is placed in it, with portraits of various Proprietors. A full-length likeness of Nelson, together with a splendid painting of the Battle of the Nile also decorate the walls.[11]
An 1844 account of dinner at Fort Vancouver, a North West Company post on the Pacific Slopes (the company firmly controlled this area, which stretched from San Francisco to the Alaska border), finds Governor (Dr. John) McLoughlin, who had served earlier as the doctor at Fort William, presiding at table:
At the end of a table twenty feet in length stands Governor McLoughlin (known as the Father of Oregon) directing guests and gentlemen from neighbouring posts to their places, and chief traders, the physician, clerks and the farmer slide respectfully to their places, at distances from the governor corresponding to the dignity of their rank and service. Thanks are given to God, and all are seated. Roast beef and pork, boiled mutton, baked salmon, boiled ham, beets, carrots, turnips, cabbage and potatoes, and wheaten bread, are tastefully distributed over the table among a dinner set of elegant Queen’s Ware, furnished with glittering glasses and decanters of various coloured Italian wines.[12]
During the month of the Rendezvous, dignity appears to have been set aside once the sun began to set. Days were spent in the Committee House at meetings, at which the business of the trade was carried out in great secrecy, but the nights were spent dining and roistering in the Great Hall. Dinners of “buffalo tongue and hump that had been either smoked or salted, thirty pound lake trout and whitefish that could be netted in the river at the gates to the Fort, venison, wild duck, geese, partridge and beaver tails would be augmented with confectioners’ delicacies that had been packed all the way from Montreal in those great canoes. They drank the wines of France and Portugal, whiskies from Scotland and the Canadas, rum by the hogshead and, on occasion, the finest champagne.”[13]
Cooks and bakers prepared imported delicacies for the elaborate banquets held at the annual July Rendezvous at Fort William. Fort William Historical Park, Thunder Bay, Ontario
Traditionally, five toasts were given, and these were presented in the following order: Mary, the Mother of all the Saints; the king; the fur trade in all its branches; the voyageurs, their wives, and their children; and absent brethren. When the dinner and toasts were over, the Great Hall witnessed one of the sights of the ages:
With the ten gallon kegs of rum running low and dawn fingering the windows of the Great Hall to find the partners of the North West Company, names that mark and brighten the map of Canada, leaping on benches, chairs, and oaken wine barrels to “shoot the rapids” from the tilted tables to the floor, and singing the songs of home. Mounting broad bladed paddles, the gentlemen in knee breeches and silver buckled shoes pounded around the hall in impromptu races, shoving boisterously, piling up at the corners, breaking off only to down another brimming bumper [of spirits].[14]
However, the Rendezvous was soon over, and by August 1 both groups left for home so they would not be caught on the frozen waterways. For the partners returning for the winter to Montreal, there was the Beaver Club’s fellowship and feasting to look forward to. The club was founded in February 1785 with nineteen members, all of whom had explored the Northwest. The object of the club was “to bring together at stated periods during the winter season, a set of men highly respectable in society who had passed their best days in a savage country and had encountered the difficulties and dangers incident to a pursuit peculiar to the fur trade of Canada.” Despite this restriction, an additional nineteen members were accepted by 1803.[15]
The club did not have its own headquarters but met every fortnight from December to April in one of Montreal’s famous eating establishments. It did have its own china, crystal, and plate, marked with the club’s insignia. At the meetings the members themselves had to wear their insignia if they wanted to avoid a fine. This medal was gold and bore the words “Beaver Club of Montreal instituted in 1785,” with a beaver gnawing the foot of a tree and the inscription “Industry and Perseverance.” The reverse side carried the name of the member, the date of his first voyage of exploration, and a bas-relief with the motto Fortitude in Distress and a canoe with three passengers in top hats being guided through rapids by canoe men.[16]
Colonel Landman, a guest of Sir Alexander Mackenzie and William McGillivray in the early nineteenth century, gives us a vivid description of one of the Beaver Club dinners that lasted twelve hours:
At this time, dinner was at four o’clock and after having lowered a reasonable quantity of wine, say a bottle each, the married men withdrew, leaving a dozen of us to drink to their health. Accordingly, we were able to behave like real Scottish Highlanders and by four in the morning we had all attained such a degree of perfection that we could utter a war cry as well as Mackenzie and McGillivray. We were all drunk like fish, and all of us thought we could dance on the table without disarranging a single one of the decanters, glasses or plates with which it was covered.
But on attempting this experiment, we found that we were suffering from a delusion and wound up by breaking all the plates, glasses and bottles and demolishing the table itself; worse than that, there were bruises and scratches, more or less serious on the heads and hands of everyone in the group…. It was told to me later that during our carouse 120 bottles of wine had been drunk, but I think a good part of it had been spilled.[17]
Other guests at the Beaver Club confirmed that description:
They served bear meat, beaver, pemmican and venison in the same way as in trading posts to the accompaniment of songs and dances during the events; and when wine had produced the sought-for degree of gaiety in the wee hours of the morning, the trading partners, dealers and merchants re-enacted the “grand voyage” to the Rendezvous in full sight of the waiters or voyageurs who had obtained permission to attend. For this purpose, they sat one behind another on a rich carpet, each equipping himself with a poker, tongs, a sword or walking stick in place of a paddle and roared out such voyageurs’ songs as Malbrouck or A la Claire Fontaine, meanwhile paddling with as much steadiness as their strained nerves would permit.[18]
The last Beaver Club dinner was held in 1827, but the event was resurrected in the twentieth century. The Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal brought it back to life in 1959, and it now has nine hundred members around the world. Once a year club members dine on a five-course dinner with appropriate wines. Each course is paraded through the club, led by costumed coureurs de bois, voyageurs, musicians, and a representative from the Kahnawake First Nation. Now, as then, five toasts are proposed to the Mother of All Saints, the queen, the fur trade in all its branches, the women and children of the fur trade (Heaven preserve them!), and absent brethren.
Beaver hats have been forgotten by the fashion world, fur-trading empires are a thing of the past, but once a year hundreds of men and women still gather to pay tribute to an unlikely team of men and women who ruthlessly pursued a small animal across this continent. Their success depended on their food supplies and the strength, skill, and stamina of a chain of men stretched across the continent. They came from different classes, languages, cultures, and standards, but they found a common cause, and until 1821, when the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company merged, they were legends in their own time.
CHAPTER SIX
Bread Was the Foundation of Every Meal
AS THE FISHERMEN, FUR TRADERS, MISSIONARIES, SOLDIERS, surveyors, and eventually settlers began to arrive in the land now called Canada, they were often astonished by its incredible bounty, beauty, and harshness. They came from every walk of life, from a multitude of cultural and religious backgrounds, and they had scores of reasons for leaving their homelands, either as sojourners or settlers. Many had come to barter for furs, work on the fishing vessels, or serve in the garrisons and either chose to stay or to return later (often with their families)
