After the formation of the North West Company, its traders occasionally encountered Bay men and leaflets threatening severe punishment against anyone who violated the HBC's monopoly. The Nor'westers ignored the bullying, confident that they had inherited not only the trade formerly undertaken by the agents of New France but also the right to the rewards of their strenuous efforts. They did so despite growing provocations (the Nor'westers, it must be said, were hardly pacifists and gave at least as good as they got). By the beginning of the 19th century, their enmity was at the brink of open warfare.

          The Montrealers had previously faced threats from other arrogant monopolies. The extension (in the Quebec Act of 1774) of Quebec's boundaries to the Ohio River had helped to deepen the divide between Britain and her rebellious thirteen colonies. Before the troops of the Continental Congress marched upon Montreal in 1775 (they occupied the town over the winter but attracted next to no converts to their cause), local authorities dumped its supply of powder and guns into the St Laurence. And in 1776, and although the colony was free of rebels, the authorities took another draconian step: they prohibited private shipping on the Great Lakes. That ban lasted until 1784.

          Both measures imposed great hardships upon the Nor'westers. There was little danger, its partners pleaded, that rebels might capture supplies transported across the Lakes. But no matter: for the better part of a decade they were obliged to take longer and more costly and arduous routes to and from the northwest. Further, in the mid-1770s the trade goods most valued by the Indians lay at the bottom of the St Laurence. As far as British and Canadian governments are concerned, in other words, no good deed goes unpunished: the Crown's local representatives "rewarded" the inhabitants of a loyal colony by menacing and shrivelling their major source of income. Scots traders and merchants soon realised that they had much more in common with their French Canadian counterparts than with the British military and civil authorities. Quebec's affairs, reflected one merchant, were "overwhelmed by every kind of confusion, particularly in commercial matters, justice being administered by a compound of English and French laws and tinctured with the absurdities of both." More than two centuries later, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

          And then came the delusions of Thomas Douglas. No ancestor of Tommy's, this Douglas was Baron Daer and Shortcleuch and the Fifth Earl of Selkirk. Two events influenced this Scots aristocrat's formative years. The first was a raid by the American privateer, John Paul Jones, upon his family's home. Though there was no bloodshed or brutality, the young Selkirk was quite frightened – and in later years believed the incident left him with a dislike of Americans that he never wholly overcame. The second was his interest in the Highlands and his shocked reaction to the Clearances. As a boy he was in no position to help; but as he grew to maturity he began to develop schemes of emigration that might both restore hope to dispossessed people and strengthen Britain overseas.

          In June 1811 Lord Selkirk and the HBC's board of directors put their seals to an agreement. In return for his promise to found an agricultural settlement and some other considerations, Selkirk was granted 75 million acres (an area five times the size of Scotland). For 10 shillings, the settlement severely unsettled the Nor'westers. From their point of view, the Red River colony (present-day Winnipeg and environs) was utterly misconceived. Economic autarchy among people living at the edge of the known world and who were completely unfamiliar with techniques required to wrest produce from the local soil and were ill equipped to withstand the region's severe winters and spring floods – it was just plain foolhardy. It was also cruel to send women and children to a place where, at that time, only one European woman had ever set foot.

          Selkirk's scheme was, indeed, a tragedy of such proportions that the suffering of participants became its dominant legacy. The settlers reached Hudson's Bay too late in the season to undertake the overland journey to Red River. But food and accommodation were scarce, and the Bay is among the world's coldest places. By spring most settlers were either dead or incapacitated. After they reached Red River their suffering continued: wolves and blizzards killed their precious cattle; hordes of locusts stripped bare the meagre crops; and what the insects did not destroy, drought and then flood did. By comparison, the Highland Clearances must have seemed benign. As one Nor'wester put it, Lord Selkirk's colonists were "victims sacrificed to the sinister views of a noble imposter."
 

The Ancient North West Spirit and Contemporary Canada's Malaise

          Canadian historiography written in English about the events after the Plains of Abraham is generally so dull that few sane people can bear to read it. The standard school fare used to be overwhelmingly political and legal history: the advent of responsible government (spiced, perhaps, with the uprisings of William Lyon Mackenzie and Louis Papineau); the road to Confederation and the rise and fall of the National Policy (rendered a bit more palatable by the roguish charm of Sir John Macdonald and the Gallic toughness of Sir Georges Cartier); the development of Dominion status and the patriation of the British North America Act. Today's standard school history is equally dreary. It is also destructive: it is little more than the glorification of the welfare-warfare state and a litany of complaints against Europeans, men and capitalists (and preferably all three). In recent French-language historiography, the events of 1759-60 are given their due, as are the various outrages committed by Ottawa since 1867; but otherwise, it seems, nothing much occurred before 1960. In either language, Canadian history bores Canadians to tears because received texts are boring, irrelevant and idiotic; and they are tedious and senseless because they excise from consideration the most fascinating – and important – aspects of Canadians' history.

          Above all, why – despite what Americans wanted and British politicians expected – did the scattered and scanty populations of the prairies and British Columbia join the St Laurence? Did Canada sleepwalk into nationhood? Canadian governments and their court historians have worked tirelessly to obscure and erase the answer: individuals – extraordinary, to be sure, but certainly not politicians – create nations. They need not intend to do so: nations (Canada is a prime example) can be unintended consequences of other human actions. The legal trimmings and philosophical justifications come later. Accordingly, the contention that politicians and constitutions create nations is a myth that, alas, has not been challenged since the French Encyclopaedists of the late-18th century propounded it. The northwest joined the St Laurence because its economic and historical ties and emotional sympathies lay there. The Nor'westers built these links. Their feats – and their frustrations – are Canada's foundations. Ostensibly a forgotten Montreal trading company, the story of the North West Company is, in a nutshell, the story of Canada.

          Commerce and capitalism, in short, underlie and underpin Canada. Yet today's Canadians – certainly the plurality that regards Tommy Douglas as The Greatest Canadian Ever – indignantly reject this truth. But as Martin Masse demonstrates, the current Canadian identity, based upon interventionism, welfarism and protectionism, is a damaging fairy tale (see "The Socialist Wind from the South" and William Watson, Globalization and the Meaning of Canadian Life, University of Toronto Press, 1998). Masse concludes "Canadians do not distinguish themselves from the Americans by trying to become more socialist, since the Americans were there before. The real Canadian tradition is one of rugged individualism being slowly frittered away under the overwhelming influence of American collectivism … The Canadian identity that should be cherished and the Canadian tradition that should be upheld are based on individualism, small government and the free market. That's what we were until the 1950s."

          The history of the North West Company corroborates and elaborates this conclusion. It also teaches three lessons. First, the handful of businesses that Canadians regard as "icons" are privileged and protected embarrassments. For most of their history, the Canadian National Railway, CPR and above all the Hudson's Bay Company were creatures of the state. As such, they were necessarily artificial, inefficient and generally incapable of standing on their own feet. They have bequeathed to Canadians the damaging legacy that business (and culture) usually will and probably should depend upon the government. Equally baleful has been their underlying attitude: the importance of deference, protection and regulation, and of organisational (collective) survival at the cost of individual entrepreneurship and excellence. These have become lauded – falsely, I believe – as "quintessentially Canadian" attitudes.

          The second enduring lesson is that, like the partners of the NWC, today's Canadians face not just "private" but also "public" monopolies. But unlike the Nor'westers, few Canadians realise this and most (recall the CBC's list of Top Ten Canadians) would hotly dispute it. Ironically, the most powerful, entrenched, predatory and arrogant monopolies – i.e., the ones that harm Canadians most – are the "health," "education" and other "public service" rackets first advocated by J. S. Woodsworth (who, curiously given Canadians' worship of the welfare state, languishes at #100 on the Top 100) and entrenched by a range of politicians including Tommy Douglas, John Diefenbaker, Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau.

          The third lesson is that today's Canadians also suffer at the hands of Lord Selkirk's ideological descendants. More than most countries, Canada is plagued with well-meaning nobility who propose and impose utopian schemes that always require taxpayers' money, usually fail (to their proponents, social programs never fail but are always "underfunded") and often bring disaster. "The urge to save humanity," said H.L. Mencken, "is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." And so it will remain until Canadians realise that they are tyrannised by "unprincipled agents of government" on one side and a "speculating nobility" of welfare-warfare statists on the other. Each seeks to separate Canadians from the rewards of honest labour and brave risk-taking. Like William McGillivray, I hope that once again "the ancient North West spirit will rouse with indignation." Surveying the list of most revered Canadians, I am not holding my breath. But dreams are eternal: "perseverance," after all, was the Nor'westers' motto and the ultimate source of their astounding success.