Chapter XI: Spoils of Sea and Wood

"You often hear tall stories of the way the salmon swarm in the Fraser River," remarked an old frontiersman one day to a "new chum" recently arrived in Canada from England. "Those stories are often dished up to suit a palate that is just waiting to be tickled with cayenne, but they are not altogether fiction."

The new chum, having still "tender feet," hesitated about putting his foot in, and merely looked the inquiry which he was unable to conceal.

"Well, you may believe me or not, sir, but it is God's truth that I once saw a man standing on the bank of the river at ----," and he named a village near New Westminster in the delta of the Fraser, "and he was flinging the salmon out on the bank with an ordinary hay-fork, and he was working so that the sweat rolled off him."

"But what did he want so many fish for as that? Surely he could not eat them all?"

"No, sir; his meadow was in want of fertilization, and fish manure, even when it consists of the carcasses of salmon, is not to be despised."

Other stories about the enormous numbers of salmon in the Fraser River of British Columbia tell how the fish are so crowded together that it is impossible for a man to thrust his hand in between them, and how they form such a solid mass that it almost looks as if you could walk across the big broad river on their backs, and could reach the opposite bank dryshod.

The tinned salmon that is such a familiar object in grocers' shops is captured, killed, cooked, and sealed down in those tins in big factories called "canneries," which stand pretty thick beside the river in certain parts of the lower course of the Fraser.

On the eastern side of Canada, again, off the coasts of Nova Scotia, Newfoundland (which, by the way, is an independent colony, and does not yet form part of the Dominion of Canada), Cape Breton, and Prince Edward Island, there is a large population of hardy fisher-folk, who for generations have fished for cod on the inexhaustible "banks of Newfoundland." And even before their ancestors settled on American soil the hardy fishermen from Brittany, in France, and from the Basque country on the borders of France and Spain, used to dare the perils of the stormy Atlantic that they might go and reap the silvery harvest of the sea in the same fish-teeming waters. And for over 300 years great fleets of fishing-boats from both Europe and the maritime provinces of Canada have continued to brave the terrors and perils of the deep in pursuit of cod, mackerel, lobsters, herring, and haddock.

The earliest Europeans, or white men, to penetrate into the wilds of the Canadian backwoods were the _coureurs de bois_--that is, hunters and trappers of French, or mixed French and Indian, descent, who collected furs to sell to the trading companies of the French. These bodies had factories along the Lower St. Lawrence. In the early days--that is to say, for a couple of hundred years after the French settled colonists in Canada--the principal fair for the trade in furs was Montreal. There every spring a crowd of trappers and hunters brought the bales of furs which they had stripped off beaver, bear, or fox, musk-rat or racoon, and handed them over in barter to the agents of the autocratic fur-trading company; and at the same time large fleets of canoes came paddling down the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa rivers, bringing whole boatloads of furs which the Indians had collected all along the Great Lakes, and even from the distant Ohio River, and the great plains of the West.

Who does not know the haunting melody of the "Canadian Boat-Song"?--

"Faintly as tolls the evening chime,
Our voices keep tune and our oars keep time.
Soon as the woods on the shores grow dim,
We'll sing at St. Anne's our parting hymn.
Row, brothers, row! The stream runs fast;
The rapids are near, and the daylight's past."

You can easily hear the swing of the oars, and catch the slight melancholy of the memory-haunting lilt as the singers keep time to the swaying of their bodies! And you can see the round rosy face of the big, burly, boyish-looking _coureur de bois_, or "runner of the woods," suddenly blanch, whilst his big black eyes grow bigger than ever, as he imagines he sees the weird flying canoe of some reckless woodsman who has sold his soul to the Evil One in return for the power of being able to make his fragile birch-bark canoe rise, as it were, on invisible wings into the air, and so speed along without paddle or punting-pole.

Now, whilst the French collected furs through the country of the Great Lakes, and from the wide regions to the west and south of them, the English, through the Hudson Bay Company, claimed a similar monopoly of the profitable fur trade farther north. And not only did they claim and maintain their supremacy as the sole fur-trading company in the North-West, they eventually grew so powerful that they carried on a regular system of government, administering the laws and punishing offenders.

Throughout all the north and west, in the towns and often in far isolated districts, we find the stores or trading-posts of the Hudson's Bay Company. This is the last of the great proprietary corporations, which at one time were so lavishly treated by European Sovereigns to privileges of unknown extent and value. The company was formed in 1670 by Prince Rupert, a cousin of Charles II., and certain associates, with proprietorship, sovereignty, and permission to trade in what was called "Rupert's Land," or all within Hudson Strait. For two centuries and a half they have carried on business, and the volume of trade at present is greater than ever before. They buy furs almost entirely, but sell everything that man desires.