Empire a
single voice in world affairs, speaking, of course, from London. As
a Canadian nationalist— his nationalism heated by the supposed
betrayal of the Alaska Boundary Award— Laurier could never agree
to any limit on Canada's future autonomy, fiscal or political.

Behind the fagade of consistent principle Canada was trying, as
always, to make the best of two possible worlds. It wanted all the

TAFTS ORPHAN CHILD

443

markets it could find in the Empire, the United States, and every-
where else for the growing output of its newly established trans-
continental economy. Expediency and not theory directed its trad-
ing policy then as now— above all, the expediency of domestic
politics.

When Laurier toured the West in the summer of 1910, a drastic
overhaul of the tariff appeared highly expedient. The Canadian
farmers, like their American neighbors, were restive under the
burden of protection, which protected only the Eastern manu-
facturer. Reciprocity would placate this growing rebellion in a
Liberal stronghold, provide a diversion from the rather monotonous
hum of the Ottawa hive, and raise a winning issue for the govern-
ment Had not Canada, had not even Macdonald, always sought
reciprocity when it was unobtainable? Now that the United States
had changed its mind after half a century of protectionism, surely
Canadians would welcome this chance and bless the government
that grasped it. Reciprocity would be not only good politics and
good economics but, as a collateral advantage, would bring an
apostate Liberal Party back to its old faith.

Having completed his soundings, Laurier decided to press the
negotiations begun by Fielding at Albany, That old flame of free
trade, which had burned him once, now seemed to offer only a
light in the wilderness of politics and the dark of Laurier's old age.

The benign autocrat of Ottawa had ruled so long and so success-
fully, he had seen the country grow so rapidly under his policies,
he had become such a personal myth and institution, that he no
longer needed to struggle for power. His sensitive touch was
blunted by ease. Perhaps he did not realize that another flame, the
flame of Canadian nationalism, was as vehement as ever-more
vehement since the Alaska Boundary Award.

Or, if he recognized that growing fact, the passionate nationalist
saw no real conflict between reciprocity and nationalism. On the
contrary, reciprocity would nourish nationalism by increasing the
wealth and strength of Canada through expanded trade. There was
convincing evidence in history for this conclusion. Only in bad
times-as ^in the annexation movement of 1849-had Canada ever
showed any interest in union with the United States. Prosperity
had always been the surest enemy of annexation. More trade meant
more prosperity. Reciprocity meant more trade. Therefore, reci-
procity meant more nationalism.

So ran Laurier's thoughts as Fielding began detailed trade nego-
tiations with the American government in the first days of 1911.
The bargain was easily struck, for Taft had begun to appreciate

444 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

the dimensions of his dilemma when the Democrats won the
autumn Congressional elections. He must have a reciprocity agree-
ment and was prepared to offer generous terms. On January 26
the deal was completed and announced.

Its broad sweep, reversing nearly half a century of American
policy, staggered the public on both sides of the border. The reci-
procity agreement of 1854 had been revived almost intact-free
trade in the natural products of the farm; low tariffs on secondary
products like meat, canned goods, and flour; low tariffs also on
many manufactured articles like farm implements, engines, build-
ing materials, and lumber.

At Canadian insistence, the deal would be ratified not by treaty
but by concurrent legislation at Washington and Ottawa. This
arrangement, Laurier thought, would be more acceptable to the
Canadian people than a treaty. He had seldom made a worse mis-
take. With a treaty, binding the United States to low tariffs for a
long, fixed period, he might have saved reciprocity. Without it, his
policy was doomed.

The first Canadian statesman to see Laurier's blunder was his
former righthand man, Clifford Sifton. Though Sifton had quar-
reled with Laurier and left the government on another issue, he
was still a powerful figure in Parliament and country, more power-
ful than Laurier supposed. He, too, had been an ardent free trader
in his youth but had changed his mind, now favored "moderate
protection" and, from his bitter experience on the Alaska boundary,
strongly distrusted American policy.

Even before the terms of the bargain were announced, Sifton
had fired a warning shot across the government's bows. If Canada
accepted reciprocity with the Americans, he said, "Must not our
trade, our business, our very life, become intermingled so that we
shall become dependent on them? What must follow in the natural
course of events but political union?" Laurier ignored that shot
and strode confidently toward destruction.

Only a political brain as keen as Sifton's could foresee, in the
spring of 1911, the ultimate shape of the monster hatched in the
innocent hive of Ottawa. As it turned out, the hardheaded man of
law and business knew the Canadian people better than did the
subtle man of politics.

All the first signs indicated that Sifton was wrong and Laurier
right. Reciprocity looked like a sure winner. Even the Conservatives
conceded Laurier's latest and greatest triumph.

Robert Borden, the aloof and greatly underestimated Nova
Scotian now leading the opposition, could not decide at first

TAFT'S ORPHAN CHILD 445

whether to support or oppose reciprocity. In his parliamentary
caucus, as he later admitted, "The atmosphere . . . was not in-
vigorating; there was the deepest dejection in our Party, and many
of our members were convinced that the government's proposals
would appeal to the country and would give it another term of
office." After all, the Conservative Party, under Macdonald, had
repeatedly sought reciprocity and only discovered its dangers when
it was refused by the United States. Should it be rejected now when,
incredibly enough, it was in Canada's grasp?

Borden's mind, powerful but slow, was made up for him mainly
by the mind of the public. Among the nation's leaders, Sifton .alone
had known from the beginning what the public reaction would
be, after the first careless raptures of the government.

As he anticipated, reciprocity soon ignited a fire beyond all
economic calculation. The Canadian people might not understand
the economics of continental trade. They felt the oldest instinct of
their breed, the folk instinct of nationalism, which seemed to be
threatened by exposure to the goods, the wealth, the power, and
the policies of the United States. A few weeks of consideration
convinced many Canadians that reciprocity was only Manifest
Destiny in a new guise. And the former guise, a Big Stick across
the Alaska boundary, was vivid and raw in Canadian memory.

Still Laurier could not measure the depth of this rebellion out-
side and inside his own party. His sense of timing for once had
deserted him. If he had taken reciprocity to the people in the first
weeks of his triumph at Washington, before the shine had been
rubbed off it, probably he would have been re-elected and the
history of America would have been drastically changed. He saw
no reason to hurry. Parliament obviously favored his policy. The
country no doubt would approve it. Instead of ramming through
his deal with Taft, he allowed Parliament to debate it throughout
the spring and he set off blithely in summer for an Empire Con-
ference in London. By then the country's mind had jelled against

him.

The opposition of the manufacturing interests to reciprocity had
been expected and discounted in advance. No one was surprised
when Van Home re-emerged from private life with a typical an-
nouncement. He was "out to bust the damn thing." The C.P.R.
had been built for east-west, not north-south, traffic. Laurier had
not foreseen, however, as he had every reason to foresee from long
experience with him, that Sifton, a Liberal, also was out to bust
the damn thing and knew precisely how to do it. Laurier did not
foresee either how well Borden had learned the subtler arts of

446 THE STRUGGLE FOB THE BORDER

politics and acquired a Machiavellian touch from his enemy.
Borden, indeed, had suddenly found what four predecessors since
Macdonald had failed to find— a method of exorcising Kiel's ghost.

In death, as in life, that uneasy spirit continued to haunt the
border. The execution at Regina had alienated Quebec from the
Conservative Party. The French-Canadian race had found in Laurier
one of its own sons at the nation's summit. Apparently it would
never vote for any other leader. But at the summit Laurier could
not be merely a French Canadian. He must represent both races
and satisfy the English-speaking majority. As a national leader he
had settled the Manitoba School Question in favor of English-
speaking Protestants, against the will of the Catholic Church, he
had brought Canada into the South African War, and lately had
undertaken to build a miniature Canadian navy.

His decision in the school question could be forgiven in Quebec,
since doubtless it was unavoidable. The South African War had
been, in the eyes of the French-Canadian habitants, only a British
adventure and another conquest of harmless people like themselves.
And now what need had Canada for a navy? Obviously it was
intended to fight in future British wars.

Laurier had accepted a knighthood from the Queen. Apparently
he was yielding in his naval policy to the imperial pressure of her
government and the social pressure of the London drawing rooms.
He was weakening his policies of Canadian nationalism, deserting
the ideals of his race,

These suspicions were ridiculous, as the last tragic chapter of
his life would show, six years hence. They were sufficiently strong
in 1911 to build a revolt against him in Quebec. It was led by a
flaming young prophet of racial mystique, Henri Bourassa, and his
able lieutenant, Armand Lavergne. A vague nationalist movement,
produced by the South African War, had become a full-fledged
political party throughout French Canada. So long as it could find
no allies elsewhere it was irritating but harmless to Laurier. The
reciprocity issue gave it such allies.

Borden, who was proving himself far more imaginative than he
looked behind the dour face and heavy mustache, quickly seized
the sudden chance to destroy Laurier among the French Cana-
dians. It would be a tricky and cynical business, of course, and
required careful management.

In English-speaking Canada the Conservative Party stood pri-
marily for the British connection. It had fought Laurier's Naval
Bill of 1910 on the ground that a purely Canadian navy would
strain the links of empire. It had decided, after its first hesitation,

TAFT'S ORPHAN CHILD 447

to fight reciprocity as the first stage in Canada's annexation to the
United States and the Empire's destruction. But it could not win
the approaching election without support in Quebec and it could
expect none except from Bourassa's Nationalist Party.

Alliance, even as a temporary marriage of convenience or an
election liaison between the true-blue Tories of English-speaking
Canada and the anti-British Quebec Nationalists, appeared not only
immoral and unthinkable hut, worse, impossible. Borden arranged
it. Such an unnatural combination, of course, could not last long,
was unworthy of a statesman of Borden's stature, but it opened
his only way to office and the only sure method of killing reciprocity.
So he held "his nose and made his deal with Bourassa, who would
ally himself with anybody, even an outright enemy of his ideals,
if that would destroy Laurier, the archenemy.

Thus the catalyst of reciprocity had rearranged the chemical
elements of Canadian life into a new and incredible combination.
Two opposites, the Conservative and Nationalist Parties, had been
united for a brief purpose and, as it turned out, they represented
together a majority of the nation.

While this dark witches' brew was maturing in Quebec, the
respectable campaign against reciprocity itself-its strategy mainly
directed by Sifton, the Liberal-convulsed the English-speaking
provinces.

Once he had doubtfully decided to oppose reciprocity, Borden
discovered and sincerely believed that it would ruin the nation. To
begin with, it would expose the fragile industry of Canada to fatal
American competition; would destroy the transcontinental economy
built by three centuries of labor and perfected under Macdonald's
National Policy. That would be only the first phase of national
ruin. Its economy gutted by American goods, its people turned into
hewers of wood and drawers of water for the American factories,
its British markets lost, Canada perforce must seek admission to
the United States, on American terms. And that was precisely what
the Americans intended. Reciprocity meant, in short, the end of
the Canadian dream.

If the Canadian people could not accept that prophecy entire,
at least they could see that reciprocity, as presently devised, would
twist the Canadian economy into a new shape. Even if it produced
all the benefits claimed by Laurier, there was no guarantee that
they would continue, A treaty would have assured those benefits
for a term of years, but Laurier, in his most lamentable mistake,
had insisted on a mere agreement by concurrent legislation in
Washington and Ottawa. At any moment, therefore, the United

448 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

States could repeal the bargain, as it had done with reciprocity
before.

"Sir/' Sifton told Parliament, "we are putting our heads in the
noose. . . . These [reciprocity] resolutions, in my judgment, spell
retrogression, commercial subordination, the destruction of our
national ideals, and displacement from our proud position as the
rising hope of the British Empire."

These were not the words of a conniving Conservative politician.
They came from the second figure in the Liberal Party, Laurier's
former lieutenant and a man who sought no public office. Sifton
had cast the bullets for the Conservative Party to fire. His speeches
became the opposition's campaign documents, along with Laurier's
old speeches against reciprocity.

By this time John Wesley Dafoe, the young Conservative from
Bully's Acre, who had turned Liberal on seeing the Macdonald
government in its years of decay, had become Sifton's closest asso-
ciate, as editor of the Winnipeg Free Press, and one of the supreme
journalists of the world. Sifton owned the Free Press, but he did
not own and did not try to own its editor. In the most interesting
human subplot of the national drama, Sifton crusaded for the de-
feat of reciprocity. His paper, under Dafoe, was the ringing voice
of historic liberalism, the champion of reciprocity, the voice of
Laurier. Two great Liberals had disagreed on a public issue. Their
private friendship remained unbroken. And Dafoe went on from
there to become a primal force in Canadian life when issues greater
than reciprocity were at stake.

Borden's decisive allies did not come from Ontario, in the person
of Sifton, or Quebec, in the person of Bourassa. They came from
the United States. The very men who had revived reciprocity there
unwittingly killed it in Canada.

Taft had to push his trade legislation through the Congress. In
pushing it he pictured its manifold advantages to the American
economy. The Conservatives of Canada shouted that Taft had
confirmed their warning— the assets which he claimed in his own
country would be Canada's liabilities. Of course, reciprocity would
make American industry thrive by giving it the Canadian market
and wrecking Canadian industry. The more Taft argued for reci-
procity in the United States the more certain was its rejection in
Canada.

That fine and luckless president went much further than ad-
vocacy. As he saw, too late, the danger of Laurier's defeat, he
began to issue warnings and predictions, They were promptly dis-
torted and misunderstood north of the border. Canada, he said,

TAFT'S ORPHAN CHILD 449

was at the "parting of the ways," meaning that if reciprocity was
not achieved now the opportunity would be lost to the United
States for the visible future and Canada would contract into a
closed system of empire trade.

The "parting of the ways" was a truthful phrase in plain fact.
In political semantics it was dangerous, perhaps fatal, when warped
in a Canadian election campaign to mean a threat from Wash-
ington.

Taft was not content with this damage. He wrote to Roosevelt:
"The amount of Canadian products we would take would produce
a current of business between western Canada and the United
States that would make Canada only an adjunct of the United
States. It would transfer all their important business to Chicago
and New York, with their bank credits and everything else, and it
would greatly increase the demand of Canada for our manufac-
tures. I see this as an argument against Reciprocity made in
Canada, and I think it is a good one."

Too good. It was, from the American President, the perfect argu-
ment for Laurier's enemies. A "parting of the ways," Canada an
"adjunct of the United States"— the humblest stump speaker of the
Conservative Party could interpret such phrases as an ultima-
tum from Washington, another dose of Manifest Destiny, the
latest gesture by Roosevelt's Big Stick in the hands of his suc-
cessor.

Taft little understood the psychology of Canada. The Democratic
supporters of reciprocity apparently misunderstood it altogether.
Thus Champ Clark, Speaker of the House of Representatives: "I
hope to see the day when the American flag will float over every
square foot of the British North American possession, clear to the
North Pole." No Canadian ear could mistake that echo of Jefferson,
Jackson, Clay, and the others who had launched the invasion of
1812, of the Summers and Chandlers who had claimed Canada as
payment for the Alabama Claims.

Laurier could not anticipate the unnatural marriage of British
toryism and French-Canadian nationalism. He could not imagine
that the American politicians would kill reciprocity, their own
child. He should have foreseen, as Sifton had warned him, that
the oldest emotions of Canada, once roused by the threat of annexa-
tion, even a false threat, would overwhelm all other argument. But
he had lived too long in the isolated Ottawa hive; he thought he
was giving Canada a chance of a new prosperity and America a
chance of economic sanity; he was deceived by the first favorable
reaction of Parliament; and, in a final blunder, he allowed passions

450 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

to rise and the opposition to consolidate before taking his case to
the people.

Taft pushed reciprocity through the Congress. Laurier could not
push it through Parliament, for Borden was conducting a skillful
filibuster with time on his side. At last Laurier abandoned the at-
tempt and, still confident, called an election. Now began one ^ of
the most angry, confused, and paradoxical campaigns in Canadian
history.

All the magic of Laurier's oratory, his personal legend and his
economic argument could not stem the tide now flowing in Eng-
lish-speaking Canada, where reciprocity was interpreted as mean-
ing annexation and the breakup of the Empire, or in Quebec, where
with highest irony Laurier was represented as the tool of British
imperialism. Even Rudyard Kipling was enlisted in the great cause
to warn Canadians that "It is her own soul that Canada risks to-
day. ... I see nothing for Canada in Reciprocity except a little
ready money, which she does not need, and a very long repentance."
Against Manifest Destiny, Taft's honest candor, Sifton's cold logic,
Bourassa's racial doctrines, the memories of battles long ago and
the Alaska Boundary Award-the great man of Canada argued in
vain.

He seemed to be caught in a political cabal of peculiarly re-
pulsive cynicism, but it was more than that. He was caught in the
deep current of a history flowing these three hundred years since
his ancestors had first settled on the St. Lawrence-the history of a
people who intended to be themselves, who had always distrusted
the Americans, who had made the border by their own toil and
bloodshed and would defend it, if they could, whenever it seemed
in danger. The border seemed in danger now. There could be
only one answer from Canada.

On September 21, 1911, Canada went soberly to the polls and
rejected the Liberal government. Despite Bourassa's inroads into
Quebec, it was a close thing. The government received 625,096
votes and the combined opposition 669,567, In Parliament Borden
had 133 seats to Laurier's 86 Liberals, almost exactly the former
Liberal majority.

Had reciprocity been defeated or had the people voted only to
dismiss an aged government, and in Quebec to repudiate Laurier's
supposed imperialism? The anguished voice of Dafoe answered
that question with unequaled authority. Allowing for all the con-
tradictions of the election, all its distortion and mean conspiracy,
still, Dafoe wrote, "Canada rejected Reciprocity in pride rather
than fear. . . . Whether the decision was right or wrong, prudent

TAFT'S ORPHAN CHILD 451

or rash, vainglorious or self-regarding, it settled for a generation
and perhaps for a century all possibility of a mutual agreement for
freedom of exchange in trade between these two countries. It is
impossible to imagine a recurrence of the favorable conditions
which made such an arrangement seem practicable in 1911. When
the arrangement fell through, the countries elected for economic
war.'*

After the brief armistice of Woodrow Wilson's low Underwood
tariff, Dafoe's judgment, as usual, was fulfilled. Economic war,
greedy, impoverishing and insensate, was joined on the border.

There is a queer little sequel to the story of 1911, never printed
before now.

President Taft was succeeded in American politics by his abler
son, Robert. That dominant figure in the Republican Party was
commonly regarded as an unshakable and unrepentant protection-
ist, an enemy of his father's low-tariff policies. Rut in 1947, when
Canadian-American trade had encountered a new crisis, Senator
Taft told this writer fn Washington that he favored the removal
of all trade barriers between the United States and Canada.

Strangely enough, he had only a vague memory of President
Taffs reciprocity agreement, he was surprised to learn its details,
but he was convinced that it was sound in principle. He added
that he would shortly advocate in the Senate a policy of free trade
with Canada, though not with other nations.

Why that announcement was never .made the writer does "not
know. At all events, as Dafoe expected, reciprocity died with the
elder Taft and one more futile attempt to revive it would only
confirm Dafoe's prediction.

32

The Higher Lunacy

[1911-1937]

A THE LAST MEETING OF THE LAURIER CABINET ITS YOUNGEST
member, William Lyon Mackenzie King, paid no attention
to the closing business and the dying gestures of an illus-
trious regime. He was scribbling a letter and a prophecy to his
parents. Someday, he wrote, this dingy chamber would see him
again. It was difficult to imagine, in 1911, anything more improb-
able. But, then, the life of Canada and the struggle of the boundary
had never produced a more improbable character than King. When,
as an old man, he discovered his youthful letter and read it in
tears, his prophecy had been abundantly fulfilled.

More than any of his predecessors, King was the product of
the border.

His maternal grandfather, William Lyon Mackenzie, had escaped
across the Niagara River in a rowboat, disguised as an old woman,
after the fiasco of his rebellion. He had returned briefly with his
burlesque "government" to Navy Island, precipitated the Amer-
ican raids of 1838, and almost produced a war between the United
States and Britain.

His long American exile had been fertile in children, most of
whom died young, in the poverty of a home often without food,
Isabel, though her parents often despaired of her life, somehow
survived and returned with them to Canada when the rebel was
pardoned by his queen. She married John King, son of a British
officer who had fought as a loyalist against Mackenzie's scarecrow
army. Their son, therefore, was a unique synthesis—with a strong
American coloration— of the historic forces that had first produced
revolt, then responsible government, and finally a Canadian nation.

452

THE HIGHER LUNACY 453

Young Billy King-or "Rex," as his family called him— moved to
the United States in his college years to study and work at Jane
Addams's Hull House, a social settlement in Chicago. It was there
that he discovered life, his purpose in it, and the nature of the
American people. Now a plump youth of flabby look, ingratiating
smile, and inveterate industry, he entered the service of the Laurier
government as a labor administrator, soon caught the attention of
the queen bee and rose steadily in the Cabinet hive.

The defeat of reciprocity and his own taught him many things.
One of them was that free trade with the United States, while an
ideal to be admired and advocated in theory, must long remain
impossible in fact. Yet better than any Canadian statesman of his
time King knew not only the American people but the necessity
for American friendship,

At Harvard, as a young teacher, he had encountered briefly a
youth of more fortunate circumstances, apparently a darling of
fortune but doomed to early physical disaster. His name was
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That chance meeting began the strang-
est and most fruitful partnership in the history of the border.

Out of office, without prospects, with only $2,000 in the bank,
and with an aged mother, a brother, and several other relatives to
support, King went back to the United States again, to work for
the Rockefeller interests as a negotiator in labor disputes^ He
learned still more about American society and began to ruminate
his own heretical and revolutionary ideas about an ideal society
for Canada and the world.

In the meantime the Borden government had begun to raise the
Canadian, tariff from the ruins of reciprocity, only to find the
American tariff falling under the New Liberalism of Woodrow
Wilson. This was only a deceptive lull, a mere aberration in a pro-
tectionist system, but Borden had little time to consider it, for he
was soon catapulted into the First World War-a long, exhausting
hemorrhage of Canadian blood and a test of Borden s quality, Both
nation and leader proved worthy of that test. But it broke both
Laurier and the Conservative Party.

To maintain the ambitious Canadian Army in France, Borden
repudiated his Nationalist supporters in Quebec, formed a coalition
with English-speaking Liberals and enforced conscription despite
the passionate resistance of French Canada, which regarded con-
scription as a symbol of the English conquest.

Laurier, while supporting the war, refused to join the Union
government of 1917 and, in the last crisis of his life, returned by
sure instinct to his own people as the protector of their race. That

454 THE STRUGGLE FOK THE BORDER

was the end of him as a national leader, but at his death two years
later his legend was imperishable.

Borden had fought reciprocity as a threat to the British Empire
and Canada's national existence but, like Laurier, he was a na-
tionalist, jealous of his nation's autonomy. After its sacrifices in the
war he insisted on its recognition in the peace treaty of Paris. He
signed as a member of the British delegation; he made Canada a
full-fledged member of the League of Nations; and he vainly tried
to modify Wilson's Covenant, by watering down its commitments,
in the hope of attracting the support of the American people.

When war and peacemaking were finished, the Liberal Party, as
the official enemy of conscription (although most English-speaking
Liberal leaders supported it), seemed broken beyond early repair
outside Quebec. That general opinion was not shared by the pale,
plump scholar who, standing by Laurier and sharing his second
defeat, was now committing his private heresies to paper in a
ponderous book entitled Industry and Humanity. King had watched
Borden's retirement and the advent of Arthur Meighen, a fellow
student of King's days at Toronto University and now, apparently,
the most promising figure in Canada. With sublime confidence
King waited for a Conservative collapse and his own elevation.
Both expectations were sound,

Chiefly because no attractive alternative was available, but with
little hope of recovery, the Liberal Party chose King as its leader
in 1919. Nothing could have suited Meighen better. That gaunt,
brilliant, and fearless young lawyer from the prairies, with his
flashing eloquence and corrosive wit, saw in his opponent only a
suet pudding of vague political theory, weak compromise, and
pious humbug. Little time need be wasted on such a pale shadow
of Laurier and, anyway, Meighen's agenda was full.

He undertook with one hand to raise tariffs against American
goods and found complete justification for his lifelong protection-
ism in the policies of the Harding government, whose "normalcy"
included increasing barriers against all imports. If the United States
was back to normal after Wilson's tariff aberrations and his own
Greek tragedy, so, in Meighen's mind, was Canada. He had re-
furbished Macdonald's National Policy and was proud of it.

With the other hand Meighen attempted, and with some success,
to carry the historic burden of a Canadian prime minister by inter-
preting the United States to the British Empire. The Imperial Con-
ference of 1921 found him bearding the imperialists of London to
demand that the Empire abrogate its alliance with Japan—this
solely to satisfy American opinion, for it regarded the alliance as

THE HIGHER LUNACY

455

aimed against the United States. Meighen's pressure succeeded
The alliance was abrogated, but with little gratitude from Canada's
neighbors. Economic war on the 49th Parallel, foreseen by Dafoe,
had been enthusiastically resumed on both sides with the old
tariff weapon.

Tariffs, however, were powerless to stop the depression of 1920.
Obviously, in the minds of Meighen in Ottawa and Harding in
Washington, still higher tariffs were required, and were applied.
On a policy of outright and candid protection, of "brick for brick"
in the rising customs wall of the border, Meighen went to the
country in 1921. King opposed him with a masterpiece of lofty and
deliberate confusion. He had learned enough in 1911 never Jo pro-
pose reciprocity again; he said he proposed "freer" not "free" trade;
he would somehow reduce the tariff to satisfy an agrarian revolt
sweeping the West like a prairie fire and yet keep it high enough
to protect the Eastern manufacturers; and by refusing to state his
own policy while concentrating his attack on the government, he
destroyed Meighen forever.

Destruction was assured in any case by Meighen's inflexible and
lonely character, by the usual revulsion against a wartime govern-
ment, and most of all by Quebec's hatred of the Conservative
Party, begun on a Regina gallows and heated, almost to the point
of insurrection, by the conscription policy of 1917.

King inherited all of Laurier's shrunken estate. He held Quebec
solidly. But he lacked a working majority in Parliament, since the
farmers' revolt, called the Progressive Party, had swept the West
in protest against high tariffs. No one but a political genius^ could
manage the situation which King now occupied as prime minister.
He did not look like a genius. He looked to the public like a
pedestrian little man surprised to find himself at the head of a
nation, and to Meighen like a contemptible fraud. Nevertheless, in
his own way ^e was a genius and would hold office longer than
any other statesman of the English-speaking world.

The adventures of this incredible person constantly and increas-
ingly dragged him back to the border and across it to the scenes
of his grandfather's exile and his own youth in the United
States.

His first budget, in 1921, showed his stubborn but cautious deter-
mination to remove, as fast as possible, what he regarded as the
insane economic arrangements of the continent. Every other nation
in the world was then embarked on economic insanity, was raising
tariffs and lurching toward the Bull Market and the Crash. Canada
alone, under King, reduced its tariff, extended the British Prefer-

456 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

ence, and even offered (being sure that the offer would not be
accepted) a new reciprocity deal to the United States.

King expected no response from Washington, and certainly did
not want reciprocity. Washington was already ushering in the
gaudy era and topless towers of the Fordney-McCumber Tariff.
Only King's genius of conciliation and postponement, combined
with the free-trade drive of the new farmers' party, could resist
Canada's impulse to retaliate against American trade restrictions,
which threatened to damage and finally devastated the Canadian
economy. Somehow King managed to reduce the Canadian tariff
gradually in this general climate of protection but toward the end
of his first term was talking vaguely of retaliation, if necessary.
Dafoe's economic war had reached a dangerous point of inter-
national friction.

It was as a North American, however, and a friend of the United
States, that King went to the Imperial Conference of 1923. There,
as a fledgling, untried empire statesman, he confronted such for-
midable leaders as Winston Churchill, who were proposing to con-
solidate the Empire under a single foreign policy. London suddenly
discovered, to its amazement, that King was not made of putty,
after all. The pressure of the centralizers, the social seductions of
the London drawing rooms, and even the personal pleas of the
great South African, Jan Smuts, could not move the genial Canadian.

There was nothing to be done about it, since Canada had become
unquestionably a nation with autonomous powers in fact, though
not yet in law. King wanted them codified but he could wait a
little longer— only three years, as it turned out. Meanwhile he must
Lave freedom to deal with Canada's neighbor as he chose.

King quickly completed the structure of Canadian status. Few
of his people realized that he was denying and trying to evade the
parallel weight of responsibility. He was moving into isolationism.
He was moving, in fact, beside his neighbors across the border.
Already he had refused to send troops to fight beside Britain against
Turkey in 1922. Now he was proclaiming a policy— if it could be
called a policy— of "no commitments" abroad. He was behaving
like a North American.

In 1923 he carried the affairs of the border and of the Empire
into a new phase by ostentatiously declaring Canada's right to
make its own foreign treaties. His Quebec lieutenant, Ernest La-
pointe, arrived unobtrusively in Washington and, to the horror of
the British ambassador, insisted on signing alone a Canadian-
American agreement for the protection of the North Pacific halibut
fisheries, Ottawa was doing its business for the first time directly

THE HIGHER LUNACY

457

with Washington and soon sent its own ambassador there. Slowly
broadening down from precedent to precedent, the Empire was
becoming a commonwealth, It required only the Balfour Declara-
tion of 1926 and the Statute of Westminster, five years later, to
validate its new structure.

Canada had been the unfailing though often unconscious archi-
tect of the Third^Empire since the Rebellion of 1837. King, in com-
pleting the work of Macdonald, Borden and Laurier, was the chief
contemporary architect of the Commonwealth.

All this work was implicit in the affairs of the border. They had
supplied the ingredients of a Canadian nation in the first place but
they could not isolate it from the United States or detach it from
Britain. King did not see the end of the Commonwealth process
now under way; he gravely misjudged the larger process of the
world; but he knew more clearly than any Canadian before him
that he must have a free hand to deal with foreign nations in
general and his American neighbors in particular.

It was not easy, in the nineteen-twenties, to deal with the Amer-
ican neighbors. They had found the secret of perpetual economic
motion by hiving their markets off from the world. They had in-
stalled two chickens in every pot and were planning to install two
cars in every garage. They exported their goods but would not
allow their customers to pay in reciprocal trade, preferring-in the
form of unsecured foreign loans— to give their goods, their money,
and their labor away, lest repayment impoverish them. When these
accents of the higher lunacy were shouted from the White House,
from the Capitol, and from the skyscrapers of Wall Street, who could
hear the faint protests of the little man in the East Block of Ottawa?

Apparently no one heard him. In the election of 1925 Meighen
swept English-speaking Canada on the proposition that low Liberal
tariffs were ruining Canada and might well "endanger our nation-
ality." He seemed likely to control the new Parliament, but again
he had underestimated King, his own cruel destiny, and the sheer
accidents of politics.

After a scandal which would have destroyed any leader less
adroit, an open quarrel with the King's representative, and a con-
stitutional issue of his own devising, King clung to office, was re-
turned with a clear majority in 1926, and prepared for easier times.

Instead, he faced the Great Depression. A convulsion of that
magnitude was sufficient to give the Conservative Party and a
high-tariff policy a new, deceptive flush of life, It would soon reveal
more interesting exhibits-among them a crippled and dauntless
squire of the Hudson River, King's acquaintance of Harvard days;

458 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

a madman with a comedian's mustache in Munich; a gaudy and
confident Canadian in Calgary, Alberta.

Richard Bedford Bennett, the new leader of the Conservative
Party, out-Meighened Meighen and made Macdonald look like a
free trader in a new crusade for tariffs, mainly against the United
States. By restraining the movement of goods across the border,
by rejecting Washington's "domination," Bennett promised to cure
the unemployment of the thirties or "perish in the attempt." By
refusing to import he would somehow "blast" his way into world
markets and save the nation. And on these assurances a desperate
nation elected him in 1930.

Roosevelt was running for the Presidency in 1932 on a traditional
Democratic policy of moderate tariffs, sound finance, strict economy,
a balanced budget, and other impeccable items of orthodoxy when
Bennett assembled in Ottawa a conference designed to set up the
Commonwealth in self-contained business. The Canadian's alter-
nating persuasion and threat compelled a doubtful British govern-
ment to sign a series of agreements which failed to reduce the
tariffs between the Commonwealth nations but raised them against
all foreigners. This might appear idiotic to the saner minds of the
United States but it was hardly surprising, Canada and its Com-
monwealth partners were merely retaliating, after long delay, against
the idiocy of American tariffs. If that involved a final severing of the
world's economic jugular, no one seemed to realize it, in Canada
anyway, except a little man watching the Ottawa Conference from
the gallery.

King knew that the Bennett government was plunging the nation
and the Commonwealth into incalculable damage and suspected
that he would have to repair it. Bennett soon suspected the same
thing and, on Roosevelt's election, arrived in Washington to issue
jointly with the President a brave statement proposing "to search
for means to increase the exchange of commodities between our
two countries." Nothing came of this pledge, since Bennett was
imprisoned in his own contrary policies and Roosevelt suddenly
turned his back on world trade, sank the London Economic Con-
ference with a torpedo directed by Raymond Moley, and embarked
on a policy of outright self-containment bearing the magic letters

Sanity had not quite died in the democratic world. Cordell Hull,
though humiliated by the President at London, was still in the
American Cabinet, still patiently waiting for the NRA, other gim-
cracks of the same species, and the lapses of Roosevelt's tariff
liberalism to pass. In 1934 Hull won his struggle with the passage

THE HIGHER LUNACY 4S9

of the reciprocal trade agreements legislation. The United States
was ready to reduce tariffs at last.

So, it appeared, was the repentant Bennett Negotiations to devise
a new Canadian-American trade agreement were almost complete
when Bennett went to the country in 1935, though he did not care
to reveal his secret somersault to the electors. Inevitably the depres-
sion, which had made Bennett, destroyed him and returned the
Liberal Party.

King found Bennett's draft agreement awaiting ratification, He
seized on it eagerly and, with a few amendments, secured the signa-
ture of the American government before the President could change
his mind again. Thus began the slow and painful return to sanity
in the North American and the world economy. It was too late,
Born of depression, the lunatics of Europe and Asia were on the
march and could not be turned back.

The governments of the United States, Britain, and Canada con-
tinued to deny the inevitable while attempting to halt it by
reorganizing the world's trade and thus relieving its tensions.

In 1937 King made a mysterious visit to the White House on his
way to a Commonwealth conference in London. He and Roosevelt
(now intimates of an improbable sort) agreed on a broad and hope-
ful tariff deal. It was quickly ratified by the three nations which
controlled the largest segment of the world's trade in the historic
North Atlantic Triangle. The British Preference system was reduced
in Britain and Canada by the agreement of November 17, 1938, and,
in return for this concession, the United States reduced its tariffs
substantially.

King, as the honest and successful broker between the United
States and Britain, regarded the agreement as the largest success of
his career so far. "Like Canning," he gloated, "we have done our
indispensable part to call into existence a New World to redress
the balance of the Old. . . . Each of us sleeps more safely in his
bed because of the rapprochement between the world's two greatest
democracies, a rapprochement which could not have been effected
without the assent and cooperation of Canada/'

The rapprochement certainly had occurred and could not have
been effected, in terms of commerce anyway, without King's work;
for there could be no trade deal between the United States and
Britain without the consent of Canada, which had binding agree-
ments with both. Hull saw his long-sought policy of sound economic
appeasement beginning to succeed. Its simultaneous counterpart,
of questionable soundness, was Chamberlain's policy of political
appeasement, recently enforced at Munich.

460 THE STRUGGLE FOR TPIE BORDER

Both sides of the general appeasement policy were doomed
together within twelve months. Meanwhile the new partnership of
Roosevelt and King had quietly begun to revise the defenses of
North America in case appeasement failed. They had agreed se-
cretly, at the White House meeting in 1937, that American and
Canadian officers should undertake joint military planning. Though
this was an obvious and necessary step, its premature disclosure
shocked the Canadian imperialists., who thought it a betrayal of
Britain, and the isolationists, who feared it would involve Canada
in the future wars of the United States. When Roosevelt, in the
same year, proposed a "quarantine" of aggressors, his nation was
equally shocked. Few North Americans, on either side of the border,
were thinking straight in those days.

33

Friends, Alive and Dead

[1937-1940]

THOUGH THE WORLD WAS REELING TOWARD ITS SECOND GENERAL
war, a new era of good feeling in America had arrived under
Roosevelt and King. Their friendship would be needed
before long.

The two leaders, each in a different public fashion but with the
same political methods, accurately reflected the mood of their
peoples.

To Roosevelt, King appeared as an elder statesman of much
greater learning, longer experience, and ingratiating ways, to whom
secrets could be safely trusted, secrets that could not be trusted
to the head of a more powerful state or one less close and friendly.
In private character the two were antithetic— Roosevelt gregarious,
assertive, gay, careless of facts, uninterested in scholarship, learning
by word of mouth and playing brilliantly by ear; King a lonely
recluse, when possible, in his farmhouse at Kingsmere, deferential
yet ruthless, outwardly simple, inwardly a war of contradictions,
in politics a master of intrigue but in private a devout spiritualist
who constantly consulted his dead mother, and later would consult
the dead Roosevelt.

A rather old-fashioned Victorian like King could not fit into the
brawling climate of Washington and the theatricals of the New
Deal. He fitted much better into his lonely bachelor's estate north
of Ottawa, where he was building, of all things, an amphitheater
of synthetic stone ruins at which he gazed by moonlight. Yet few
Americans and probably no foreigners were as close to Roosevelt in
his last days. The President called him "Mackenzie," a familiarity
which no Canadian ever used to the Prime Minister. King, always a
little stuffy and aware of his lesser status in the scheme of things,

461

462 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

addressed Roosevelt as "Mr. President." Each confessed his secret
problems to the other as they were seldom confessed to their cabi-
nets. Those confidences were never betrayed on either side.

Roosevelt regarded King as a kind of political genius, which he
was, as an impartial adviser with no ax to grind, and sometimes
as a wailing wall. In Roosevelt, King found qualities of grandeur,
flair, and stagecraft which he lacked and envied. Many of Roose-
velt's policies he dismissed as political claptrap. He was appalled
by the NRA, the Blue Eagle parades, and General Hugh Johnson s
dead cats. He often shook his head at Roosevelt's economic igno-
rance-as; for example, when he had asked the President how he
proposed to finance his huge budgetary deficits and Roosevelt had
replied: "Well, Mackenzie, my family has held French securities
since before the Revolution and they're still paying interest, so why
can't we do the same?'5

It was no use for King, the trained economist, to talk in technical
terms with such a man. But King never doubted that his friend
was the greatest statesman and most fascinating person of the
age-even if, as King once told his friends, Roosevelt secretly
would like to annex Canada, as who wouldn't?

Thus complementing each other by their differences, the two men
got along famously together and brought their nations into an
intimate friendship doubtless without precedent anywhere at any
time. That was not the least of their teeming lifeworks.

The cooperation built in small affairs soon made possible a major
continental decision. On August 18, 1938, the partners announced
the American-Canadian partnership to the world in terms under-
standable to Hitler, who was currently preparing to partition Czech-
oslovakia. President and Prime Minister met with ostentatious
symbolism to dedicate the Thousand Islands International Bridge
and pledge their nations to joint defense.

Roosevelt's brief speech committed the United States by public
guarantee, as it was already committed by geography, history, and
the Monroe Doctrine, to the protection of Canada. "The Dominion
of Canada," he said, "is part of the sisterhood of the British Empire.
I give you assurance that the people of the United States will not
stand idly by if domination of Canadian soil is threatened by any
other empire."

King reciprocated this promise two days later at Woodbridge,
Ontario: "We, too, have our obligations as a good, friendly neigh-
bor, and one of them is to see that, at our own instance, our country
is made as immune from attack or possible invasion as we can
reasonably be expected to make it, and that, should the occasion

FRIENDS, ALIVE AND DEAD 463

ever arise, enemy forces should not be able to pursue their way,
either by land, sea or air, to the United States across Canadian
territory/'

Without consulting the American Congress or the Canadian
Parliament, the partners had proclaimed, in actual fact, a military
alliance, the final issue of three hundred years of struggle along
the border.

A year later, almost to the day, this partnership of Roosevelt and
King, which had become a partnership of the United States and
Canada, was put to the test.

At six o'clock on the morning of September 1, 1939, King was
roused by the ring of the telephone beside his bed at Kingsmere.
German troops had crossed the Polish border. After a lifetime of
pacifism, King, the conciliator, was called upon to lead Canada as
the only North American nation in the Second World War.

While he waited for Parliament to assemble and declare war,
Roosevelt telephoned him from Washington. Was Canada actually
at war? Roosevelt asked. No, said King, it was not. Until Parliament
decided to the contrary, Canada was still neutral "You see," Roose-
velt told the advisers around his desk, "I was right!"

Canada being technically neutral, the United States could ship
war supplies across the border, despite the existing Neutrality Act.
In the hours remaining before Parliament's declaration of war
Roosevelt (now a highly fictitious neutral) sold Canada all the
munitions the United States could spare. They amounted to little
but were invaluable at that time of shortage, especially some train-
ing planes which Canada desperately needed. The Roosevelt-King
partnership was paying off.

Another year passed in the phony war of Europe, in Dunkirk, and
the siege of Britain. By summer, 1940, the Western world would
appear in greater peril than at any moment since the Mohammedan
invasions. No men understood that better than Roosevelt, writhing
in the prison of the Neutrality Act, and King, suddenly asked to per-
form a miracle in support of Britain. Could Britain hold, or must
freedom perish in the Old World and find its last lodgment in a
North American island under perpetual siege?

That -question was written on the haggard face of King but never
uttered even to his cabinet. It was written on the ashen face of
Roosevelt as, sitting in his shirt sleeves through the summer heat of
Washington, he heard the vain appeals of a falling France and the
grim oratory of Winston Churchill.

Events confronted Canada with a special question of its own:
If Britain fell, if Europe were overrun, must Canada seek physical

464 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

survival by abandoning its political independence and joining the
United States; was this, then, the end of the old Canadian dream?
Not a few Canadians thought so. King had schooled himself against
such thoughts. His faculty of self -hypnotism, his power to think only
what he wanted to think, now served him well

The American partners had conferred in April at the White
House. King, in retrospect, considered these discussions the begin-
ning of his greatest days. He had made himself, as he believed, the
secret link between Roosevelt and Churchill.

Years before, Churchill had called Canada "the linchpin of
peace," the magnet drawing Britain and the United States together.
That was little more than a vivid phrase when Churchill uttered it.
Now King regarded it as a solid and urgent fact, He himself was
the linchpin.

Heavy with his sense of mission, he strove to temper Churchill's
impatience with the United States' neutrality and pacified Roosevelt
when Britain's appeals for help became embarrassing. According
to King, these effort mainly prevented a disastrous clash between
Washington and London; in proof of which he always carried in his
wallet, as too sacred to be placed on any official file, some cables
from Churchill thanking him for his intervention.

Until this crisis the British Tory had never taken the Canadian
Liberal very seriously, whatever he may have thought of Canada,
the free world's linchpin and magnet. King had not appreciated the
genius of the young Churchill and had told him frankly, at their
first meeting long ago, that Churchill had made an ass of himself in
his first speaking tour of Canada. Now the three men under fire,
Roosevelt, Churchill and King, began to understand one another.
King always claimed to be the essential interpreter of this new
friendship.

So far the Washington-Ottawa axis had functioned privately and
informally, Toward the end of the ghastly summer of 1940 the
partners agreed to confirm their personal agreement by a public act.
King was alone at Kingsmere on Friday afternoon, August 16, and
when the telephone rang answered it himself. The voice of the Presi-
dent asked him to be at Ogdensburg, New York, next day.

Ogdensburg was well chosen as a symbolic setting for a North
American alliance, already operating but never written into binding
contract. The Canadians had burned Ogdensburg in the War of
1812. The Fenians had used it as a base of their proposed raids on
Canada. How distant, futile, and absurd those events looked in the
summer of 1940 when the foundations of the world were cracking!
So, no doubt, thought Roosevelt, as his private train carried him

FRIENDS, ALIVE AND 0EAD 465

into the little St Lawrence town, and King, as he crossed the river
to meet his friend.

They met in the President's car and formalized all the private
discussions of these last three years. The Ogdensburg Agreement
was scrawled by Roosevelt on the back of an envelope. Again
neglecting to secure the consent of the Congress, and giving no
advance notice to his people, he had signed a military alliance with
a member of the Commonwealth. He had formally repealed, on one
of its battlefields, the War of 1812. He had changed the border from
a line of division into a line of unity by accepting Canada as a sov-
ereign friend and the United States' only contractual foreign ally.
King signed with the same lack of legal authority. It was no time for
quibbling. Both men had the unspoken authority of their peoples
and the sanction of events.

To agree on joint military planning for North American defense
was not difficult, since agreement merely formalized arrangements
under way for three years. The real business of Ogdensburg, which
continued from the dinner hour until two next morning, was not
confined to North America. It covered the whole Atlantic.

Roosevelt had begun the secret negotiations by which he pro-
posed to convey fifty American destroyers to Britain, then at the
nadir of its fortunes. The deal was ticklish because it sailed very
close to the constitutional limitations of the Presidency, perhaps
beyond them, and because Churchill (according to King's account)
was being very difficult.

Obviously Roosevelt could not give part of the American Navy
away for nothing. For both strategic and political reasons he must
present the American people with some immediate and tangible
return to justify the bargain. He wanted military bases on British
territory in the West Indies and in Newfoundland, then a British
colony.

Churchill, having refused to preside at the liquidation of the
British Empire, was in no mood to lease even a few bits and pieces
of it to a friendly neutral. Could King persuade Churchill? That
(according to King) was the real question at Ogdensburg, but it
could not be mentioned, of course, in the official communique.

King agreed to accept the assignment of the honest broker and
undertook to persuade Churchill, Whether King or Britain's need of
destroyers in the Battle of the Atlantic convinced Churchill may
never be known, but King believed that his intervention was deci-
sive. Later certain distinguished British statesmen would say pri-
vately that King had persuaded Churchill to yield too much, but
King never regretted it.

466 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

Few Canadians realized then what he meant when he told the
Canadian Parliament that in the Ogdensburg Agreement "Canada,
in liaison between the British Commonwealth and the United
States, is fulfilling a manifest destiny." Roosevelt must have smiled
on reading those words. His Canadian partner had appropriated an
ancient American slogan of hostility to Canada and twisted it into
a new meaning of friendship. That spirit, more than the large
intrinsic contents of the meeting, was the vital result of Ogdensburg.
The partners had sealed, at the most critical moment of modern
history, the friendship of North America and the English-speaking
world. And Canada's token commission on the deal was a gift of
six American destroyers for its own infant navy.

Neither Roosevelt nor King could afford at the moment to explain
his work in public. Roosevelt was still the prisoner of his nation's
legal neutrality and would not escape it finally without the assist-
ance of Japan, more than a year later. King must bear the criticism
of his enemies at home without breaking the secrets of his friends,
Roosevelt and Churchill.

The Ogdensburg defense agreement was instantly attacked in the
Canadian Parliament by R. B. Hanson, leader of the opposition, as
a stunt to re-elect Roosevelt that autumn and as King's latest affront
to the British connection. Meighen emerged from his long silence
to call the Ogdensburg decisions mere "twilight twitterings" which
only diverted Canada from its sovereign purpose, the support of
Britain, and from its only reliable defense, the British Navy.

The critics of Ogdensburg thus distorted its whole purpose. It
was certainly designed to prepare North America for siege if Britain
fell. In the summer of 1940 the leaders of the United States and
Canada would have been guilty almost of treason if they had not
taken those precautions. The primary purpose, equally clear, was
to rescue Britain, within Roosevelt's existing limitations; and the
net result was not, as Meighen supposed, to draw Canada further
into the American orbit, but to draw the United States, by a treaty
with Canada and by the destroyer deal, closer to the whole
Commonwealth.

Churchill had no doubts on that score. He quickly relieved the
political difficulties inflicted on King by enforced silence. In a
rousing public cable from London he thanked the Canadian Prime
Minister for "promoting a harmony of sentiment throughout the
New World" and concluded: "This deep understanding will be a
dominant factor in the rescue of Europe from a relapse into the
Dark Ages."

Three other cables from Churchill remained thenceforth in King's

FRIENDS, ALIVE AND DEAD 467

wallet, fastened with a silver clasp, and were sometimes shown in
confidence to his friends. Their contents proved, said the proud
owner, that Churchill at first had underestimated his Canadian
friend, was full of contrition for his mistake, and now realized that
King had brought America and Britain together at the edge of a
serious rift.

This work of reconciliation between the two leaders of the free
world King regarded to his dying day as the most important of his
life. In 1940, he would add mysteriously, transatlantic friendship
had reached a head-on collision. "It was bad/' said King, "very very
bad!" because Churchill expected more than Roosevelt could grant
and Roosevelt had been incensed by Churchill's impatience. Then
King would carefully fold Churchill's cables, put them tenderly into
his wallet and the wallet into his inner coat pocket as the proof that
he had indeed enforced Canada's manifest idesliny.

Ogdensburg was not the only occasion when King must suffer in
silence to serve the interests of the United States and Britain. Not
long afterwards he was attacked for maintaining a Canadian repre-
sentative in Petain's French capital of Vichy, for condoning the
betrayal of France, and for truckling to the remaining isolationists
of Quebec. Pie could not tell Parliament or people that he had
maintained contact with Vichy against his will solely at the request
of the American and British governments. As Hull had warned Lord
Halifax, British ambassador to Washington, the American govern-
ment could not keep its observers at the important listening post of
Vichy if Canada withdrew and left the United States as the only
free nation represented there. Reluctantly King agreed to carry the
public load of P6tain. It was part of Canada's burden as the honest
broker.

34

Onward from Hyde Park

[1940-1947]

BY THE SPRING OF 1941 THE IMMEDIATE CRISIS IN OTTAWA WAS
not military but financial. Canada faced imminent bank-
ruptcy. Only the United States could rescue it.

An ancient problem thus appeared in a new and extreme form,
Canada had usually bought more goods in the United States than
it sold there. The resulting deficit was made up by Canada's dollar
surplus in the world market, mainly in Britain. Now Britain could
not pay in dollars for many of its Canadian imports. Yet Canada
must continue to buy hugely in the United States to fuel its war
industries with American coal, oil, steel, and other essentials. Its
supplies of gold and dollars had been steadily shrinking and must
soon run out, thus wrecking its whole war program.

The Canadian government's experts saw this as a problem of
economics. King saw it as a problem of politics and human nature.
He decided to find a political solution in the human nature of his
American partner. Where the Canadian experts had failed for
months in negotiations with the Washington government, King
approached Roosevelt direct at Hyde Park.

The two friends drove about the President's estate in his little
hand-operated car while King explained the crisis in layman's
terms. Roosevelt admitted candidly that he could never understand
the details of foreign exchange, but King insisted that there was
nothing complicated in this situation. Canada needed American
dollars, that was all, to continue its aid to Britain. True, Canada
could raise a few more dollars, and remain effectively in the war
for a few months longer by spending its last gold reserves and
liquidating the small assets held by its investors in the United
States. If they were compelled to do that, King warned, Canadians

468

ONWABD FKOM HYDE PARK 469

would never forgive the United States when they were fighting a
war to defend North America as well as Britain,

Roosevelt might not grasp the intricacies of foreign exchange but
he instantly grasped the import of King's warning. Why, it was
unthinkable, he said, that some financial dispute should endanger
the friendship of the North American peoples and weaken the
defense against Germany. How could the thing be fixed?

King was ready for that question and primed with a simple
answer. The United States, he said, had only to buy Canadian
materials and munitions to be supplied to Britain in any case under
the Lend-Lease formula and to pay Canada in American dollars,
Thus the United States would use Canadian industry to produce
essential British supplies, it would roughly balance Canadian-
American exchange in dollars and save Canada from economic
collapse.

Roosevelt agreed that this was "a swell idea." The partners drove
back to his house and wrote the Hyde Park Declaration on a slip
of paper. It committed the two nations to King's solution, saved
Canada's war effort, buttressed its friendship with the United States,
charted a sound policy of Canadian-American trade for the future
and, rewritten after the war, was used against the new menace of
communism, To the jottings of Hyde Park Roosevelt appended a
typical postscript: "Done by Mackenzie and F.D.R, on a grand
Sunday in April" The friendship of Roosevelt and King had pro-
duced another gigantic dividend.

It was not easy at first to work out the Declaration in practice.
When American and Canadian officials fell into technical argu-
ment, King telephoned Roosevelt and heard the President shout at
his technicians: "This is what I want done! Don't tell me why it
can t be done, just do itl" From then on, as long as Roosevelt lived,
Canada had plenty of dollars, earned by the production of war
supplies. For purposes of war the economics of the American
nations had been meshed. For the purposes of peace the wit of
man has not yet achieved such a sensible arrangement

Few Americans understood any better than did their president the
dollar crisis of Canada. Some of them still accepted as true the slur
of an American statesman who said that Canada demanded "cash
on the barrelhead" for every pound of goods shipped to Britain.
That slander on his country had infuriated King, but, until the
summer of 1941, he had publicly ignored it, Now that the Hyde
Park deal was working satisfactorily, he judged the time ripe for
an explanation to the American people.

On June 17 he went to New York with Roosevelt's approval and

470 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

lashed out at Canada's slanderers. While his speech was worded
with restraint, its meaning was clear to the national radio audience.
Canada he said, had entered the war not to save others but to save
itsdf-a calculated reminder to the neutral Americans that they,
too, were in danger, as they would learn in less than six months at
Pearl Harbor. He added that Canada was not demanding payment
from Britain, but was offering its treasure and its sons freely to the
"common cause of freedorn"-a cause from which, he intimated, the
United States could not isolate itself.

Then, to show the American people that they were getting their
full money's worth under the Hyde Park Declaration, he translated
Canada's war program into comparable American terms— figures of
enlistment and armament intended to reveal the United States' own
relative weakness.

No more was heard after that of cash on the barrelhead. His
Hyde Park policy thus justified and his critics discredited, Roose-
velt congratulated King on a good night's work. These two were
now operating by perfect agreement, almost by telepathy. Pearl
Harbor, ending the United States' technical neutrality, could not
bring the partners personally closer together but it removed the last-
barrier between their peoples in the conduct of the war.

Two years later King found himself in urgent need of Roose-
velt's friendship.

The Canadian government had reached the low point of its
political fortunes after its overwhelming election victory of 1940.
Public opinion polls showed the electors ready to vote it out at the
next opportunity. The nation was not tired, it had just caught its
second wind and clamored for larger tasks, but it was frustrated by
the stalemate of the war. Its army had been pinned down since
1939 to the drill grounds of Britain. It could not be told that the
hour of action and casualties was fast approaching, that the plans
on foot would soon absorb all its energies. Meanwhile its frustra-
tion was taken out on the government

The Canadians prepared to land with the Americans and British
on Sicily. King demanded that their presence be revealed in the
first British announcement of the new campaign. Canada had a
right to know, he urged, that the days of stalemate and frustration
were over.

The lofty officials of the British War Office said they would
announce only that "British" units had landed with the Americans
under General Eisenhower. King telephoned Roosevelt in a fury.
The Canadian government, King told his partner, could not endure
the reaction of its people if they were insulted and their soldiers
ignored by the intended British comrminiqu6.

ONWABD FROM HYDE PABK 471

Roosevelt, the politician, understood at once that this was a seri-
ous affair in the queer politics o£ Canada, but what could he do? As
at Hyde Park, King was ready with an answer: Would Roosevelt
instruct his officers in Sicily to include the Canadians by name in
their first reports? Roosevelt agreed to do his best, though there
was hardly an hour to spare before the Sicily landing. For the first
time since Canada's declaration of war, King did not sleep that
night. His anguish was relieved next morning, The Canadians'
arrival on the battlefield had been announced. Again Roosevelt had
not failed his friend.

The President went out of his way in the following month to
boost the Prime Minister's political stock. Speaking in Ottawa, after
his conference with Churchill in Quebec, Roosevelt informed the
Canadian people that King was a "wise and good and gallant
gentleman" and concluded, with a typically disarming touch: "My
old friend, your course and mine have run so closely and affection-
ately during these many long years that this meeting adds another
link to the chain." It also added-Roosevelt being a Canadian hero
much more popular than King— an incalculable number of ballots
to the Canadian government's election ledger.

The friendship of the two men and their peoples had reached an
unprecedented point of intimacy and warmth. One aspect of King's
policy, however, was deliberately designed to checkmate the expan-
sion of American power.

He had decided to persuade the ancient British colony of New-
foundland into the Canadian Confederation. Its colonial position,
he believed, could not last long. Its future must lie in Canada or
the United States. Since it was garrisoned by American troops, in the
bases leased to Roosevelt by Churchill, the danger of its gradual
drift into the orbit of the United States was obvious. An American
Newfoundland, King feared, would not merely enfilade the St, Law-
rence and outflank Canada's Atlantic gateway; in the long run it
might well threaten confederation entire. The loss of Newfound-
land, the realization that Canada was hemmed in on the east by
another giant stride of Manifest Destiny, would inflict a grave, per-
haps a fatal, psychic wound on the Canadian people, would make
them despair of their long continental labors when they could not
hold the most vital strategic point in their natural geography.
King's fears may have been excessive, but he held them tenaciously.

His thoughts about Newfoundland could not be uttered aloud, of
course. Nor could the people of Newfoundland be pushed into
union with Canada. Overt pressure would only antagonize that
crusty breed. All King's predecessors from Macdonald onward had
tried to attract Newfoundland. All had failed. King, therefore,

472 THE STKUGGLE FOB THE BORDER

moved in slow, deceptive stages, insisted that the decision was
entirely for the Newfoundlanders to make, planted the idea of
union subtly in their minds, and waited patiently for it to

£0*0 W*

He had found in Joseph Smallwood a resourceful Newfoundland
politician and discreetly encouraged this welcome ally, Smallwood's
campaign finally produced a plebiscite and a modest majority in
favor of union with Canada. On April 1, 1949, a tenth province was
added to the Confederation. King had forestalled the United States
(as he believed) and completed Canada's boundaries. Concerning
them, and little else, King would die happy. He had come to final
and friendly terms with Manifest Destiny.

Whether the United States government understood his long
thoughts about Newfoundland or not, it did nothing to obstruct his
policy and apparently took little interest in the ultimate union,
Anyway, it had every reason to trust King's cooperation in virtually
all aspects of its own policy.

When, for example, Lord Halifax came to Toronto in 1944 and
proposed that the postwar Commonwealth make itself into a titan
power with "a common foreign policy, expressed not by a single
voice but by the unison of many," King promptly repudiated this
eminent representative of Britain. In the titan theory of a few super-
states running the world, King i>aid, "lurks the idea of inevitable
rivalry between the Great Powers. . . . Our commitments on these
great issues must be part of a general scheme, whether they be on
a world basis or regional in nature."

He thus rejected the idea of a commonwealth competing for
power with the United States in favor of Roosevelt's concept of One
World. The former Canadian isolationist had become an outright
internationalist and the leading Commonwealth advocate of Amer-
ican postwar ideals. He would soon see the end of the One World,
long before the American architects of that dream could accept its
collapse, and he would die almost in despair of human prospects.
But his partnership with Roosevelt lasted until the senior partner's
death in the spring of 1945.

It lasted even beyond that earthly separation. As soon as he could
escape his business in Ottawa, King hurried to England, consulted
his secret spiritualistic mediums there, and established contact with
his dead friend. At first Roosevelt urged King to retire and save his
dwindling health; later he changed his mind and decided that King
must remain in politics and guide his nation through an approach-
ing storm— or so King reported to his intimates.
King had seen that storm approaching by the spring of 1945.

ONWARD FBOM HYDE PARK 473

During the previous winter he had survived the most spectacular
and dangerous crisis in the political history of his country. Living
for weeks on the lip of personal and, as he thought, of national ruin,
or even "anarchy/' he had finally held his cabinet and party together
by a prodigy of delay, entreaty, threat, and manipulation. He had
achieved the apparently impossible by reconciling Quebec to con-
scription. He had established friendly contact with Roosevelt's suc-
cessor and gone to the founding conference of the United Nations
in San Francisco still dazzled by Roosevelt's One World.

If Harry Truman continued to believe in the dream for some
time longer, King abandoned it before the San Francisco conference
was a week old. The split between the two worlds, revealed in the
drafting of the Charter, might be papered over for the present.
King never doubted that it was incurable. From then on the only
question in his secret mind was whether the two worlds could live
together or, as he was inclined to expect, must collide in mutual
destruction.

Roosevelt had died before he could lose his illusions. King was
destined to live five years longer and thus to recognize, with an
old man's bitterness at the end, that the hopes of his youth, all
those Utopias he had so often discussed with Roosevelt, were far
beyond man's present reach.

The five years were filled with business on the border.

To begin with, there was the case of Igor Gouzenko, who fled
from the Russian embassy at Ottawa on September 5, 1945, and re-
vealed the first known Russian spy ring in America. At first King
would not believe Gouzenko, suggested that the little cipher clerk
was insane, and proposed that he return to the embassy and certain
murder. Once convinced, King acted ruthlessly to smash an espio-
nage net extending across the border, and he hurried to Washington
to give Truman the facts.

Truman could not substitute for Roosevelt in King's affection.
There is no reason to suppose that Truman regarded King as any-
thing more than a friendly old man who knew the art of politics
even better than did the master from Missouri. King's first serious
business with the new American President was depressing.

After the Russian spy affair King returned to Washington with
Clement Attlee, prime minister of Britain, to consider the future
of the atomic bomb, then complacently regarded as an American-
British-Canadian monopoly. King was shocked to find that Truman,
though he had ordered the first bombs to be dropped on Japan, had
yet to realize the unprecedented world problems exploded at Hiro-
shima and Nagasaki. King did not understand them very well

474 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE

either— who did?-but he knew at least that they might well explode
civilization itself.

At the Washington discussion he took off his coat and sat down
with his assistant, Lester Pearson, to write an announcement by the
three heads of state. The resulting statement, signed by Truman,
Attlee and King, declared that their three nations, having jointly
invented the bomb, proposed to maintain its secret for the good of
mankind. The only weakness of this plan was the fact that the
Russians already knew the secret and were working industriously
on it.

The pious statement of Washington would soon become irrele-
vant. The conference, nevertheless, had achieved certain intangible
results of vast future importance.

It had begun, on the presidential yacht, the process by which
Britain and Canada recognized the new world struggle already
under way, accepted American leadership but determined to mod-
ify, as necessary, the exuberant foreign policy of the United States,
That process would c6ntinue until the present day under the several
successors to Truman, Attlee, and King,

The indestructible Canadian leader had now held office for longer
than any other statesman of the English-speaking world. He would
soon break Robert Walpole's all-time long-distance record. He was
seventy-three years old and he was physically broken. There re-
mained only one more job of work for him on the border.

Canada's wartime dollar crisis, solved by Roosevelt and King at
Hyde Park, had returned. Throughout 1947 Douglas Abbott, King's
young minister of finance, had watched with a stiff upper lip and
a glazed public optimism the hemorrhage of his dollar and gold
reserves as Canada bought far more in the American market than
it could sell there, could not cover this yawning deficit by dollar
earnings in the dislocated world market, and was not an applicant
for American charity. National bankruptcy again lay not far ahead.

Disaster could be averted by one of two methods or a combina-
tion of both. Canada could seek new American markets, through
lower American tariffs— a traditional Liberal policy— or it could
restrict the importation of American goods— a Conservative, pro-
tectionist policy.

Abbott would later become a dominant figure in Commonwealth
politics and in the world economy, but he was then too young and
inexperienced to plumb the dark well of King's mind, where such
minor stones as a dollar crisis dropped without an echo. Supposing
that King was still the same low-tariff Liberal who had gone down
to defeat with Laurier in 1911, Abbott decided to sound out the

ONWABD FROM HYDE PABK 475

United States on another reciprocity deal, or something like it. King
approved tentatively, as a matter of general principle but without
any faith in results at Washington. Besides, all his thoughts were
new concentrated on the choice of a successor in this world and
on his own arrival in the next, with which he was in constant
spiritualistic communication.

Accordingly, a secret mission of Canadian experts began to dis-
cuss a drastic tariff reduction with officials of the State Department,

The Americans proved surprisingly enthusiastic. A new reci-
procity agreement almost as comprehensive as the old one was
quickly outlined on paper. Would the Congress approve it? The
American officials could not be sure, but they were ready to fight
for their policy on Capitol Hill The Canadians, in their innocence
of American politics, were delighted and hurried home to Ottawa
with the good news. It was never clear in these mysterious con-
versations whether the deal carried the approval of the President
or whether he had even seriously considered it.

While his hopeful young men pursued the old will-o'-the-wisp in
Washington, King had sailed for Britain to attend-as a kind of
overseas uncle to the royal family— the wedding of Princess Eliza-
beth.

The trip quite distracted King's mind from the trade negotiations.
He was frantic at the loss in transit of his housekeeper's trunk and
feared that in her anger she would never return to cook his meals
at Laurier House. He was humiliated when his own baggage was
lost in Paris, and he arrived in Brussels wearing his oldest clothes
to meet the Belgian government. His secretaries managed to rent
a morning suit for him, his valet slit a starched collar to make it fit,
and a sartorial calamity was narrowly avoided. But the old man
was failing. He had grown fussy, unpredictable, and at the royal
wedding rather pathetically sentimental. He was in no state to
govern a nation or to supervise its business in Washington.

Suddenly realizing what his officials were doing there, he roused
himself from his lethargy, remembered Laurier's fate in 1911, and
canceled the negotiations outright. There would be no reciprocity
under him, the man who had gone down to defeat for it thirty-six

years earlier.

He had three clear reasons for this complete reversal.

First, he did not believe that the United States Congress would
approve a general tariff reduction even if, as he did not expect, the
Truman government proposed it. In the light of subsequent events
his judgment seems to have been correct Reciprocity in 1911 had
been offered by the United States in a solid, binding agreement,

476 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

Reciprocity in 1947 was a gleam in the eyes of a few enthusiastic
American and Canadian experts. So it remains at this writing.

Secondly, King believed reciprocity to be politically impossible
in Canada. As Dafoe had written, the 1911 decision held for a gen-
eration, perhaps a century. Since then Canada had built a huge
industrial complex, always sheltered to greater or less degree by
Macdonald's National Policy. It had certainly built some pretty
exotic and noncompetitive industries during the war boom and the
pressures for tariff protection could, therefore, be expected to grow.
King would split his government and party if he attempted to re-
vive Laurier's policy. Or so he calculated. In any case, his judgment
that protectionist pressure would increase in Canada was fully justi-
fied not long afterward.

Third, at a cruel and doubtful moment in Britain's postwar pov-
erty. King— once a rebel and now a royalist— could not bring himself
to do anything which, by integrating the Canadian economy more
closely with the American, might seem to be a blow at Britain and
the ties of the Commonwealth.

These, for King, were reasons enough. He called off the mission
to Washington without bothering to explain why. The negotiators
came home, baffled. Some members of the Cabinet were angry be-
cause they had never understood their devious leader. Yet in this
issue his reaction had been simple, instantaneous, and Canadian.

The Canadian nationalist in him feared American economic
domination. The loyal citizen of the Commonwealth and personal
friend of the royal family was devoted to the British connection,
which he, more than any other man, had transformed into complete
Canadian autonomy. So reciprocity, as far as the disenchanted free
trader was concerned, could not be considered for reasons of
politics and of instinct more important than economics. And there
was no need to consider it. King remained convinced until the end
that the United States would not abandon its protectionist policy.

This did not mean that tariffs could not be moderately and pro-
gressively reduced. At the moment when King was rejecting reci-
procity the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was being
completed at Geneva. Its substantial tariff reductions were regarded
by King as a huge victory for the cause of world trade, and no
nation would benefit from them more than Canada. But in those
weeks of mystery and paradox Canada seemed to be undertaking
a tariff reduction with one hand and raising its protectionist fence
with the other. Actually, it had no alternative.

The dollar shortage was now so alarming that the government
perforce restricted American imports by direct (and legally ques-

ONWAEB FBOM HYDE PARK 477

tionable) quotas. Though it promised that they would be temporary,
they had a look of permanency to American exporters. Those fears
proved groundless. The quotas were removed as soon as Canada's
dollar reserves rose, mainly as a result of American tariff reductions
under the Geneva agreement.

The supreme paradox now appeared. King undertook to tell his
people by radio from London that he was reducing trade barriers
while apparently raising them and added that he intended to seek
"real reciprocity" with the United States. What could this mean,
when he had personally killed the trade talks of Washington? It
certainly did not mean that he had changed his mind again. It
meant only that Canada would continue to seek a gradual scaling
down of tariff walls if the United States would do likewise. It meant
very little, but it sounded good. It satisfied the low-tariff wing of
Canadian politics without seriously disturbing the protected indus-
tries. King had merely achieved, in fact, the inevitable Canadian
compromise. Without reciprocity, Canada was moving into freer
trade and, on a current of exports and imports massive beyond
King's imagination, into its greatest boom.

35

Days of Doubt

[1947-1955]

WHEN THE HEBMIT OF KINGSMEBE DIED ON JULY 22, 1950, HE
left his government, party and nation in good order, under
a successor of his own choice. Louis St. Laurent, the new
Canadian Prime Minister, was the son of a French-Canadian father
and an Irish mother. He came to Ottawa— a short, handsome man
of terrier face, brisk speech, courtly manner, and granitic tempera-
ment—to do a temporary war job in the Cabinet. He had little
interest in politics, and less knowledge of international affairs. But
he learned fast.

St. Laurent viewed his problems with a mind much simpler, more
incisive, more practical, and less imaginative than King's. As he
lacked both King's subtlety and his power of self-deception, he saw
the postwar world in clearer terms. As he had never constructed
the Utopias that filled King's younger years, he suffered less dis-
illusionment when the One World broke in two. And as Russia was
the only possible aggressor, St. Laurent wasted no time in lamenta-
tion, but proposed an Atlantic alliance before most Western states-
men were ready to support it.

His first real test as an international statesman and as a neighbor
of the United States came with Truman's decision to defend South
Korea. It was a formidable test for a French-Canadian prime
minister, the leader of a race traditionally hostile to all foreign wars.
St. Laurent met that test by committing modest Canadian forces to
the Korean war and simultaneously to NATO in Europe. By so
doing he accepted not only Canada's responsibilities to the United
Nations, but the leadership of the United States in the free world.

He held high hopes for that leadership and some doubts, which

478

DA17S OF DOUBT 479

he did not attempt to disguise, for he was by nature as candid as
King was obscure.

So far as relations between Canada and the United States were
concerned, he hoped mainly that the American government and
people would learn to understand that they now lived beside a
nation of some importance. He had not been long in office before
he realized that there was little real understanding of Canada south
of the border, only a generous friendship and the rather dangerous
assumption that his country could be taken for granted.

It had not been in the nature of King to speak these doubts
aloud. The more direct St. Laurent saw no reason to suppress them.
Repeatedly, when he was invited to speak to American audiences,
he warned them that friendship, however openhanded, was not
quite enough, that there must be understanding as well, and that
Canadians, while flattered by their neighbors' confidence, strongly
objected to being taken for granted.

His articulate and brilliant young foreign minister, Lester Pearson,
was even more outspoken. Trained in the arts of diplomacy, thor-
oughly educated in American affairs as ambassador to Washington
and in world affairs at the United Nations, Pearson undertook a
kind of one-man educational campaign in the United States. A long
series of his flashing speeches laid down the fundamentals of Can-
ada's policy in North America.

In brief, Canada had no illusions about its Neighbor. It must de-
pend on the United States* power, for it could read a map. It must
accept the United States' decisions in great international affairs,
but it demanded, as a friend, the right of consultation before deci-
sions affecting it were made. It would remain a loyal friend, but
it was not content to be a "camp follower" or "the echo of an-
other's voice."

No sensible American could object to this doctrine, but when
Pearson stated the obvious fact that the days of easy and automatic
relations between the two countries were finished he produced an
explosion of incredulity and anger. In that rather commonplace
speech he had been the victim of unfortunate timing. Ignorant of
Truman's pending decision, Pearson spoke a few hours before the
dismissal of General MacArthur. That the Canadian government
should choose a moment of national tumult and strain to lecture a
good neighbor seemed incomprehensible to the thoughtful Amer-
ican and ungrateful, unfriendly, and churlish to the thoughtless.
Pearson had been trapped by his own little foreign explosion in an
unforeseen domestic explosion of huge, though brief propor-
tions.

480 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

Nevertheless, what he had said was the plain truth. Until the
present era the business of the United States and Canada had
almost exclusively concerned them alone—trade, boundary waters,
and the like. Now they were both members of a world-wide coali-
tion of defense, and any important international act by either must
affect all the other members. Hence, because they were now deeply
involved in the world at large, Canadian-American relations could
never be so easy and automatic as in the good old days.

Canada's policy toward its neighbor remained what it had always
been in fundamentals, since those fundamentals had been laid down,
within pretty narrow limits, by history and geography. For Canada
a daily working partnership with the United States was not merely
desirable, it was essential and a serious quarrel unthinkable. On the
other hand, the United States needed the free cooperation of Can-
ada because, if for no other reason, Canada lay directly between it
and Russia in the age of air power.

Canada also desired and needed the friendship of Britain, There-
fore, the most fundamental of all Canada's foreign policies could
never be changed. All Canadian governments must consistently
strive to reconcile disagreements between the United States and
Britain. Canada must remain the middleman and honest broker of
the English-speaking world to preserve itself.

This was a role for which St. Laurent was fitted by a large fund
of common sense and Pearson by wide international experience.
But never a pleasant, easy role. In practical terms it came down to
this: Canada would argue with the United States on world policy
where it thought the United States mistaken; it would insist on a
friend's right to argue; it would seek to modify American policy
when necessary; but it would accept the United States' great deci-
sions if they did not threaten Canada's vital interests.

For several years after St. Laurent won his first election in 1949,
the affairs of the border proceeded in perfect harmony. There was
no difficulty, for example, in arranging the joint use of Canadian and
American forces in the arctic and no friction worth mentioning
between American forces and Canadian civilians at various air
bases. Economic relations were equally happy in the days of the
postwar boom. Canada's good humor was nourished by unexampled
prosperity, the discovery of unsuspected resources in minerals and
oil, the largest capital investment, in per capita terms, ever known
anywhere.

By 1952, however, some of the unpleasant possibilities foreseen
by Pearson— conflicts of emphasis rather than principle— had begun
to emerge. If the American people did not realize that Canada had

DAYS OF DOUBT 481

become seriously disturbed it was because a Canadian government
always grows more silent as its troubles deepen.

Three factors, apparently separate but all interrelated, quietly
undermined the ordinary Canadian's confidence in American leader-
ship. By order of importance they were American policy in Asia-
American policy in international trade; and those dark, demonic
forces called McCarthyism.

Historically, Canada had thought little of Asia until the Second
World War. Outside America its memories, its ties of blood, and
its economic interests lay across the Atlantic. The attack on Pearl
Harbor and the brief presence of Japanese troops in the Aleutian
Islands suddenly reminded Canadians that their western coast
fronted on Asia. The presence of their troops in Korea convinced
them overnight that they would be involved in any great Asiatic war.

Pearson had worried about Western policy in Asia for years
before the Communist thrust into Indo-China, Thinking aloud in
guarded generalities, he had warned the United States that, to
avoid disaster in Asia, it must distinguish between real communism,
as an agency of Russian imperialism, and the natural aspirations
of native peoples for freedom, sometimes operating under a Com-
munist label, He wondered whether the United States was making
that distinction. Like most of his countrymen, he took a dim view
of such American proteges as Syngman Rhee and Chiang Kai-shek,
and in the spring of 1955 declined to assist the United States in
defending certain offshore Chinese islands, though admitting that
Canada could not escape any great American war. Viewing events
in Asia as a revolution beyond the white man's control, he found
reason for hope only in such nations as India, Pakistan, and Japan
and in such men as Jawaharlal Nehru.

Canada asserted a friend's prerogative to advise the United States
that it was not satisfied with platitudes. It opened its markets to
Japanese goods, on the assumption that Japan must trade with the
West or seek its survival in the Communist world, and in the hope
that the United States would follow the Canadian example.

The Canadian government has often been critical of American
policy in Asia, has made no secret of its doubts but, knowing that
the United States carries most of the white man's new burdens, it
has studiously avoided any breach with its neighbor. For example,
it has refused, up to this writing, to consider the recognition of
Communist China (though ultimate recognition is regarded as in-
evitable) lest it offend the American people,

The breach between the United States and Britain in the Indo-
chinese crisis of 1954 found Canadians almost unanimously on

482 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BOBBER

Britain's side-not for reasons of sentiment, but solely because they
were as much opposed to intervention as was Sir Winston Churchill.
Most of them were appalled by the interventionist speeches of some
of President Eisenhower s colleagues. They saw in the strains be-
tween Washington and London the oldest nightmare of Canadian
life, for a real transatlantic quarrel must tear the whole substance
of Canada apart. Thus Eisenhower's refusal to intervene and his
apparent reconciliation with Churchill forestalled the danger of
new strains between. Ottawa and Washington,

Canada, in short, could no more escape its customary acrobat's
position on the transatlantic tightrope than it could shuck off its
geography and history.

Dominant in all Pearson s reasoning, implicit in the entire history
of the continent, explicit in every current problem, was the oldest
fact of Canadian life: Other continents and nations conceivably
might escape American policies and somehow survive American
mistakes, but not Canada. Equipped with the power of hydrogen,
as Pearson says, the United States could destroy Canada by a single
international blunder-a risk written on the northern map and
scrawled across the polar sky by every passing American, Canadian,
or Russian plane.

The alternative danger was equally clear, though seldom men-
tioned: What if the United States, a titan weary under the too
great orb of its fate, were to unload its burden and retire within
the besieged fortress of America? Or, what if it yielded to the
advice of its new isolationists and attempted to construct a new
kind of alliance of satellites willing to be coerced in an American
imperium?

These fears have long been latent in the Canadian subconscious.
They come to the surface only when a lunatic fringe is baying
occasionally in Washington. They subside before the sanity of an
Eisenhower, a Truman, or a Roosevelt. In times of crisis and tension
everywhere they are overmagnified against the record of the past
twenty years. The border has been so free of trouble in this genera-
tion, so profoundly at peace, that the slightest friction looms in
exaggerated dimension. While the nerve of the boundary line may
sometimes look taut to a few excited observers on either side> it is
healthy and relaxed.

Canada could exert no great influence on Asiatic affairs, but it
was not quite powerless. Its middle position seemed to give it an
intangible power as the only Commonwealth nation in America
and, moreover, a Western nation which the Asiatic peoples had no
reason to distrust.

Unlike Britain, Canada had never possessed colonies in Asia,

DAYS OF DOUBT 483

and thus had escaped the price paid for them in native resentment.
Unlike the United States, it was too weak to be feared. As the close
friend of the United States and Britain, as an American nation
which threatened no one, Canada occupied a unique status, in
theory at least. The practical question was whether, after its long
effort to interpret the United States to Britain and vice versa,
Canada should now attempt to interpret the United States to Asia.

That must be a thankless task in the existing climate, but after
long thought St. Laurent resolved to make the experiment. In the
spring of 1954, as the Indochinese crisis deepened, he flew around
the world, ostensibly on a ceremonial tour, his real destination
being New Delhi, his real objective a talk with Nehru.

These men, by their own racial origins, were uniquely equipped
to work together without prejudice. St. Laurent represented Canada,
yet as a French Canadian he could not be suspected of any emo-
tional subservience to Britain. He had also shown a sturdy inde-
pendence in dealing with the United States. He obviously knew far
more than Nehru about the Americans. Moreover, the two men
already had become personal friends at the London conference
which devised a curious formula to hold the Republic of India
within the Commonwealth.

Thus, as an outsider, St. Laurent might be trusted by Nehru in a
discussion of American policy where any American statesman
would be suspect as a partisan. Certainly the Commonwealth had
never been represented in great affairs by such unlikely heads of
state as Nehru, the Indian republican, and St. Laurent, the French-
Canadian monarchist. In their own persons they symbolized the
Commonwealth's diversity, its flexibility, and its hope.

St. Laurent went to India doubtful about some American tactics
in Asia but he had no doubt about basic American motives. He was
ready to testify publicly, before the Asiatic peoples, in defense of
basic American policy. His testimony was delivered in a speech at
New Delhi.

St. Laurent assured Asia that the United States had no aggressive
intentions anywhere, in particular that its armament of Pakistan
offered no danger to India. In support of his verdict he could pro-
duce the undeniable exhibit of Canada. If the United States* mo-
tives were imperialistic and its policies aggressive, Canada could
not long have remained a member of the Commonwealth or sur-
vived as a free nation. That argument was valid. But would Asia
heed it?

St. Laurent had hardly returned to Ottawa before the tragedy of
Indochina moved to the Geneva conference. There Pearson rein-
forced his leader's testimony by defending the United States7 inter-

484 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BOEDER

national morals against Communist attack and offering Canada as
the best proof that those morals were good.

What effect St. Laurent had on Nehru or Pearson on the Geneva
conference may never be known. Apparently their separate missions
were largely overlooked in the United States, then distracted by
many more exciting matters. Nevertheless, they were a projection
across the Atlantic and the Pacific, in modern terms, of Canada's
experience as a conciliator on the American boundary. They were
the acts of a good neighbor. They did not mean that Canada agreed
with everything the United States was doing in Asia. They meant
only that if Canada, living in weakness beside the American giant,
could trust its real intentions— as often distinguished from some
of its statesmen's utterances—those intentions were trustworthy. It
was pre-eminently on the North American boundary that they had
earned the right to be trusted.

Anyone who knew the history of Canada could see in these vague
movements the oscillation of an old pendulum. Historically and in-
stinctively Canadians resist the pressure most felt at any given mo-
ment. They resisted the pressure of Britain from the Conquest until
they won their complete sovereignty by the Statute of Westminster
in 1931. They resist the pressure of the United States whenever it
passes a point of tolerance. The center of their gravity has moved
perpetually between these pressures to preserve a national balance.

It has been said with some truth that events in the United States
and Canadians' distrust of some American policies have pushed
Canadians closer to the Commonwealth in recent years and made
them appreciate anew the value of a world-wide association which
multiplied their own power.

This familiar and oft-repeated movement can never be measured,
but the oscillations of the Canadian pendulum are transitory and
confined to a narrow range. Behind them the invariable purpose of
all Canadian governments is never to separate the United States
from the Commonwealth, but to bring them together. The Com-
monwealth, as Canadians see it, is a cohesive, not a divisive force.
Canada is its link with the United States, a kind of central linchpin,
as Churchill has called it.

The influence of Canada in these affairs should not be over-
estimated, but it grows with the nation. It is already greater than
it usually appears, being exercised for the most part in private,
between a few men in Washington, London, and Ottawa. Cana-
dians' advice carries weight out of proportion to their nation's
power simply because they are trusted as honest brokers.

Statesmen like King, St. Laurent, and Pearson symbolize in them-
selves the inevitable posture of their state. They are middlemen

DAYS OF DOUBT

485

because Canada is a middle-state. That posture can never be easy—
as demonstrated, for example, in the truce of Indochina, where
Canada is the Western world's representative on the truce commis-
sion-but it is unavoidable. It is Canada's lot by the mandate of
history and geography.

The current economic frictions between Canada and the United
States are another matter entirely, older than the Canadian nation.

After the Second World War, Canada beheld its prewar pattern
of trade in ruins. Its British customers lacked dollars for the pur-
chase of Canadian goods— the dollars long used to cover a deficit
in Canada's trade with the United States. As a result, Canada
needed a greatly expanded American market and secured it through
the Geneva trade agreement and the United States' increasing
appetite for many kinds of Canadian supplies.

Canada soon found itself selling well over half its exports to its
neighbor, and thriving on an almost unbelievable volume of trade.
But Canada continued to buy far more than it sold in the United
States. It had to carry a huge trading deficit in American dollars.
The deficit was covered mainly by American capital investment
moving across the border and making the Canadian dollar tem-
porarily the most valuable currency in the world. So long as the
investment movement continued, so long as Canada could earn
some American dollars in the world market, the deficit could be
carried, though it was far too large for comfort, Many Canadians
thought, and still think it a dangerous policy to place so many
of the nation's eggs in the single American basket.

These fears, often uttered in the Canadian Parliament, were
eased by President Eisenhower's clear promise of a reduction in
American tariffs. Hardly less than their neighbors, Canadians always
liked Ike, even though most of them had long been unofficial Demo-
crats, simply because the Republican Party had so often damaged
Canada by its high tariffs. Canada was, therefore, ready to await
Eisenhower's reform of American trade policy and to overlook, with
only formal protests, the United States* minor breaches of the
Geneva agreement

By 1954, however, when the President postponed any action on
trade for a year, to avoid an interparty quarrel in a Congressional
election campaign, Canada began to wonder aloud whether the
Republican elephant would ever change his tariff spots. At this
writing the question remains unanswered. The Canadian govern-
ment is therefore, under increasing pressure to raise its own tariffs
against the United States and further protect its new industrial

complex. ,

Like all Canadian governments of the past, it will act not accord-

486 THE STRUGGLE FOB THE BOEDER

ing to set principles but quite pragmatically, as the actual trade
situation seems to require. Certainly if American tariffs go up, or
even if they fail to come down, Canada will be sorely tempted to
rectify its trade deficit in the United States by more restrictions on
American goods. At the moment it can hardly understand why
American industrialists and farmers are demanding more restric-
tions on Canadian goods when the United States enjoys a huge
trading surplus in the Canadian market, when Canada is by far
the United States' largest foreign customer, and when American
investors own nearly a third of Canadian industry. If Eisenhower
cannot convince or subdue the protectionists of his party, if the
Canadian deficit is not reduced and the Canadian protectionist
pressure continues to rise, the economic warfare of the boundary,
foreseen by Dafoe in 1911, could enter another mutually destructive
phase.

Tariffs may go up and down as governments and policies change.
The St Lawrence Seaway, its canals and its electrical plants, will
remain. The 1954 agreement to construct and use these works jointly
opens wider the economic lung of the continent and spills the
Atlantic Ocean, uphill, into the Great Lakes.

It also proves that in a clear issue which the two peoples can
understand (as they seldom understand the tariff) prudent man-
agement of the continent's resources is politically feasible. St.
Laurent and Governor Dewey, of New York, turning the first cere-
monial sods of this vast project, were carrying forward the task
started by Cartier. That task remains, in terms of tariffs, commerce,
and the sane use of North American resources, still far from com-
pletion, at the daily peril of politicians, pressure groups, and na-
tional greed.

McCarthyism, the third item of friction, struck deep into the
Canadian mind, for it seemed to deny Canada's basic assumptions
about the American character. Rightly or wrongly, many Canadians
have regarded the activities of Senator Joseph McCarthy as an
attempt to repeal the Bill of Rights and destroy the American
Presidency. In a moment of indiscretion C. D. Howe, St. Laurent's
right-hand man, an American by birth, cried out in Parliament:
'We all abhor McCarthyism!" He was merely saying publicly what
millions of Canadians had been saying privately. Senator McCarthy
has a substantial body of Canadian supporters, but Parliament, an
accurate mirror of the public mind, contains only one member
willing to defend him. The defense was greeted with silent con-
tempt. In any case, Canada's fears of McCarthyism waned with the
waning of its author and at this writing have ceased to be a serious
cause of international friction.

BAYS OF DOXJBT 487

It may be asked what the political enterprises of an American
senator from Wisconsin have to do with Canada or Canadian-
American relations. Officially, nothing. Unofficially, however, any-
thing which even seems to debase the coinage of American life
exacts payment in the coin of Canadian respect.

This, of course, will matter little to Senator McCarthy and those
who think with him. Canadian opinion is a matter seldom in the
conscious minds of most Americans, though it can sometimes make
quite a stir when it happens to catch the headlines. Regarded or
disregarded, it must always be an important factor in American
foreign policy, since it touches the United States' most important
frontier.

The generally slight attention given to Canadian affairs by the
American press and the average citizen is an unconscious tribute
to the northern neighbor. He is a reliable friend. Unlike many other
friends, he makes no trouble, so why worry about him? A passing
armed revolution in some remote corner of the world excites Amer-
ican anxiety. Since Canada causes no anxiety to anyone, its current
peaceful revolution was hardly discovered in the United States
until it had been under way for at least a decade. Canada has
seldom made what journalists are pleased to call news. It is being
partially discovered at last by the American press, by Hollywood
(which customarily sees it as an epic of ice, Indians, and Mounties),
and by an annual migration of American tourists (who see the
friendly surface but not far beneath it).

Why should Canadians expect Americans to understand them
when they have not fully learned to understand themselves? Can-
ada is more than three and a half centuries old by measurement of
time; by measurement of national consciousness it is only now
emerging from its youth. Its mind still teems with youth's doubts,
torsions, and secret conflicts— and with youth's fierce courage, en-
ergies, appetites, and dreams.

Considering all its circumstances— the appalling obstacles of its
geography and climate, the sparseness and ill-balanced distribu-
tion of its people, the clash of its diverse economic zones, above all,
its racial split and dual culture— the wonder is not that Canada has
matured slowly but that it has survived into manhood. By any
measurement it must be judged a successful experiment, carried
through against heavy odds.

At all events, Canada has been fully engaged until recent times
in the business of survival, with little time left over to look at itself
or ponder its nature.

Lately it has begun to ponder, to think furiously of its place in
the scheme of things, to exaggerate both its failings and its virtues.

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE BORDER

This private national assize has rendered one unmistakable verdict;
The Canadian nation has passed its point of no return in our time.
It has proved itself viable. The experiment of more than three cen-
turies has produced a state and a society as permanent as anything
can be in this kind of world.

Only a Canadian can understand what may be a surprising fact
to a foreigner. The Canadian knows, as most foreigners do not
know, that until very recent times— perhaps until the beginning of
the Second World War— the long future of Canada was in doubt.

Its people were afflicted by a painful inferiority complex before
the ancient glories of Britain and the bursting dynamism of the
United States. They were haunted by the knowledge of their racial
division, discouraged by their relatively slow growth, and uncertain
whether their small numbers could ever master the empty half of
a continent.

The unspoken question in the Canadian mind was whether a
nation so weak could endure and hold a huge northern vacuum
in an era of naked power. Must a people thus situated remain a
British colony or become an American satellite? Was union with
the United States, so long resisted, ultimately inevitable, as so many
Americans had always believed from the Revolution onward? Even
after Canada had gained all the constitutional machinery of inde-
pendence those questions lurked deep in its being.

It is impossible to say exactly when they were answered, but
they have been answered. The watershed of national life certainly
had been crossed by the end of the Second World War.

Canada had fought the First World War as a British colony, for
Britain's defense, and ceased to be a colony in the agony of its
struggle. It fought the Second as a sovereign state, for its own
defense. Its contribution—almost unbelievable in terms of popula-
tion—made it not a principal but a vital factor in the victory of
1945; so far as Britain was concerned in 1940, an absolutely essen-
tial factor. The war of itself revolutionized the Canadian economy
and built a major industrial nation. Far more important to Cana-
dians, it made them aware of their own capacities. It proved to
their satisfaction that their nation was here to stay.

As the twentieth century dawned, Laurier said it would belong
to Canada. That was only an oratorical flourish when Laurier
uttered it. Long after his time his prophecy remained a bitter dis-
appointment. But in the sense he intended it has finally been made
good during the past decade. If the twentieth century does not
belong to Canada, or indeed to any state or group of states, Canada
clearly belongs to Canadians.

DAYS OF DOUBT 489

The acceptance of this fact, not in any constitutional document
or public proclamation, but in the mind of the ordinary Canadian,
may well be the largest event north of the border since Champlain
drove its first stake at Quebec. A vague but undeniable force called
Canadianism, for lack of a better word, bestrides the upper slope
of America— inarticulate, puzzled, amorphous, incalculable in its
outcome, with no visible limits to its future.

The Canadian watershed was not marked in passage as the Amer-
ican watershed was marked by the rebels of Philadelphia. It stands
out mountainous in retrospect, and must increasingly influence the
future of the whole continent.

The continent, however, remains whole, even while the political,
racial, and spiritual separateness of its two peoples becomes in-
creasingly clear. It is made whole by geography, by economic in-
terest, by its common peril, and by that queer unity beginning in
hatred and ending in friendship. The boundary that divides it yet
laces it together by hidden stitches in a texture entirely North
American, unique, sui generis.

The principles, attitudes, and living ways of the boundary, if
reproduced elsewhere, could mend far more than the fabric of
America. They could repair the raveled garment of mankind. Cer-
tainly no other system of ideas, whatever the local variations may
be, can hope to weld the grinding splinters of a disordered world-
except, of course, the opposite system of our enemies. The universal
question and the hope of our time, it may be said, is represented by
an imaginary line, not one of its 3,986.8 miles defended, running
from Fundy to Fuca's Strait.

As Europe could not imprint its image on America, so America
cannot print its own on others. At the moment it covers its true
face and nature under a false mask. This continent must continue
its march in its own fashion, however foreigners regard it. A long
march, as it seems to the marchers after 347 years, a march which
has carried two peoples out of the palisades of Jamestown and
Quebec to the fringes of their continent and, in war, commerce and
joint adventure, to the ends of the earth, a march whose furious
passage is hardly remembered, whose leaders and followers are
buried in lost graves.

Long as the course has been, heavy the baggage, tierce the bat-
tles, and wasted most of the bloodshed, that march is only well
begun. It has filled hardly a moment in the history of America, a
tiny speck of time in the larger march of humankind. But it has
left certain blazes beside the trail. Men will mark them, long hence,
and pause in wonderment.

Index

Abbott, Douglas, 474-75

Abbott, J. J. C., 403

AbenaMs, 77

Abercromby, James, 112

Aberdeen, Lord, 282

Abernethy, George, 295

Acadia, 14, 24, 25, 29, 31, 37, 38, 51,

78, 82-83, 84, 88, 96, 105-6
Adams, John, 132-33, 147, 153, 157,

160, 161, 165

Adams, Sam, 120," 130, 135
Adet, "citizen," 184
Age of Reason, 15
Ainslie, Thomas, 140-41
Aix-la-Chapelle, Peace of, 96
Alabama affair, 350
Alabama Claims, 385, 393, 394, 397,

399, 400, 401
Alaska, 195, 198, 366
Alaska Boundary Award, 432-39
Albanel, Father, 51
Albany Convention, 103, 136
Albert, Prince, 331
Alexander, Sir William, 29
Algonquin Indians, 29
Alien Act, 184
Allan, Sir Hugh, 402-3
Allen, Ethan, 137-38, 139-40, 181,

184

Allen, Ira, 184
Allouez, Father, 51
Alverstone, Lord, 435, 436, 437, 438
American Revolution, 3, 137-51, 153
Amherst, Jeffrey, 112, 114, 118, 121,

124

Amherstburg, 246-47
Anderson, Anthony, 271
Andrews, Israel deWolfe, 316
Andros, Sir Edmond, 72, 77
Anglo-Scotch Company, 30
Annexation Manifesto, 312-13
Archibald, Adams, 381, 382

Argall, Samuel, 25

Arnold, Benedict, 4, 138-45, 148

Arnoux, Surgeon, 117

Aroostook War, 285

Ashburton, Lord, 286-87

Asia, American policy in, 481-85

Astor, John Jacob, 227

Atomic bomb, 473-74

Attlee, Clement, 473-74

Aylesworth, A. B., 435

Bagot, Sir Charles, 305

Baldwin, Robert, 302, 305, 309

Baldwin-Lafontaine compromise, 309

Banks, N. P., 372

Barclay, Robert, 243-46

Barker, Billy, 323

Barkley, William, 200

Barney, Commodore, 251-52

Beaver, Herbert, 289

Begbie, Matthew Baillie, 320-22, 389

Belleau, Sir Narcisse, 350

Bellomont, Governor, 85

Bennett, Richard Bedford, 458-59

Bering, Vitus, 195-96

Bernard, Susan Agnes, 360

Biencourt, Jean de, 24

Bierce, "General," 279

Big Bear, Cree chief, 416, 418

Big Mouth, Iroquois chief, 65, 72

Bigot, Francois, 105, 107, 109, 111-12,

114, 118
Bill of Rights, 70
Birge, John W., 277
Blainville, Celeron de, 97
Blake, W. H., 309, 422, 425
Bodega y Cuadra, 196, 202
Bonaparte, Louis Napoleon, 331
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 209-10, 211,

231, 252
Bond Head, Sir Francis, 267-68, 270,

273

491

492

INDEX

Borden, Robert, 444-45, 446, 447, 448,

450, 453, 454
Boston Massacre, 132
Boston Tea Party, 133
Boswell, James, 171
Bouchette, the Wild Pigeon, 140
Bougainville, Louis Antoine de, 116
Boule, Helene, 23
Boulton, C. W., 377-78
Bourassa, Henri, 446, 450
Bourget, Bishop, 412
Bourgmond, Etienne de, 89
Braddock, Edward, 103, 104
Bradstreet, John, 78, 112
"Brandy Parliament" of 1678, 58
Brant, Joseph, 150, 171, 183
Brebeuf, Jean de, 23, 35
British American League, 314
British Columbia, 384-89
British North America Act, 361,

362

British-Russian treaty (1825), 432
Brock, Isaac, 229-30, 233-40, 257
Brothers, F. P., 420
Brougham, Lord, 301, 303
Brown, General, 250
Brown, George, 314, 317, 325-26, 328,

330, 333, 336-39, 341, 344, 349,

358, 359, 362-63, 397, 406
Bruce, James. See Elgin, Earl of
Bruce, Robert, 289
Brule, Etienne, 46
Buade, Louis de. See Frontenac
Buchanan, James, 396
Buller, Charles, 301
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 321
Burgoyne, John, 147-48
Burke, Edmund, 127, 134
Burns, M. W., 355
Burns, Robert, 258
Burr, Aaron, 138, 267
Butler, Benjamin Franklin, 392-93
Butler, John, 150

Cabot, John, 24

Calhoun, John C., 231

Campbell, Major, 186

Canadian Pacific Railway Company,

402, 407-10, 415, 420, 430, 445
Canning, Foreign Secretary, 294
Cariboo gold rush, 323-24
Carleton, Guy (Lord Dorchester), 3,

120-21, 126-30, 134, 135, 136-50,

167-68, 172, 178-79, 182, 183, 184,

185, 327

Carnarvon, Lord, 361
Caroline affair, 274-75, 280-83
Carder, Georges Etienne, 326, 337,

341, 349, 360, 363, 380, 389, 403
Carrier, Jacques, 1, 16
Carver, Jonathan, 190
Cavelier, Rene Robert, 52
Chamberlain, Governor, 391
Chamberlain, Joseph, 436, 442
Chambon, Dupont du, 95
Champlain, Samuel de, 2, 8, 12-32,

35

Chandler, Zachariah, 5, 379, 394
Charbonneau, Toussaint, 213-14
Charles I, 26, 29, 31, 35
Charles II, 49, 56, 59, 87
Charles III, 195
Charlottetown, 337-38
Charnisay, Governor, 37
Chauncey, Commodore, 242
Chenier, J. 0., 270
Chesapeake affair, 333-34
Chesne, Henri de, 296
Chesterfield, Lord, 98
Chiang Kai-shek, 481
Chouart, Medard ( Groseilliers ) , 47-

49, 52, 59
Churchill, Winston, 456, 463, 464,

465-67, 471, 482
Civil War, American, 330-35
Clark, Champ, 5, 449
Clark, George Rogers, 179-80
Clark, William. See Lewis and Clark

Expedition

Clay, Henry, 5, 230, 231, 232, 261
Clayton-Bulwer Treaty (1850), 434
Clerke, James, 199
Cleveland, Grover, 419, 424
Cobden, Richard, 406-7
Coffin, John, 144
Colbert, Jean Baptiste, 33-35, 40, 45,

51,58

Colborne, Sir John, 270
Cole, Charles H., 334
Columbia River, 1, 202-3, 208-9, 216,

226-27

Common Sense, 130
Confederation, 337-50, 357-65
Constitution, Canadian, 342-43
Constitution of the United States,

177

INDEX

493

Constitutional Act of 1791, 172
Continental Congress, 133, 137, 138,

142, 146, 150
Cook, James, 197-99
Cornwallis, Edward, 97, 105, 106
Cotton, John, 28
Courcelle, Governor, 39
Coursol, Charles Joseph, 346
Cramahe, Hector Theophilus, 139
Cromwell, Oliver, 15, 35, 37
Crown Point, 18, 138, 147
Custer, George Armstrong, 410
Cut Nose, Iroquois chief, 75

Dafoe, John Wesley, 422, 426-427,

439, 448, 450-51, 456, 476
Dale, Sir Thomas, 24-25
Daniel, Antoine, 23, 35
D'Anville, Due, 96
Dartmouth College case, 281
Davis, Jefferson, 334
Davis, Sylvanus, 77-78
Dearborn, Henry, 233, 234, 242
Declaration of Independence, 147
De Cosmos, Amor, 7, 367, 386-89
De Courcy, John Fitzroy, 395
De Grey, Lord, 398
Demoiselle, Pickawillany chief, 97
Denis, Paul, 51
Dennis, John Stoughton, 369-70, 375,

376
Denonville, Marquis de (Jacques Rene

de Brisay), 41, 66, 67-73, 74
Derby, Earl of, 361
De Salaberry, Charles, 248, 376
D'Estournel, 96
De Tracy, Marquis, 38
Dewey, Governor Thomas, 486
Dickens, Francis Jeffrey, 416
Dickinson, William, 267
Dieskau, Baron, 106
Dinwiddie, Lieut. Governor, 99, 101,

102

Dix, John A., 345
Dobbs, Arthur, 189-90
Dollard, Sieur des Ormeaux, 37, 49
Dollar shortage, 468-70, 476-77
Dominion status, 361
Dongan, Thomas, 64-65, 66, 67-71
Donnelly, Ignatius, 373
Dorchester, Lord. See Carleton, Guy
Dorion, Antoine Aim6, 326
Douglas, David, 288

Douglas, James, 291, 293, 294, 319-24,
395, 396

Douglas, Thomas. See Selkirk, Earl of

Douglas, William, 200 .

D'Outrelaise, Mademoiselle, 54

Dover (N. H.), 77

Downie, Captain, 253

Drake, Sir Francis, 14, 195

Drake, W. T., 388

Drurnmond, Gordon, 249, 250, 251

Duchesneau, Jacques, 58

Dufferin, Lord, 403

Dulhut, Sieur, 60, 70, 89

Dumont, Gabriel, 411-12, 413, 414,
415, 417, 418

Dupuy, Paul, 40

Duquesne, Marquis, 97

Durfee, Amos, 274, 280

Durham, Earl of (John George Lamb-
ton), 299-303, 327

Durham Report, 301-2

Duval, John, 18

Edward VII, 331

Eisenhower, Dwight D., 470, 482,

485, 486
Elgin, Earl of (James Bruce), 306-12,

314-15, 316-17
Elizabeth, Princess, 475
Epernon, Due d', 55
Essen, George, 429
Eustis, William, 230, 234, 241
Evans, John, 213

Fallen Timbers, Battle of, 186

Family Compact, 267-71

Faneuil Hall, 132

Farrer, Edward, 425

Fenian Brotherhood, 2, 351-56

Ferguson, Bartimus, 267

Feudalism, 26, 41

Fielding, William Stevens, 429, 440,

443

Fife, Duncan, 429
Finlay, Jaco, 226
First World War, 488
Fish, Hamilton, 391, 399
Fisheries, Canadian, 315-17, 392-93,

399, 401, 424, 431-32
FitzGibbon, James, 272
Five Nations, 22
Fleming, Sanford, 409

494

INDEX

Forbes, John, 113

Fort Astoria, 227

Fort Cumberland, 149

Fort Dearborn, 235

Fort Defence, 201

Fort Douglas, 259, 261, 262

Fort Duquesne, 102

Fort Frederic, 93

Fort Frontenac, 70, 74, 83-84

Fort Garry, 369, 371, 373, 374S 375,

376, 381, 411
Fort George, 221, 226, 229, 237, 238,

239-40, 249
Fort Gibraltar, 259
Fort Langley, 290, 321
Fort Lawrence, 104
Fort Le Boeuf, 86, 92, 97, 99, 100
Fort Loyal, 77
Fort Maiden, 234
Fort McLeod, 220
Fort Meigs, 242
Fort Miami, 185, 186
Fort Nelson, 83
Fort Niagara, 71, 72
Fort Oswego, 125
Fort Pitt, 113, 416
Fort Becovery, 185, 186
Fort Rouill6, 93
Fort Royal, 82
Fort Rupert, 69
Fort St. James, 221
Fort St. John, 138
Fort Stephenson, 242
Fort Stikine, 289, 290
Fort Sumter, 329

Fort Ticonderoga, 137-38, 147, 148
Fort Vancouver, 265
Fort Victoria, 294, 297, 298, 319, 322
Fort William, 228, 262
Fort William Henry, 111
Forty-ninth Parallel, 3-4, 14, 31, 90,

118, 121, 165, 212, 215, 226, 256,

260, 288, 294, 297
Foster, Hattie May, 92
Franklin, Benjamin, 4, 5, 100, 102-3,

126, 131, 132, 136, 146, 153, 157,

160, 161, 165

Fraser, Simon, 1, 218, 219-28, 262
Fraser River, 1, 221-26, 319-22
Frederick the Great, 98
Free Trade, 306-7
French and Indian War, 109
Frobisher, Thomas and Joseph, 193

Frog Lake massacre, 416
Frontenac, Comte de (Louis de
Buade), 11, 52, 53-59, 73-85, 86
Fuca, Juan de, 14, 198
Fugitive Slave Law, 330

Gallatin, Albert, 256, 331

Gait, Alexander Tilloch, 327, 332, 336-

39, 341, 344, 349, 350, 360, 363
Gait, John, 267
Garrick, David, 131
Gatling gun, 417

Genet, Edmond Charles, 183, 184
George II, 121
George III, 3, 126, 136, 148, 149,

153, 167

Germain, George, 147, 148
Ghent, Treaty of, 253, 255, 283
Girod, Amaury, 270
Gist, Christopher, 101
Gladstone, William, 349
Glassonniere, Governor, 107
Gold rush of 1849, 319-24
Gore, Sir Francis, 266-67
Gourlay, Robert, 267
Gouzenko,, Igor, 473
Grand Trunk Railway, 402
Grant, Cuthbert, 261-62
Grant, Ulysses S., 348, 373, 376, 381,

385, 391, 406, 412
Gray, Robert, 199-203, 208
Gray, Thomas, 114
Great Depression, 457
Great Northern Railway, 408
Greenville, Treaty of, 186
Grenville, George, 131
Grey, Colonel, 301
Grey, Earl, 300
Greysolon, Daniel, 60
Guercheville, Marquis de, 24
Gwyn, Nell, 35

Haldimand, Frederick, 170, 171, 181,

182

Halifax (Nova Scotia), 169, 170, 251
Halifax, Lord, 467, 472
Hamilton, Alexander, 260
Hamilton, Henry, 180
Hampton, General, 248-49
Hancock, John, 131
Hanson, R. B., 466
Harding, Warren G., 455
Harmar, Josiah, 183

INDEX

495

Homey, William S., 395, 396
Harrison, William Henry, 231, 241,

247, 281

Hartley, David, 151
Harvard University, 42
Harvey, Colonel, 242
Harvey, Sir John, 285, 307
Hay, John, 435
Hearne, Samuel, 192, 198
H6bert, Louis, 13, 22-23, 26, 116
Heceta, Bruno, 196
Heffernan, Michael, 356
Helmcken, J, S., 388
Hennepin, Father, 60
Henry, Patrick, 120, 130, 133
Henry VII, 24
Hertel, Frangois, 77
HiU, James J., 407-8
Hincks, Francis, 310
Hitler, Adolf, 462
Hogg, James, 270
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 435-36
Hooker, Thomas, 28
Howard, Lord, 64
Howard, Lady Anne, 136
Howard, Arthur L., 417
Howard, Lady Maria, 136-37
Howe, C. D., 486
Howe, Lord, 112, 148
Howe, Joseph, 307, 327, 341, 348, 359,

360, 364-65, 371
Hudson, Henry, 20
Hudson Bay, 68, 83
Hudson's Bay Company, 92, 189, 191,

192, 193, 263, 294, 323, 368, 383,

395

Hull, Cordell, 458, 459, 467
Hull, William, 233, 234, 235, 236, 241
Hunters and Chasers, 276-79, 300
Huron Indians, 29, 35, 36
Huston, James, 319
Hutchinson, Governor, 130, 133
Hutchinson, Anne, 2,7
Hyde Park Declaration, 469-70
Hydrogen bomb, 482

International trade, American policy

in, 481, 485-86
Intolerable Acts, 125, 134
Iroquois Indians, 18-20, 21-22, 29,

36-37, 38, 56-57, 59, 64-65, 66, 70-,

71, 72, 74-76, 82, 83-84, 87, 88,

150

Jackson, Andrew, 230, 252, 253, 261

James I, 29, 66, 69, 70, 71, 72

Jamestown (Va.), 1, 17, 18, 24

Jarvis, Sheriff, 272

Jay, John, 153, 157, 160, 161, 187-88

Jay's Treaty, 187, 209

Jefferson, Thomas, 1, 4, 147, 155, 178,

179, 209, 211-13, 230, 231
Jenkins, Robert, 93
Jervis, John, 114
Jesuits, 31, 36, 39, 42, 57
Jett6, Sir Louis, 435
Jogues, Isaac, 23
Johnson, Colonel, 247
Johnson, Andrew, 356, 393
Johnson, Hugh, 462
Johnson, Sir John, 150, 173
Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 3, 118, 154
Johnson, Sir William, 125
Johnston, Bill, 276-77, 279
Jolliet, Louis, 52, 55-56
Jones, John Paul, 258

Keithley, Doc, 7, 322-23

Kelley, Hall J., 291-92

Kelsey, Henry, 92

Kendrick, John, 199-201

Kent, Duke of, 170

Key, Francis Scott, 252

King, John, 452

King, William Lyon Mackenzie, 7, 275,

427, 452-53, 454-57, 458, 459-60,

461-67, 468-77, 478, 479
King George's War, 93-96
King William's War, 67-84
Kipling, Rudyard, 450
Kirke, David, Thomas, and Lewis,

29-30
Korean war, 478

La Barre, Joseph Antoine Lefebvre de,

62-64, 65-66, 68
Labonte, Louis, 292-93
La Chine massacre, 72
Lafayette, Marquis de, 149
Lafontaine, Louis Hippolyte, 305, 311
La Grange-Trianon, Anne de, 54
La Jonquiere, Marquis de, 97
Lake Erie, 243-44
Lake Huron, 21
Lake Michigan, 32
Lake Superior, 190

496

INDEX

Lalemant, J6r6me, 23, 32, 35

Lamb ton, John George. See Durham,

Earl of

Langevin, Sir Hector, 403
Langlade, Charles, 97
Lapointe, Ernest, 456
La Prairie, 81
La Salle, Rene Robert, 11, 52, 56, 60-

62, 63, 64, 70, 88

La Tour, Charles de, 30, 37-38
Laurier, Wilfrid, 419, 421-22, 425-26,

427-29, 435, 438-39, 441-51, 453-

54, 488

Laval, Bishop, 39, 43-45, 57-58
Laval-Montmorency, Francois de, 39
La Verendrye, Francois, 11, 92
La V6rendrye, Jean Baptiste, 11, 89,

90

La Verendrye, Louis Joseph, 11, 90, 92
La Verenclrye, Sieur de la (Pierre

Gaultier de Varennes), 87, 89-92
Lawrence, Charles, 106
League of Nations, 454
Le Ber, Jeanne, 42
Lee, Jason, 291, 292
Le Jeune, Father, 32
Le Loutre, Joseph Louis, 106
Le Moyne, Iberville, 68, 69, 83, 84
Le Moyne brothers, 68, 70, 76, 81
Lepine, Maxime, 383
Lescarbot, Marc, 17
Levis, Chevalier de, 118
Lewis, Meriwether. See Lewis and

Clark Expedition
Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1, 5, 213-

18, 221, 225, 256, 294
Lexington, 136
Lincoln, Abraham, 260, 331, 332, 335,

347, 349

Little Big Horn massacre, 410
Little Turtle, Miami chief, 186
Livingston, Robert R., 210
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 434-35
Loudon, General, 110
Louis XIV, 33, 45, 51, 56, 57, 59, 62,

63, 66, 68, 69, 74, 81, 84, 86-87, 88
Louis XV, 94

Louisbourg, 88, 94-96, 105, 111
Louisiana, 88-89, 122, 209
Louisiana Purchase, 187, 210-11
Lowther, Katherine, 113
Loyalists, 167-77, 266
Lundy's Lane, 250-51

MacArthur, Douglas, 479

Macaulay, Thomas, 301

Macdonald, Hugh John, 417

Macdonald, James A., 441

Macdonald, John, 239

Macdonald, John Alexander, 6-7, 8,
277-79, 294, 298, 314, 317, 325-29,
330, 332-33, 336-44, 345-50, 352,
356, 357, 358, 359, 360-65, 366,
367, 369, 373-74, 375, 379, 381,
383, 384, 387, 388, 390-404, 406-7,
408, 410, 413, 414, 415, 419, 422-26

MacDonald, John Sandfield, 326

MacDonald, Sandy, 7, 322-23

Macdonell, "Red George/' 248

Macdonough, Commodore, 253

Mackenzie, Alexander, 194-95, 203-7,
208, 211, 219, 220, 221, 224, 227-
28, 404, 405-6

Mackenzie, William Lyon, 7, 11, 267-
75, 309, 327, 452

Mackenzie River, 204

Macleod, James F., 410

MacNab, Sir Allan, 309

MacTavish, William, 372

Madison, James, 232, 252, 253

Maine-New Brunswick boundary, 283-
87

Maintenon, Madame de, 84

Maisonneuve, Sieur de, 36

Maria Theresa, 93

Marlborough, Duke of (John Church-
ill), 87

Marquette, Father Jacques, 52, 55-56

Martinez, Joseph, 200

Mason, James Murray, 331

Maurepas, Comte de, 89-90, 92

Mayflower, 26

May hew, Jonathan, 119

McCarthy, Joseph, 486-87

McCarthyism, 481, 486-87

McDougall, James, 220

McDougall, William, 370-72, 373,
374-75

McGee, Thomas D'Arcy, 8, 329

McGillivray, William, 262

McGowan, Ned, 322

McKay, Alexander, 205, 263

McLeod, Alexander, 280, 282-83

McLeod, Archibald Norman, 220

McLoughlin, John, 262, 263-65, 283,
288-96

McNeill, William, 294

INDEX

497

Meade, George, 355, 356

Meares, James, 200

Meighen, Arthur, 454-55, 457, 466

Melbourne, Lord, 268, 273, 299, 303

Meloises, Angelique des, 118

Mercantilism, 155

Merritt, William Hamilton, 315

Metcalfe, Sir Charles, 305-6

Metis, 367-83, 405, 411-19

Middleton, Frederick D,, 415, 416-17,

418

Militia Bill of 1862, 332-33
Mississippi River, 1, 49-50, 55-56, 60,

88

Mohawk Indians, 38, 47-48, 171
Moley, Raymond, 458
Molotov, V., 196
Monck, Governor General, 363
Monroe, James, 210-11
Monroe Doctrine, 260-61
Montcalm, Marquis de ( Louis Joseph ) ,

13, 99, 109-18
Montespan, Madame de, 54
Montgomery, Richard, 4, 138, 139-46
Montpensier, Mademoiselle de, 54
Montreal, 36, 63, 68, 72, 137, 170-71
Monts, Sieur de, 17
Moody, Sam, 95
Morgan, Daniel, 145
Mowat, Oliver, 328
Murray, General, 118, 121-22, 128,

129, 130
Musgrave, Anthony, 387-88, 389

Nash, Beau, 98

National Policy, 406, 407, 423-24,

428 476

Nault/Andr^ 366
Navigation Acts, 26, 42
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 481, 483, 484
Nelson, Horatio, 156
Neutrality Act, 463
New Brunswick, 169
New Orleans, 88, 209
Nicolet, Jean, 32
Nicolls, Governor, 38
North, Lord, 150
North Atlantic Treaty Organization,

478
North West Company, 209, 219, 220,

221, 226, 227, 259, 261, 263
Northwest Mounted Police, 410-11,

413, 414, 416, 418, 433

Northwest Passage, search for, 49,

189-207
Nova Scotia, 149, 168-69. See also

Acadia

Noyon, Jacques de, 89
NRA, 458, 462

Oachonk, Jacques, 36

O'Donoghue, William, 377, 379, 380,

381-83

Ogdensburg Agreement, 464-66
Ohio Company, The, 96-97
One Hundred Associates, 29
O'Neill, John, 353-55, 382
Onondaga Indians, 37
Oregon Treaty, 394
Oswald, Richard, 154, 156, 157
Ottawa, 343-44, 364
Ottawa Indians, 122
Otter, W. D., 417

Paget, Sir Charles, 300

Paine, Tom, 130

Palmerston, Lord, 280-82, 331, 333

Panama Canal, 434

Papineau, Louis Joseph, 269-70, 271,

290
Paris Peace Conference (1782), 153-

66, 180

Parker, Samuel, 292
Payne, Captain, 126
Peace of Paris (1763), 122
Pean, Madame, 107
Pearl Harbor, attack on, 470, 481
Pearson, Lester, 10, 474, 479, 480,

481, 482, 483, 484
Pedlars, 191-92, 194
Pelly, John Henry, 294
Pepperell, William, 94-96
Perez, Juan, 196
Perrot, Nicholas, 47, 60
Perry, Oliver, 243-46
Petain, Marshal, 467
Peter the Great, 195
Philadelphia Convention, 177
Philip of Anjou, 87
Phips, William, 53, 55, 73, 78-81, 82,

83,84

Pickett, G. E., 395, 396
Pitt, William, 98, 112, 113, 121, 130-

31, 156
Pitt, William, the Younger, 178, 179,

1809 181

498

INDEX

Plains of Maitre Abraham Martin,

115, 141, 144
Plattsburg, 253
Pocahontas, 24, 25
Polk, James Knox, 5, 297
Pompadour, Madame de, 98
Pond, Peter, 193-94, 203
Pontegrave, backer of Cliamplain, 17
Pontiac, Ottawa chief, 122, 124-25
Pope, W. H., 337-38
Port Royal, 17, 24, 25, 37, 88
Poundmaker, Cree chief, 416, 417, 418
Prevost, Sir George, 233, 236, 253
Prevost, James C., 395
Priestley, Joseph, 136
Proclamation of 1763, 125, 129, 134
Proctor, Colonel, 246-47
Puget, Lieutenant, 201

Quebec, 1, 12-32, 33, 36, 52, 55, 73,
79, 108, 113-18, 121-22, 127, 137,
141-45, 147, 149, 170, 307, 339

Quebec Act (1774), 134, 136, 137,
158

Quebec Resolution, 348

Queen Anne's War, 87-88

Queenston Heights, 229, 236, 238-39,
240

Quesnel, Jules, 221

Radisson, Pierre Esprit, 47-48, 52, 59,
92

Railway, transcontinental, 384-85, 388,
389, 402, 404, 405-20, 430

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 16

Rarnezay, commander of Quebec gar-
rison, 117

Ramsey, Alexander, 374, 376

Rankin, Philip, 387

Raymond, H. J., 361

Rebellion Losses Bill, 308-9

Rebellion of 1837, 267-73

Reciprocity agreements, 440-51, 475-
77

Reciprocity Treaty of 1854, 316-17,
346, 347, 350, 391

Red River, 259, 261, 366, 368

Red River rebellion, 366-83

Reformation, 26

R&ny, Daniel, 38

Revere, Paul, 136

Rhee, Syngman, 481

Richelieu, Cardinal, 13, 15, 28-29, 30,

31
Riel, Louis, 6-7, 366, 367-83, 410,

412-19

Rigaud, Philippe de, 87
Roberts, William H., 351, 356
Robson, John, 388-89
Rocky Mountains, 90, 92
Rogers, A. B., 420
Rogers, Robert, 189-90
RoBe, John, 24
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 7, 427,

453, 458-60, 461-67, 468-71, 472,

473, 474
Roosevelt, Theodore, 421, 431, 432,

434, 435-36, 437, 438, 439, 449
Root, Elihu, 434-35
Rose, John, 7, 322-23
Rupert's Land, 369-83
Rush»Bagot agreement, 255, 279, 305,

345, 347
Russell, Earl, 331
Russell, Lord John, 306, 393
Ryswick, Peace of, 84

Sacajawea, 214, 216

St. Albans raid, 344-45

St. Glair, Arthur, 183

St Laurent, Julie, 170

St. Laurent, Louis, 478-89

St. Lawrence River, 1, 12

St. Lawrence Seaway, 486

St. Louis, 64, 180

St, Lusson, Sieur de, 51

Saint-Pierre, Legardeur de, 92, 99

Saint-Simon, Due de, 54

Saint- Vallier, Bishop, 82

Salmon Falls, 77

San Juan Island dispute, 394-97, 399,

401

Saratoga, battle of, 149
Saunders, Admiral, 114
Schenectady, 76

Schoultz, Nils Szoltevcky Von, 277-79
Schultz, John Christian, 375-76, 377
Schuyler, John, 81
Schuyler, Peter, 82
Schuyler, General Philip, 138
Scott, Thomas, 378-79
Scott, Sir Walter, 258
Scott, Winfield, 240, 250, 276, 285
Second, Laura, 242-43
Second World War, 463-67, 488

INDEX

499

Sedgwick, Robert, 37

Selkirk, Earl of (Thomas Douglas),

258-59, 262-63
Scruple, Robert, 261-62
Seneca Indians, 124
Seven Oaks murders, 261-62, 368
Seven Years' War, 109
Seward, William Henry, 345, 347, 351,

366-67

Seymour, Governor, 385-86, 387
Shaubena, Potawatomi chief, 247
Shays, Daniel, 181
Shelburne, Lord, 154, 155-56, 157
Sherman, John, 423
Shirley, William, 94-95, 106
Sifton, Clifford, 429, 430, 432-33, 434,

436, 437, 444, 445, 447-48, 450
Simcoe, John Graves, 176, 185
Simpson, Aemelius, 288
Simpson, George, 263-65, 288, 289-90,

293-94, 295
Sitting Bull, 410
Slacum, William A., 292
Slidell, John, 331
Smallwood, Joseph, 472
Smith, Attorney General, 103
Smith, Adam, 155, 157, 258, 306, 312
Smith, Donald, 373, 376, 378, 407, 420
Smith, Goldwin, 424, 427
Smith, Gregory, 344
Smith, Jedediah, 289
Smith, John, 8, 18, 23
Smuts, Jan, 456
Smyth, General, 237, 241
Snake River, 227
Spalding, Henry, 292
Spokane River, 227
Stamp Act Congress, 130-31
Stephen, George, 407, 408
Steuben, General von, 181
Stone, Samuel, 28
Strange, Bland, 417
Stuart, John, 221
Stutsman, Enos, 371-72, 373
Sumner, Senator, 393-94
Susquehanna Indians, 36
Sweeney, R. W., 351, 353

Tach<§, Etienne, 326, 341, 350, 371

Taft, Robert, 451

Taft, William Howard, 423, 440-41,

443-44, 448-50, 451
Talleyrand, Prince, 210-11

Talmage, Lieutenant, 76

Talon, Jean, 33-35, 38, 39-42, 44-45,

49-50, 51, 52
Tariff barriers, 440-51
Taylor, James Wickes, 372
Tecumseh, Shawnee chief, 229, 231,

234, 235-36, 246-47
Thibault, Vicar-General, 376
Thirty Years' War, 15, 35
Thompson, David, 223, 226-27, 228
Thompson, Jacob, 334-35
Thomson, Charles Poulett, 304-5
Thorn, Jonathan, 227-28
Tilley, Samuel Leonard, 170, 341, 347,

357, 359, 363
Tompkins, Governor, 237
Tonty, Henry, 60
Townsend, Charles, 131
Trent affair, 331-32
Troyes, Chevalier de, 68
Truman, Harry S., 473-74, 478, 479
Tupper, Charles, 341, 347, 348, 357,

359, 363, 364-65, 426
Turner, George, 434-35
Turton, Thomas, 301
Tuscarora Indians, 22
Tute, James, 190

Underground Railway, 380
Union Pacific Railway, 409
United Nations, 473, 478, 479
Utrecht, Peace of (1713), 88

Van Buren, Martin, 274, 301
Vancouver, George, 201-2, 208
Vancouver Island, 384, 386
Van Home, William Cornelius, 7,

407-8, 409-10, 415, 419-20, 445
Van Rensselaer, Solomon, 237
Van Rensselaer, Stephen, 237, 239
Vaudreuil, Marquis de, 106, 107, 109,

110, 111, 113, 115, 116, 117
Vergor, Duchambon de, 105, 106, 115
Victoria, Queen, 170, 273, 299, 331,

343,362,407 •
Vignau, Nicolas, 20-21
Vincennes, 180
Virginia Resolves, 130
Voltaire, 98
Voyageurs, 191, 193, 194

Wakefield, Gibbon, 301
Walker's Ear, affair of, 126

500

INDEX

Walpole, Horace, 98, 118, 150, 154
Walpole, Robert, 474
Wandering Spirit, 416, 418
Warner, Seth, 138
War of 1812, 229-57
War of Jenkins's Ear, 93
War of the Austrian Succession, 93
War of the Spanish Succession, 87-88
Warren, Commodore, 95-96
Washington (D. C.), raid on, 251-52
Washington, George, 3, 4, 86, 99-102,
104, 113, 120, 121, 148, 150, 168,
177, 178, 179, 181, 182, 184

Washington, John, 43

Washington, Treaty of, 400

Wayne, "Mad Anthony," 178, 184-86

Wealth of Nations, The, 155

Weaver, George, 7, 322-23

Webster, Daniel, 261, 281-82, 286-87

Weeks, William, 267

Wellington, Duke of, 241, 252, 254-55

West Florida, 180

White, Elijah, 293

Whitman, Marcus, 292

Whitney, Eli, 260

Wilkinson, General, 243, 248, 251

Wilkinson, James, 185

William of Orange, 70, 72, 78

Williams, Roger, 27

Wilmot, R. D., 358

Wilson, Woodrow, 157, 440, 451, 453

Winchester, General, 242

Winder, General, 251-52

Winnebago Indians, 32

Winthrop, Fitz-John, 78

Winthrop, John, 26, 28

Wolfe, James, 13, 98-99, 112, 113-15,

117, 121

Wolsely, Garnet, 379-80
Wool, Captain, 237, 238, 239
Wright, Tom, 322
Wyeth, Nathaniel, 291

Yorktown, battle of, 150
Young, Bennett H., 344
Young, Ewing, 292

CD

118397