British Columbia -- Fiction; Families -- Fiction; Lumber trade -- Fiction
"On that first voyage he got the idea of settling here. It evidently
grew on him, because when he came out the second time--the first
venture was a very profitable one--he brought a couple of dozen extra
men, artisans of different trades, and set up a trading post here
just as Captain John Meares tried to do at Nootka Sound a few years
earlier--you'll find a very interesting account of Meares and his
clash with the Spaniards over that post in Begg's 'History of British
Columbia.' Meares and Don Martinez between them very nearly got
Spain and Great Britain into war. Vancouver came out here to look
into that squabble as much as for anything else.
"But ancestor Norquay had this spot pretty much to himself. He
bought Big Dent from a local chief for six sheets of copper, an old
cutlass, and a pint of glass beads. Think of it! He built a
blockhouse of logs with a sixteen-foot stockade. His men cultivated
some land for vegetables. He had cattle and pigs and sheep--brought
'em out in the _Hermes_, like Noah with the animals aboard the Ark.
But fur-trading was the chief business. He traded for sea otter as
far north as Sitka. Here at home he got beaver, mink, marten,
whatever the Indians brought in. The Northwest Fur Company claimed
this territory. They were carrying on a big scrap with the Hudson's
Bay Company at the time. Finally the Hudson's Bay swallowed the
Northwest concern and got a free hand. They tried for years to make
all North America their private fur preserve. But they didn't scare
old Roderick off. Apparently he wasn't afraid of them. Too
well-equipped, I suppose, to be driven off.
"On his fourth voyage in 1804 he took a cargo of twenty-two hundred
sea otter which netted him fifty-six thousand dollars--so you can see
what the fur trade meant in those times. On that trip he made off
with the daughter of a country gentleman of Northumberland--he was
Scotch himself, you know--an English girl named Dorothy Grosvenor.
Her people considered him a low-class adventurer. So they took the
bit in their teeth, boarded the _Hermes_ and sailed away. Sounds
quaint. They brought out three or four families with them. The men
stationed here had mostly gotten Indian wives by that time. Dorothy
sailed with great-great-grandfather wherever he went with the barque
for three or four years. But their first child was born here on Big
Dent in 1807.
"The next year the Chilcotins came down. They're a fighting tribe
from the interior. They had a way of coming down a river to the head
of Bute Inlet, killing as many coast Indians as they could, taking
the loot and the young women back across the mountains. I suppose
they had heard of this white man who had lots of goods. So they
organized a surprise attack on Hawk's Nest, as it was already called.
"There was quite a scrimmage, by all accounts. The Chilcotins were
beaten off. We lost six men in the fight. Those small headstones
are for them," Rod indicated a compact row of graves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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