PREFACE
The second volume of our series of Early Western Travels is devoted to the reprint of John Long’s Voyages and Travels of an Indian Interpreter and Trader, originally published in London in 1791.
Concerning Long, but little is known further than what he himself relates in his book. Coming from England to North America in 1768, he passed nearly twenty years upon this continent, chiefly consorting with the Indians—learning their languages, wearing their garb, living their life. An expert woodsman, fur-trader, and explorer, he penetrated into regions north and west of Canada, that are still practically unexplored.
At first an articled clerk in Canada, he later was apprenticed to a Montreal fur merchant. Having displayed an adaptability for Indian philology, Long was sent to the neighboring mission colony at Caughnawaga, where he remained seven years, becoming an adept in the arts and occupations of savage life. His term of service having expired, the excitements of army life attracted him. The American Revolution had just broken out, and volunteering for service with the British he was detailed to lead Indian parties to hang upon the flanks of the invading American army—one of these expeditions captured the famous Ethan Allen. After a year and a half of this service, in which—dressed as an Indian, and scalping his prisoners in their fashion—he could scarcely be distinguished from a brave, Governor Guy Carleton appointed Long a midshipman in the navy. But when his vessel sailed for England, he left the sea in order to enter upon the more lucrative business of fur-trading.
In May, 1777, Long left Montreal for Mackinac, engaged as a bourgeois to lead a party of voyageurs into the far Northwest, and trade with the Indians on their own hunting grounds. The independent Canadian merchants of this period were endeavoring to maintain the old French connections with the Indians of the “upper country,” and at the same time to undermine the trade of the Hudson’s Bay Company, by intercepting the natives before they reached the posts of the latter. Long was assigned to the Nipigon district north and northeast of Lake Superior—a region early occupied by the French, and the scene of their hardy and audacious enterprises against the Hudson Bay trade.
Cameron[1] defines the limits of this region as follows: “Bounded on the south by Lake Superior, on the southwest and west, by the northwest road from Lake Superior to the lower end of Lake Ouinipique (Winnipeg); on the northwest and north by Hayes river and part of Hudson Bay; and on the northeast by Hudson Bay. Its greatest length from Pierre Rouge (Red Rock), at the entrance of Nipigon River, to the Lake of the Islands, on the Hayes river, is about three hundred and fifty leagues and its greatest breadth, from Trout Lake to Eagle Lake, is about one hundred and eighty leagues, but in most parts not over eighty leagues. The two-thirds at least of this country are nothing but rivers and lakes, some fifty leagues long; properly speaking, the whole country is nothing but water and islands.” Into this watery wilderness Long and his voyageurs pushed their way, literally subsisting on the country. The bourgeois’s chief qualification for the enterprise was his familiarity with the Indian life and language, and the fact that he had undergone the ceremony of adoption by one of the most noted chiefs of the Chippewa nation.
During the French régime, this country was noted for producing the largest number and best quality of furs in the Northwest;[2] but after the English occupation the district had been nearly abandoned, the difficulties of existence proving too great. Four out of eight traders starved to death in the region in one year, and it was avoided in favor of the better-provisioned Western districts. Cameron says that in 1785 the whole district produced but fifty-six packs of furs. We may judge from this of Long’s success as a trader; in the first year, he not only subsisted himself and a party of eight Canadians, during the “hardest winter ever remembered,” but rescued a brother trader from destruction by a murderous band of Indians, and brought out a cargo of a hundred and forty packs of furs all in good condition, valued between $25,000 and $30,000. For these services he received from his chiefs the salary of $750 a year, and a supply of Indian corn and “hard grease,” or tallow, as provision.[3]
At the end of his first year’s engagement, Long returned only to Pays Plat, a trading station on Lake Superior. Being there relieved of his furs, and supplied with fresh provisions, he set out August 15, 1778, for another winter in the “inlands,” whither, after many hardships and experiences with murderous Indians, he returned to Mackinac, and spent the following winter with the Chippewas near that fort.
In June, 1780, he joined a party of Canadians and Indians who were sent from Mackinac to Prairie du Chien to secure the deposits of furs at the latter place, and prevent them from falling into the hands of the emissaries of George Rogers Clark from the Illinois, and the Spaniards from St. Louis. After a march through Wisconsin, this undertaking was successfully accomplished—the furs that could not be saved being burned to keep them from the enemy.[4]
The following autumn, Long returned to Quebec never again to come to the “upper country.” He made one more successful trading expedition to unknown lands, by way of the Saguenay River and Lake St. John, penetrating the country east of Hudson Bay, and bringing back a rich cargo—in the very year that the Hudson’s Bay Company was pillaged by the French expedition of La Pérouse.
Long returned for a year to England, his mother-land being entirely strange to him after fifteen years’ absence. He was, therefore, glad to fit out a cargo for another venture in the Indian trade of Canada. But his good fortune seems now to have deserted him—debt, lack of employment, and other difficulties drove him from one place to another. In the spring of 1785 he was in New York, where he pushed the claim of a Huron Indian through Congress. A fur-trading expedition among the Iroquois failed, and the British commandant at Oswego confiscated his goods. Taking refuge among his Loyalist friends near Kingston, he received a grant of land for his services, but debt drove him from that; and after securing some assistance from the authorities, he returned to England in the fall of 1788,[5] there to write and publish the volume of his adventures.
He appears to have secured some patronage for this work, as is evidenced by the list of subscribers, and the dedication to Sir Joseph Banks. He also consulted the best available authorities on Indian traditions and Canadian history, and seems to have taken pains to verify his own experiences and observations, without slavishly following his authorities.[6] In his defense of the Hudson’s Bay Company, there is to be noted either a desire to secure its favor for future services, or pique in relation to the new North West Company, under some one of whose partners he had undoubtedly served. The book, which was published in 1791, attained considerable popularity. It was favorably reviewed in the Monthly Review (June, 1792), and translated into both French and German. The French translation, made by J. B. L. J. Billecocq, with notes by the translator (but without the vocabularies, a fact deplored by French philologists),[7] appeared in 1794, and again in 1810. Two German translations were made, the first by B. Gottlob Hoffmann, issued in 1791; the second by G. Forster, published in Berlin the following year.
The interest of the work, aside from incidental historical references to expeditions in Canada and Wisconsin during the Revolution, the Loyalist settlements, and the retention of the Northern posts, lies in the author’s intimate knowledge of Indian life and customs, especially those of the more primitive and savage tribes of the North; and in the light he incidentally throws on the history of the fur-trade.[8]
It is anything but an engaging picture which Long paints of his Indian friends and companions—they are in the stage of downright savagery, debauched by contact with the dregs of civilization, learning its vices, appropriating its weapons, and dominating the whites by sheer force of numbers, and knowledge of the weakness and greed of the latter. A pleasant contrast is his account of the Canadian mission Indians; but even these proved their savagery during the American Revolution. Of their aboriginal customs, Long’s notices of totemism, religious rites and beliefs, courtship and marriage, social customs—games, dances, food, dwellings—habits of hunting, and physical and mental characteristics, are valuable because original and the result of immediate observation.
Scarcely less dark is the picture presented by Long, of the fur-trade and the traders. This was the period of unlicensed and almost ruinous competition between the great company at the North, and the independent merchants from Canada—the latter acting each for himself, with slight regard for the interest of the trade, the Indians, or the lesser employees.
The fur-trade under the French régime had been under strict surveillance. All traders were required to purchase a government license, and the products of their traffic were closely inspected. By the close of the French rule, even the lawless coureurs de bois—trading through the forest at will, and carrying their peltries to the English at Albany and Hudson Bay—had been quite largely suppressed, and brought into the service of the licensed traders.
After the conquest of New France, a period of cutthroat competition began. The English traders did not at first dare venture into the wilderness peopled with Indians faithful to the French; those who did, nearly paid the penalty with their lives (as witness Alexander Henry, at Mackinac). But after Pontiac’s War, and the gradual subsidence of Indian hostility, British traders from Montreal and Quebec began reaching out for this lucrative traffic, and a class of enterprising entrepreneurs was developed, recruited chiefly from the ranks of Scotchmen. By them the fur-trade was pushed to its highest development, and the rivers, lakes, and fastnesses of the great Northwest discovered and explored in rapid succession. This work was done by such men as the Henrys, Ponds, Frobishers, Finlays, Camerons, McDonalds—and, greatest of all, Sir Alexander Mackenzie.
By 1780, they began to unite their fortunes, and a sixteen-share stock corporation was formed of the principal traders.[9] A conspiracy of the Indians in the same year, to massacre all the whites and pillage the posts, was discovered and averted; but by the following season a still more terrible scourge had begun. Smallpox appeared among the tribes in the Northwest, and spread so rapidly that hunting was but languidly carried on, and profits fell to the zero mark. To avert the chaos into which the trade seemed falling, the North West Company was established in 1783, for a term of five years. In 1787 its organization was perfected, and the corporate period of the Canadian fur-trade began; competitors were gradually bought out—union with the X Y Company occurring in 1805, and with the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1821.
Long’s narrative, therefore, portrays conditions during the period of the free trader, responsible to no authority, exploiting the country and the natives for the largest immediate returns, without reference to the preservation of the hunting grounds or the protection of the hunters. The frightful debauchery of the Indians by means of traders’ rum, and the necessity for the use of laudanum to control their drunken excesses, are shown in full by Long in his simple narrative of events. The dangers, also, to which this system exposed the trader, are only too evident from his relation of the case of Mr. Shaw. As for the competition with the Hudson’s Bay Company, it is plain from Long’s narrative that the Canadian traders were encroaching on the hunting grounds of this great monopoly. The case of M. Jacques Santeron shows the possibility of dishonest men passing from one employ to the other.
As for the rest of the picture, Long presents the usual traits of the trader and interpreter—a certain rude honesty, taking the form of loyalty to his employer, a disregard of dangers, and small concern for hardships. His knowledge of wilderness life was intimate, but to this fact he alludes only in an incidental way. In acquaintance with Indian character, and power of influencing them in a crisis, he seems to have been superior to the ordinary trader. His vices were those of his class—slight regard for laws, either moral or military (witness the incident at Fort Mackinac), improvidence and wastefulness, restlessness, and dissatisfaction with the routine life of towns. His literary style, while discursive, is simple, and as clear as running water. What he wishes to say, he says plainly, leaving the reader as a rule to draw his own conclusions. There is an unvarnished, unflinching directness in his statements, conveying to the reader the impression that he is concealing nothing, doing nought for effect, but telling a straightforward story of travels and adventures. The book forms a contribution of note to this important class of literature, and will always be readable.
In the preparation of the notes, the Editor has had, as in the first volume of the series, the assistance of Dr. Louise Phelps Kellogg, of the Wisconsin Historical Library. He has also had helpful suggestions from Dr. James Bain, Jr., of the Toronto Public Library.