occasion was knee-breeches with gold-
clasped garters and silver-buckled shoes,
silken coat with ruffles and gold braid. The
festivities generally ended in the “wee sma’
hours ayont the twal,’—usually with dawn.

These men were the Lords and Masters
of the Fur Trade—rich, vigorous and irre-
sistible. Their noise and roistering hilarity
must have been a source of awe and perplex-
ity to the watch going his rounds of the
streets of Montreal, as he stopped for a
moment to listen and to gaze up at the bril-
liant lights streaming from the windows of
Beaver House.

The Club dispensed hospitality with lav-
ish prodigality. They entertained many dis-
tinguished visitors to the City. John Jacob
Astor was a welcome guest for years. Wash-
ington Irving, too, sat at their festive board
on several occasions, as an impressionable
youth, ‘a chiel amang them takin’ notes.”
The Earl of Selkirk was an honoured guest
at the Beaver Club in Montreal in the year
1803, and it was said by certain Nor’
Westers later that his questions regarding
their Company’s operations in the northwest
were more numerous, more studied and more
probing than disinterested good taste called
for, and the noble Earl was accused of be-
traying the hospitality of the Club, inasmuch
as he made use of the information he gath-
ered from them for his own ends and to
their partial undoing. Be that as it may.

In 1804, Thomas Moore, the Irish poet,
was a guest at the Beaver House. In due
season, David Thompson, the world’s great-

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Page Twenty

est geographer, and Simon Fraser, the noted
British Columbia explorer, Peter Grant, the
histriographer, and Malheot, the trader,
variously partook of the Club’s hospitality
and good fellowship. Sir John Franklin,
when a young man, was entertained there,
too.

The Beaver Club, for a time, was the
“inner circle’ of Canada’s political and
commercial, as well as social, existence. It
is said that part of their ritual, when the fun
was at its height, was for these usually stern,
rugged Nor’ Westers to sit down on the
carpet, one behind another, as if in a canut
du Nord, (north canoe) and in this manner
go through all the motions of a crew of
voyageurs making the Grand Voyage, sing-
ing their choruses and chansons — Rose
Blanche, En Rowland Ma Boule, Alouette,
or perhaps:

“Row, brothers, row; the stream runs fast,
The rapids are near and the daylight’s past.”

If not these, at least such songs of a
similar nature as happened to be in vogue
at the time. Another favourite game was
shooting the rapids astride empty wine kegs,
from the table to the floor.

What a galaxy from which to choose a
crew for any canut du Nord—William and
Simon McGillivray, Simon McTavish, the
brothers Frobisher, Alexander Mackenzie,
Alexander Henry the Younger, Peter Pond,
David Thompson, Daniel William Harmon,
A. N. McLeod, John McDonald of Garth,
Duncan Cameron, Alexander Macdonell,
Simon Fraser, John Stuart, Samuel Black
and Cuthbert Grant! And who would have
the temerity to shoulder the responsibilities
of being guide on the momentous voyage?

Still another custom with them is men-
tioned by an old chronicler:

“The calumet or pipe of peace is handed
round, and the Indian manners, customs,
and language closely imitated. The members
generally stand, but the visitors have the
privilege of sitting.”

This close fraternity, for such it undoubt-
edly was, wore on special occasions large
gold medals upon which the motto of the
organization was engraved: “Fortitude in
Distress.” And in liguid form they saw to
it that they were strongly fortified.

The old Beaver Club was the key to much
of the North West Company’s power, and
their power was great—for a time greater
by far than that of the Hudson’s Bay Com-
pany—in their heyday their daring was
greater, if less scrupulous, and often, when
heading for some new enterprise, the Hud-
son’s Bay Company traders would espy
ahead of them, some of those intrepid Nor’
Westers thumbing their noses.

The Nor’ Westers kept up their devil-
may-care spirt to the bitter end. They might
almost be said to have “fiddled while Rome
burned,” not in ignorance, but in a full
knowledge. Doubtless, it was from this very
same Beaver Club that the North West
Company’s plans of action against the Sel-
kirk settlement were formulated.

Towards the time of the close of the
North West Company’s power, the Beaver
Club at Montreal lost much of its unity of
spirit. Sides were taken, dissention broke

out, with arguments and differences of
opinion over certain happenings at the Red
River. These created enmities that could
not be smoothed down, and shortly after
the amalgamation of the two Companies in
1821, if amalgamation it could be called
rather than absorption, the Beaver Club
disintegrated, coming to an official ending
in the year 1824.

It is said that for years following, cups
and silver plates bearing the mark of the
Beaver Club, were put up at auction sales
throughout the country, silent witnesses of

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