CHAPTER VII.

THE RESULTS OF THE HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY'S

CHARTER IN ITS. EFFECTS ON THE NATIVE

INDIAN

POPULATION

TERRITORIES.

OF THE

COMPANY'S

THE evil influence of the Hudson's Bay Company upon the mother country, has resulted more from crimes of omission, than from those of commission; and amidst the vast and various sources of our national wealth, and the manifold directions in which it is employed, it is scarcely to be wondered at that the comparatively insignificant commercial operations of the Company should have escaped much public notice; nor is it more surprising that, invested with such powers, and in the possession of such admirable machinery for veiling their transactions, as well as the country in which they are carried on, in impenetrable secrecy, the interests of merchants and adventurers should have been but little attracted to those fields for enterprise, from which the Hudson's Bay Company exclude all others, and which, nevertheless, they only very partially occupy themselves.

But it is far otherwise with the subject to which we have now to turn the influence of the Company's power and privileges upon the Indian population.

To the native Indian, the Company is all in all. It is his master—his lord his "great medicine."

The results of the Charter which we have now to contemplate, are fatal and universal; extending over a country upwards of four millions of square miles in extent, inhabited by fifty nations of human

beings.

If that these human beings are uncivilised and poor-in fine, only savages-be a reason why their sufferings should be unheeded, and their interests despised by the Company; there are those, at any rate, by whom this will be deemed only a more irresistible claim for sympathy and protection.

Far from the least important result, therefore, of the dominion of the Company, to which we shall call attention, is the effect which it has upon the native population of North America; on behalf of protest against the frightful despotism to

whom, we

which England has unintentionally consigned them. It is but a small part of the truth to say that the Hudson's Bay Company enjoy a right of exclusive trade with the Indian population. This right of

exclusive trade is, practically and positively, a right of exclusive property in the labour, life, and destinies of the Indian race. It is an absolute and unqualified dominion over their bodies and their souls-a dominion irresponsible to any legal authority-a despotism, whose severity no legislative control can mitigate, and no public opinion restrain. It knows but one limit, and obeys but one law,"Put money in thy purse." "God knows," said the Rev. Mr. Beaver, the Company's own Chaplain at the Columbia River, "God knows that I speak the conviction of my mind; and may he forgive me if I speak unadvisedly, when I state my belief, that the life of an Indian was never yet by a trapper put in competition with a beaver skin.”

A trading port is established in the heart of a tribe of Indians, who enjoy a savage independence, and draw from the woods and waters, by such rude implements as their untaught ingenuity can supply, a subsistence suited to their primitive condition and simple wants. The skins of the beaver and silver fox are not much in request, except as a chance article of clothing. But beaver skins, though unappreciated in the Indian camp, are valuable in the London market; and the Indians are not long in perceiving that hunting the buffalo, spearing fish,

and planting patches of maize, are pursuits less honourable in the eyes of the new comers, and less adapted to obtain the kind of wealth which the strangers import, than trapping otters, martins, and musquash; which, if they do not supply food to the trapper, supply something more valuable to the trader. Time passes on, and the primitive bow and arrow, the bone-pointed spear, and snares of the sinews of the deer, are laid aside for more effective instruments of destruction-guns, steel traps, and scalping knives. And the ancient weapons of the chase, in the skilful use of which the' Indians of old lived and multiplied upon the earth, are entirely forgotten, and exchanged for others, supplied by the strangers who have appeared amongst them, and who thus hold in their hands the thread of life of the whole Indian race.

The stroke of a pen, ordering the supply of ammunition to be stopped, can sweep a score of families from the face of the earth.

The original tribe, formidable in their collective numbers and strength, and therefore less manageable and subservient, is broken up, and dispersed in single families over hundreds of miles of waste forests, where each has the exclusive property of all the beavers, wild cats, wolves, and grizzly bears, &c.,

that may infest its particular hunting-ground, or "preserve."

The hunter, no longer attired in his comfortable primitive dress of leather or furs, shivers and starves under a civilised slop coat or shirt, decked out, with a profusion of lace, glass beads, gewgaws, and trinkets, all of which are purchased at the moderate rate of two thousand per cent. on their cost in London.

To complete the absolute and entire dependence of the Indian on the Company, he is invariably kept in debt; of the obligation of which, it is said, no human being is more sensible.

In the course of time, under a systematic and constant persecution, the larger animals which supply the food of the natives, and even those which yield the valuable furs for the London market, decrease in numbers, and become nearly or wholly exterminated.

The district, no longer valuable to the Company, must be abandoned; their trading fort is removed to a distant part of the country; the supply of powder, by which alone the natives can now ensure a subsistence, is stopped; and famine and cannibalism sweep off the wretched remnant of the native tribe.

The fate which sometimes engulfs an entire sec