Death in the Age of Steam (48 page)

Eight miles west of the city's heart, the Lachine Canal drank in the St. Lawrence River through a trio of mouths, each of a different age, before blending the water and sending it east to turn the wheels of industry. By five o'clock, Harris was tying Banshee to the rail of a bridge that spanned the oldest and narrowest of the three channels. Stone banks and shade trees sheltered the waters that no vessel larger than a canoe could have ruffled. Two brown ducks, mallard hens, paddled tentatively from beneath the bridge. To either side in park-like calm stood the Canadian headquarters of the company that owned half the continent.

Harris turned first to a massive, dressed-stone villa on the north bank. Thick columns and balustrades hung about the entrance. Thick mutton chops hung about the face of the immaculate porter. The visitor was briefly conscious of his own dusty riding clothes.

He was led to an office which, in the late afternoon, exhibited
as much spruceness and bustle as if the work day were just beginning. Bookkeepers' and copyists' pens scratched briskly across the pages of neatly bound ledgers. Harris had heard that Governor Simpson kept long hours, rousing his voyageurs as early as one a.m. when travelling in the Northwest. Evidently a similar regime applied at home. The governor lived upstairs, but was currently absent on just such a northwestern tour of company trading posts, a clerk briefly intimated. No one familiar with Lake Superior in the forties was just now in the office. Perhaps if Harris would step across to the warehouse . . .

Outside, he crossed the bridge and made for a long, low fieldstone building on the south bank of the old canal. The door was open.

“Pack 'em tight, curse you,” someone inside was grumbling. “You can get six or eight more in that piece, up to a hundredweight—but snug, mind.”

Harris entered the dim and mostly empty storeroom to find a lad of perhaps fourteen struggling to tie a tower of blankets into a bale compact enough to be transported by canoe or portaged.

“Bear down on it with your knee there. Press out the air . . . Who are you?”

The speaker, noticing Harris, stepped forward out of the shadows. He wore a ragged, salt and pepper beard and an old-fashioned brown frock coat startlingly patched in blue, green and red. His right hand rested on the butt of an old single-shot pistol tucked into his belt.

The boy was all but standing on the blankets now and seemed paralyzed for fear the jack-in-the-box would spring rafter-wards once more. Before this could happen, Harris seized the encircling rope and knotted it tight.

“I've some questions regarding the Northwest,” he told the parti-coloured warehouseman. “The office referred me to you.”

Considering that the region alluded to extended twenty-five hundred miles, all the way to the Pacific Ocean, Harris prepared to be laughed at.

“I know the Northwest body and soul. Anything
worth
knowing about its commerce, its redskins, its fur-bearing animals, its rocks and rivers, its storms and freezes I can tell you without your even asking. Now I'll thank you to undo that bale you've been meddling with. The brat has to learn for himself.”

“Mamma will be looking for me, Uncle,” the boy quickly interposed. Taking advantage of the distraction Harris had provided, he grabbed a shotgun from beside the door and left with a promise to come again tomorrow.

The uncle grunted scornfully. He was a powerfully built, apparently once vigorous man, who now moved stiffly and carried a paunch. The face behind the beard was weathered but no longer firm. Long service on rougher ground had presumably earned him this custodial position, which if it made few demands afforded little in the way of society—no captive ear for his counsel, no permanent target for his ire.

Having by now had some practice questioning strangers, Harris bet this one would talk. Whether to the point remained to prove.

“Well, state your business now you've spoiled my lesson,” he said, taking the only chair. “I've leisure enough till October, when the canoes come back down river with the furs, and there'll be plaguey few of those. The land this depot serves is all trapped out. Who wants beaver hats now anyway? I suppose silk's the thing in Europe, although where the warmth in silk is you tell me. Has fashion done away with winter there?”

“Excuse me, Mr.—”

“Cuthbert Nash. I thought the scribblers yonder told you. They know me. Marten you can sell and arctic fox, but they go out through Hudson's Bay, not Montreal . . .”

In time, Harris extracted the admission that, while he had never been as far as the Pacific, Nash had from 1830 to '49 managed a trading post north of Lake Superior, the only barrier to his attaining higher office being his lack of formal education. Not lack of shrewdness, mind. The mid-forties had seen a copper rush on the U.S. side of the lake and the arrival of steamships. The first were side-wheelers, but Nash had made a
young boat-owner's fortune by convincing him that the lake was too rough for paddles, and that he and his partner should build a vessel powered by screws instead. A sandy-haired fellow from Kingston, son of a deceased hardware merchant.

Harris, who had been pacing about the warehouse, glancing at the piles of blankets, guns, kettles and hatchets used in trade, stopped in his tracks.

“Was it Henry Crane? What more can you tell me about him?”

Nash expressed irritation. He wanted to talk about his own solid success as post manager and what a capital chief factor he would have made, not about some here-today, gone-tomorrow speculator.

“He left suddenly?” said Harris. “What were the circumstances of his departure?”

“I know nothing about it. I thought you wanted to hear about the Company's activities in the Northwest. The key is managing the Indians. Your Ojibway is unpredictable, but my experience taught me just when to extend credit and when to come down hard.”

“You did say ‘here-today, gone-tomorrow,'” Harris persisted. “Why did you use those terms?”

“He was gone the last time I came through Sault Ste. Marie, wasn't he? That would have been in November '49.”

“Gone where?” said Harris.

“South, damn you,” Nash exploded. “Where else? The canal around the rapids there still hadn't been built and kept getting delayed, so you couldn't run your ships down into Lake Huron. He must have got tired of waiting.”

This hardly sounded to Harris like a guilty departure. “What exactly happened to his partner?”

“No, you tell me now—what's your interest in Crane?” said Nash, tugging at the greasy lapels of his harlequin frock coat as if it were a barrister's gown.

Harris looked for an answer he could give with some show of conviction.

“The truth, mind,” Nash scolded. “The Ojibway will bear witness I've a sure nose for any sort of lie.”

“I'm making inquiries on behalf of a lady,” said Harris.

“Go on. What inquiries?”

“My object is to discover whether there is anything in his past to indicate that Henry Crane would make an unfit husband.” Harris wished he had had this mission years ago.

“Not married yet?” Nash snorted. “I had a country wife, three children too, but Governor Simpson would not let me bring them to Montreal. He left two families in the Northwest himself before he married Lady Frances that's dead. Now we're both alone.”

“I see,” said Harris, pausing briefly in acknowledgement of these domestic upheavals. “What became of Crane's propeller ship?”

“Last I saw, it was sailing under the Stars and Stripes, so he must have sold it to the Michiganders once his partner died. Now don't go asking
his
fool name or how the deuce he got so scalded up. I had my own affairs to think of.”

“Scalded by the ship's boiler?” Harris doggedly inquired.

“After nineteen years,” said Nash, “I was at last to receive advancement, all the way to Hudson's Bay House in Lachine.”

“I understand, but as for Crane—”

“For Crane I didn't give a—look, Mr. Question Mark, there used to be a lighthouse keeper up there who knew the story. Anything you want to ask about Crane you ask Harvey Ingram.”

“Harvey Ingram?”

A gunshot close outside underscored the repeated name. Window glass rattled. Banshee snorted.

“My sister's brat is shooting ducks again!” exclaimed Nash, pushing Harris towards the door. “He'll blacken my name with the Company if I don't put a stop to it once for all. Get along. Time for me to lock up here anyway.”

Harris looked first to his horse. Ears pitched forward, she was staring down into the old canal. There the boy whom the blankets had so vexed was acting as his own dog. Wet to the
armpits, his shotgun held over his head, he floundered through the silted-up channel towards the remains of a brown mallard. She floated on her side, the blue speculum on her wing turned up to the clouding sky.

“Just wait!” Nash cried. “I'll break that gun over your backside.” He was so excited he could barely close the padlock on the warehouse door. “Shooting up Company property—blast this lock.”

However he felt about his own children whom he had left in Indian country, it was hard to imagine that his sister's pleased him better.

“Mr. Nash,” said Harris, seizing perhaps his last chance to wring a
living
informant's name from the former post manager, “can't you tell me of anyone else who—”

“Talk to Ingram. Climb out of there, my boy, or I open fire! Ingram that kept the light at Presque Isle.”

Not another coherent word could Harris get from him before Nash's thick, unsupple legs bore him away, the pistol from his waistband waving in his fist. There was no time to explain that French champagne had made Harvey Ingram unquestionable.

Unknown to Harris at Lachine, his lawyer friend had that afternoon also been looking for witnesses to Crane's boreal endeavours. Small took a cab from Rasco's to the Jesuit College at Bleury and Dorchester streets. To the missionary, he reasoned, no corner of God's earth is remote.

On the pretext of preparing a biographical sketch of Mr. Henry Crane, he gained access to a white-haired priest of gentle disposition. Father Gouin consulted a journal he had started in 1849. From it he read aloud in clear, deliberate English translation from his native French. He read the first entry plus whatever passages touched, even glancingly, on Small's theme.

24 May 1849

I arrived last week at Sault Ste. Marie, where our Jesuit predecessors first founded a mission in 1668. It is not properly speaking a
sault
(waterfall), but rather a set of rapids. In the space of half a mile, the level of the river joining Lakes Superior and Huron drops some twenty feet. The Indian canoes ride down this current with apparent ease and even stop to fish from it.

I live on the right or American bank, there being as yet no church on the other. I shall, however, be crossing often, above the rough water or below. It is only in the past half decade that the Society of Jesus has been permitted back into Canada for the first time since the English Conquest of New France. There is much work to be done.

The American settlement, with a summer population approaching one thousand, boasts a substantial fort, a fur trading post, two hotels, various shops and a horse-drawn railway for the portage of freight around the rapids. Two years ago, the state of Michigan became the first in the union to abolish capital punishment. I fear that, as news of this excessive leniency spreads, the Sault may become a mecca for cutthroats as it has for copper miners, though at present it is no rowdier than parts of Montreal.

I eat some trout and more whitefish, which is slightly longer. Potatoes and pork, seasoned with cranberries, are also staples of my diet, for all of which I give thanks . . .

15 June

I have now made a number of crossings of the St. Mary's River. The Canadian bank is thick with alder bushes and evergreens, beyond which are to be found a Hudson's Bay Company post and practically no other amenities. The one stone house stands unoccupied. The settlement counts fewer than a dozen white residents and between one and two hundred Indians.

Among the latter I make slow progress. They are under the
impression that the religion of the Queen of England must be the best. The Protestants have furthermore profited from their head start by assiduously translating their
Book of Common Prayer
and other tracts into the Ojibway tongue.

Notwithstanding the left bank's general backwardness, I have made the acquaintance there of two enterprising young Englishmen. Both born like myself within sight of the St. Lawrence, they now operate a side-wheeler between points along the north shore of Lake Superior and are adding a screw-driven steamer to their armada. Both men are affable. The more gifted in a mechanical sense, Mr. Colin Ewing by name, is a Montrealer and a Catholic . . .

20 August

Colin Ewing has just paid me a call before setting off for Chicago. There he will supervise completion of the screw-driven
Steadfast
, so named to advertise her advantage over side-wheelers in rough water. Also, so Colin says, to characterize his partnership with Henry Crane, who seems to be the chief raiser of capital and finder of cargoes. I understand they met in Kingston, C.W. some three years ago. As far as the business goes, they have made each the other's heir.