A History of Oregon, 1792-1849. Gray William Henry

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      The Kingston Chronicle, a newspaper, on the 27th of September, 1848, says: “The Hudson’s Bay Company have, in some instances with their rum, traded the goods given in presents to the Indians by the Canadian Government, and afterward so traded the same with them at an advance of little short of a thousand per cent.”

      Question asked by the Parliamentary Committee: “Are intoxicating liquors supplied in any part of the country – and where?” The five witnesses answered: —

      1st. “At every place where he was.”

      2d. “All but the Mandan Indians were desirous to obtain intoxicating liquor; and the company supply them with it freely.”

      3d. “At Jack River I saw liquor given for furs.”

      4th. “At York Factory and Oxford House.”

      5th. The fifth witness had seen liquor given “at Norway House only.”

      The writer has seen liquor given and sold to the Indians at every post of the company, from the mouth of the Columbia to Fort Hall, including Fort Colville, and by the traveling traders of the company; so that whatever pretensions the company make to the contrary, the proof is conclusive, that they traffic in liquors, without any restraint or hinderance, all over the Indian countries they occupy. That they charge this liquor traffic to renegade Americans I am fully aware; at the same time I know they have supplied it to Indians, when there were no Americans in the country that had any to sell or give.

      In the narrative of the Rev. Mr. King, it is stated that “the agents of the Hudson’s Bay Company are not satisfied with putting so insignificant value upon the furs, that the more active hunters only can gain a support, which necessarily leads to the death of the more aged and infirm by starvation and cannibalism, but they encourage the intemperate use of ardent spirits.”

      Says Mr. Alexander Simpson, one of the company’s own chief traders: “That body has assumed much credit for the discontinuance of the sale of spirituous liquors at its trading establishments, but I apprehend that in this matter it has both claimed and received more praise than is its due. The issue of spirits has not been discontinued by it on principle, indeed it has not been discontinued at all when there is a possibility of diminution of trade through the Indians having the power to resent this deprivation of their accustomed and much-loved annual jollification, by carrying their furs to another market.”

      This means simply that Mr. Greenhow and all other admirers of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s manner of treating Indians have been humbugged by their professions of “humanity and policy.”

      We are inclined to return Mr. Greenhow’s compliment to the Rev. Samuel Parker in his own language, as found on the 361st page of his work. He says: “Mr. Samuel Parker, whose journal of his tour beyond the Rocky Mountains, though highly interesting and instructive, would have been much more so had he confined himself to the results of his own experience, and not wandered into the region of history, diplomacy, and cosmogony, in all of which he is evidently a stranger.” So with Mr. Greenhow, when he attempts to reconcile the conduct of the Hudson’s Bay Company with “humanity,” and admires their policy, and gives them credit for honorable treatment of “Indians, missionaries, and settlers,” he leaves his legitimate subject of history and diplomacy, and goes into the subject of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s moral policy, to which he appears quite as much a “stranger” as Mr. Samuel Parker does to those subjects in which Mr. Greenhow found him deficient.

      But, notwithstanding we are inclined to return Mr. Greenhow’s compliment in his own language, his historical researches and facts are invaluable, as developing a deep scheme of a foreign national grasping disposition, to hold, by a low, mean, underhanded, and, as Mr. Greenhow says, “false and malicious course of misrepresentation, the country west of the Rocky Mountains.” There are a few pages in Mr. Greenhow’s history that, – as ours is now fully written, and we see no reason to change a statement we have made, – for the information of our readers, and to correct what we conceive to be an erroneous impression of his relative to our early settlements upon this coast, we will quote, and request our readers to observe our corrections in the history or narration of events we have given them.

      “Schools for the instruction of their children, and hospitals for their sick, were established at all their principal trading-posts; each of which, moreover, afforded the means of employment and support to Indians disposed to work in the intervals between the hunting seasons.”

      Says the Rev. Mr. Barnley, a Wesleyan missionary at Moose Factory, whose labors commenced in June, 1840, and continued till September, 1847: “A plan which I had devised for educating and turning to some acquaintance with agriculture, native children, was disallowed, – it being very distinctly stated by Sir George Simpson, that the company would not give them even a spade toward commencing their new mode of life.”

      Says Mr. Greenhow: “Missionaries of various sects were encouraged to undertake to convert these people to Christianity, and to induce them to adopt the usages of civilized life, so far as might be consistent with the nature of the labors in which they are engaged; care being at the same time taken to instill into their minds due respect for the company, and for the sovereign of Great Britain; and attempts were made, at great expense, though with little success, to collect them into villages, or tracts where the soil and climate are favorable to agriculture.”

      Mr. Barnley says: “At Moose Factory, where the resources were most ample, and where was the seat of authority in the southern department of Rupert’s Land, the hostility of the company (and not merely their inability to aid me, whether with convenience or inconvenience to themselves) was most manifest.”

      Another of the English missionaries writes in this manner: “When at York Factory last fall (1848), a young gentleman boasted that he had succeeded in starting the Christian Indians of Rossville off with the boats on a Sunday. Thus every effort we make for their moral and spiritual improvement is frustrated, and those who were, and still are, desirous of becoming Christians, are kept away; the pagan Indians desiring to become Christians, but being made drunk on their arrival at the fort, ‘their good desires vanish.’ The Indians professing Christianity had actually exchanged one keg of rum for tea and sugar, at one post, but the successive offers of liquor betrayed them into intoxication at another.”

      The Rev. Mr. Beaver, chaplain of the company at Fort Vancouver, in 1836, writes thus to the Aborigines Protection Society, London, tract 8, page 19: —

      “For a time I reported to the governor and committee of the company in England, and to the governor and the council of the company abroad, the result of my observations, with a view to a gradual amelioration of the wretched degradation with which I was surrounded, by an immediate attempt at the introduction of civilization and Christianity, among one or more of the aboriginal tribes; but my earnest representations were neither attended to nor acted upon; no means were placed at my disposal for carrying out the plan which I suggested.”

      Mr. Greenhow says, page 389: “Particular care was also extended to the education of the half-breed children, the offspring of the marriage or the concubinage of the traders with the Indian women, who were retained and bred as much as possible among the white people, and were taken into the service of the company, whenever they were found capable. There being few white women in those countries, it is evident that these half-breeds must, in time, form a large, if not an important portion of the inhabitants; and there is nothing to prevent their being adopted and recognized as British subjects.

      “The conduct of the Hudson’s Bay Company, in these respects, is worthy of commendation; and may be contrasted most favorably with that pursued at the present day by civilized people toward the aborigines of all other new countries.”

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