Shadow Soldiers of the American Revolution by Mark Jodoin

Author:Mark Jodoin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2013-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Kwantlen First Nation villages are located on the south bank of the Fraser River near Fort Langley. The Musqueam peoples are of the marshy lowlands in the southwest corner of the modern city of Vancouver.

By the time Fraser arrived back at Fort George on August 6, 1808, he had to overcome another hostile native engagement that drove his men to near-mutiny—they wanted to abandon the river and flee overland. The men were hungry, fatigued and unnerved by the unrelenting pursuit of the natives, yet Fraser was able to restore their morale by having them swear an oath of loyalty and change into their finest attire. The natives, evidently impressed by the men’s return to good form, retreated. Fraser’s personal morale, however, had been struck down by serious injury and by his realization midway in his exploration that the river he had conquered was not the Columbia. Despite his ordeals and accomplishments, Fraser and his business partners did not consider the arduous journey a success.

Fraser’s career continued and he ran the Mackenzie River Department for several years. By 1815, he was determined to retire from his life as a Nor’wester but agreed to serve one more year in Athabasca, despite increasing hostilities between his own company, the Hudson’s Bay Company, the French-Indian métis and newly arrived settlers.

The fifth Earl of Selkirk, a Hudson’s Bay Company shareholder, had established a colony at Red River in the middle of the métis’ buffalo hunting grounds. At stake was the supply of pemmican, a provision made from buffalo meat and fat on which Nor’westers had relied for decades as sustenance during their fur trading trips. The new settlers needed it too, and when their leaders tried to prohibit its sale to the fur traders, the métis formed a militia. The rivalries led to a gunfight in 1816 known as the Battle of Seven Oaks, in which settlers tried to block the métis from selling pemmican to the Nor’westers and lost twenty of their men in the process.

Métis leaders and North West Company partners, including Simon Fraser, were charged by Lord Selkirk with complicity in the deaths and were tried but acquitted in 1818 in York, the site of present-day Toronto. At this time, Fraser retired and returned to St. Andrews near the St. Lawrence River and Cornwall, Ontario, where his mother had originally settled nearly four decades earlier. In 1820, he married and began leading a quiet and happily uneventful life of farming and operating mills.

During the next year, the name of the company to which he had devoted two decades of his life all but disappeared when the British government forced the merger of the North West Company with Hudson’s Bay Company. The unproductive feuding between the two companies was finally put to an end.

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