Harmon's Journal: 1810-1819

Harmon's Journal

1800 – 1819

DANIEL WILLIAMS HARMON

A PARTNER IN THE NORTH WEST COMPANY

With a Foreword by

Jennifer S. H. Brown

Professor of History, University of Winnipeg

Contents

Foreword by Jennifer S. H Brown

Preface to the 2006 Edition by Graham R. Ross

Introduction to the 1957 Edition by W. Kaye Lamb

Preface to the 1820 Edition by Daniel Haskel

JOURNEY TO THE WEST: 1800

Montreal to Grand Portage

Grand Portage to Fort Alexandria

SWAN RIVER DEPARTMENT: 1800–1805

Fort Alexandria

Swan River Fort

Second Sojourn at Fort Alexandria

Bird Mountain

Third Sojourn at Fort Alexandria

Second Sojourn at Bird Mountain

Fourth Sojourn at Fort Alexandria

Lac la Pêche

Fifth Sojourn at Fort Alexandria

Fort Alexandria to New Fort

THE SASKATCHEWAN: 1805–1807

New Fort to South Branch House

South Branch House

Cumberland House

Cumberland House to Fort William

NIPIGON: 1807–1808

Fort William to Sturgeon Lake

Sturgeon Lake Fort

Sturgeon Lake Fort to Fort William and thence to Dunvegan

Athabaska: 1808–1810

Dunvegan

Dunvegan to Stuart’s Lake

NEW CALEDONIA: 1810–1816

Stuart’s Lake

Stuart’s Lake to Dunvegan and return

Second Sojourn at Stuart’s Lake

Fraser’s Lake

HARMON’S JOURNAL: APRIL 1816–AUGUST 1819

REPRINTED FROM THE FIRST EDITION, EDITED BY DANIEL HASKEL.

Third Sojourn at Stuart’s Lake

Stuart’s Lake to Fort William

Character of the Canadian Voyagers

About the Scholars

Endnotes

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Daniel Williams Harmon

Title Page of the First Edition

Title Page of the 1957 Edition

MAPS

Lake Superior to Lake Winnipeg

Lake Winnipeg and Swan River District

Cumberland House to Dunvegan

New Caledonia

Foreword

by

Jennifer S. H. Brown, University of Winnipeg

My interest in Daniel Williams Harmon and his life in the fur trade goes back thirty years and more. In the early 1970s, I began research on Hudson’s Bay and North West company fur traders and their Native families for a doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago. I soon discovered that at the same time, Sylvia Van Kirk was doing doctoral research on women in the fur trade at the University of London; we had independently decided that these families and their stories had been too long neglected. Our confluence of interests led to fruitful conversations, and as it happened, our books on these topics found publication in the same year, 1980. 1

Twenty-five years later, it appears that our work helped to initiate a whole new field of study. Fur-trade family history, fuelled by the Internet, by new interests in oral history, and, not least, by modern descendants’ growing pride in and affection for their Aboriginal roots, is flourishing as never before. In the 1970s, Sylvia Van Kirk and I (like Harmon when he entered the fur trade—see below) had few people to talk with. Now the networks of conversations can be endless.

As I read the documents that the literati (overwhelmingly men) of the times left behind, I found that I had some favourites among them. Certain traders wrote with unusual detail, perspective, and even sometimes with feeling and introspection. Among the best are Daniel Harmon, George Nelson, David Thompson, and Peter Fidler; these four writers left us some of the richest records we have of traders’ experiences and of their relations with their fellow traders and with the Aboriginal people on whom their trade and livelihood depended.

Harmon and Nelson, in particular, tell us more than perhaps any of their peers about the transforming process of becoming a fur trader, leaving home and family to learn about and adapt to a radically different lifestyle, occupation, and physical and social world. They had much in common. Their fur-trade careers overlapped closely (1800–1820 for Harmon; 1802–1823 for Nelson); they both worked mainly for the North West Company; they both acquired Native wives and families in the fur-trade country, and they both brought them east rather than leaving them behind. 2 But the trajectories of their lives were far from straightforward. Getting along in the fur trade, dealing with one’s superiors and fellow clerks, and with voyageurs of French or Metis descent, who spoke their own language and had their own ways, while travelling and living among varied Aboriginal peoples, presented considerable challenges and barriers to communication. A fur trade clerk finding his way faced no end of decisions about options, tactics, and obligations and commitments to be assumed or avoided, in the spheres of both work and personal affairs, and he might often find himself without trusted or familiar peers with whom to consult.

In this context, keeping a journal could help to fill the void, as its writer conversed with himself or with distant family members whom he could imagine as eventual readers of his words (both Harmon and Nelson sent letters and other writings home to family members at one time or another). A colleague of mine, Laura Murray, on reading Harmon, was struck by how often he wrote of lacking opportunities for good conversation. She has found that this lack is often a theme in fur traders’ writings, evoking the isolation they felt from home, and from people of their own sort with whom they shared implicit understandings and values. Her study of Harmon’s journal offers some insight into why he cre-ated it, as a space for talking to himself and his familiars, as his responses to his situation evolved. 3

For readers interested in fur-trade families, Harmon’s all-too-brief journal entries about the woman who became his wife and about his children are among the most poignant and interesting. When the relationship began on 10 October 1805, Harmon was twenty-seven, almost twice the age of Elizabeth, Lisette, or Lizette, as she has been variously called. Her father was Canadian, likely a voyageur, named Duval. Her mother was said to be a Snare Indian, a name that has been interpreted as referring to the Shuswap people, currently known as Secwepemc (Murray, 310n27) of the Salishan language family. The language that this woman’s daughter Lisette and Harmon had in common, however, was Cree, the lingua franca of the fur trade; Lisette’s mother may have lived for some time as a Cree captive before her alliance with Duval. Further research may shed more light on this history. The beautifully decorated leather shot bag that Lisette made, which is now in the Bennington Museum in Vermont, is described as being of Cree style. 4

Harmon never named his new partner in his journal. But in this he was typical of his times; Nelson never named his Ojibwe wife either, and we must turn to later church and other records for the identities of these and many other women allied with fur traders, if indeed they eventually got baptized and married by church rite. Traders often used terms such as my woman or the mother of my children, a vocabulary reflecting their uncertainty or ambivalence about the standing of such relationships and their knowledge that readers at home would also have doubts about their legitimacy and propriety. I mentioned in the foregoing the transforming process of becoming a trader. These fur-trade unions, if they endured, also went through a process of transformation as both partners grew into them and moved to redefine them; they were not static. Elsewhere, I have written about these relationships as processual, and about how some of them played out in practice. 5 A few, notably the fur-trade marriage of William Connolly, led to legal battles, as in 1864 when Connolly’s half-Cree son John sued the Montreal woman his father had married after setting aside his Cree wife, for a share in his father’s estate. Each family’s story was different, and neither a young fur trader nor his Native partner, when they started out, could predict the future course of their relationship or the paths that their offspring would travel.

It is interesting to speculate about certain parallels in Harmon’s and Lisette Duval’s backgrounds, even if they may not have thought much about them, and even if they seem very different indeed. They both became multilingual and transected several boundaries in their lives, and they challenge efforts to put them in compartments. Lisette is sometimes described as Metis. But she fits that category only if one equates Metis with mixed-blood, and many people of mixed ancestry never became Metis. She was not part of a Metis community or family in her upbringing or in the course of her life. If Shuswap or Secwepemc through her mother, she must have been brought up at least partially among Cree. Maybe she learned some French from her father, but when she was offered to Harmon, Duval was not mentioned and there is no sign he was present. On 20 July 1816, Harmon wrote that Lisette’s own language was Cree and that he therefore used Cree in speaking to their children; however, he more frequently used French in speaking with her. In living and travelling among Nor’Westers and voyageurs, both he and Lisette also needed and learned French. Ultimately, she learned still another language, English, when the family headed east.

As for Harmon, he too evidently acquired some proficiency in French and Cree in the context of the fur trade. He is often simply identified as American, but he too had also grown up in a situation where boundaries were more fluid and contested than is sometimes recognized. His birthplace, Bennington, now in Vermont, was in an area that New York and New Hampshire had both been trying to claim for many years before the American Revolution. Vermont had not existed as a separate American colony, and its course was not yet set when Harmon was born in 1778. During the revolution, both the British in Canada and a good many loyalist Vermonters seriously explored the idea of arranging for this in-between territory to join its northern neighbour. That idea faded as the tide of war turned. But the Vermonters then asserted their own identity by establishing an independent republic, which existed from 1778 to 1791 when they accepted American statehood. 6 Harmon, born to a Bennington innkeeper, grew up in a setting where state and national identities had not yet congealed, and in which many people had ties to and relatives in Canada. Viewed in that light, his heading to Montreal in 1799 to become a clerk in the Canadian fur trade seems less curious than if we interpret it from a later boundary-focused perspective.

Harmon’s journal deserves to be better known, and its reprinting is greatly to be welcomed. He repays close reading and study. Reading his words, and reading also beyond them for what he implies or omits, accepting his way of writing both critically and on his own terms, we glimpse a life of unusual scope, stretching from Bennington and Montreal to the far Northwest and back again. His conversations with himself, the efforts he made to set down his thoughts and observations, contribute to our conversations almost two centuries later in ways he could never have foreseen.

Preface to the 2006 Edition

The journal of Daniel Williams Harmon is one of the most descriptive accounts of fur-trade life in the Western Canada of two hundred years ago. In 1800 Harmon, a twenty-one-year-old native of Bennington, Vermont, was engaged by the North West Company in Montreal to proceed to Indian Country where he was to spend the next nineteen years. Nine of these were as a seasoned trader in north-central British Columbia, most particularly at the Stuart Lake Post.

In 1805 he accepted the offer of a fourteen-year-old girl of mixed blood to be his country wife. He intended, when his contract expired, to leave her with some good honest Man. This was the custom, and although boys were sometimes sent to civilization to be educated, children were normally left with their mother. In Harmon’s case, when the time came, he could not leave his beloved children in the wilderness nor could he tear them from a mother's love. Thus Harmon in 1819 travelled with his wife, Elizabeth Duval, and children Polly and Sally to Fort William. He and Elizabeth were legally married there before continuing on to Vermont.

The Journal was first printed in 1820, heavily edited. In 1957, W. Kaye Lamb published the text of the original manuscript, but that volume has long been out of print. Thus I thought it appropriate to republish it this year as a commemorative edition with a scholarly foreword. 2006 is the 200th anniversary of the founding by Simon Fraser of the Stuart Lake Post (now Fort St. James), where Harmon spent so much of his fur-trading life.

Above all, however, the work deserves republication because it is an engaging story. It is lively and conveys vividly the rough and tumble of life where two cultures trade ascendancy on a daily basis. Most fur-trade journals were kept to record business transactions in detail or to chronicle the adventures of de facto explorers. Harmon's is about his often raw, often warm and often reflective life involving conciliation, celebration and near starvation—the latter being a frequent threat.

The initiative of the Fort St. James Historical Society in the 1950s, coupled with local determination, brought about the multi-million-dollar restoration of the fort in 1971 by senior governments. Parks Canada continues to maintain the site in excellent condition.

My proceeds from this edition will be turned over to the Friends of the Fort St. James National Historic Site, a successor society, to further their commitment to the site.

I would like to acknowledge the support and encouragement I have received from such diverse quarters. Elizabeth Hawkins, daughter and executor of the Estate of Dr. W. Kaye Lamb, editor of the 1957 edition, gave permission to publish, the sine qua non of the project. Dr. Jennifer Brown’s book Strangers in Blood and other writings have made a major contribution to understanding the intercultural relations of fur-trade families. Dr. Brown kindly agreed to write the foreword to provide an historical and cultural context that will help the reader understand the world in which Harmon lived. The Friends of the Fort St. James National Historic Site, and its executive member Pat Hampe in particular, provided the liaison with the Elders of the Nak'azdli Band and with Robert Grill, Parks Canada Superintendent of the site. My sincere thanks to all. Finally, I am grateful to my friend and colleague Vic Marks of Hartley & Marks Publishers Inc., whose commitment to doing good works in publishing made the project financially possible.

And I thank Daniel Williams Harmon for returning with his family to his roots in Vermont, and later Montreal—and specifically for bringing Polly with him.

Graham R. Ross

Great, great, great-grandson of

Daniel Williams Harmon

Introduction to the 1957 Edition

by

W. Kaye Lamb

1

There is here printed, for the first time, the original text of the greater part of one of the most famous journals of the Canadian fur trade—the diary kept by Daniel Williams Harmon in the years 1800–19, while he was in the service of the North West Company. Hitherto this journal has been available only in the version edited by the Rev. Daniel Haskel and first printed in 1820. Haskel stated frankly in his preface that he had written it wholly over. This is an exaggeration, for Harmon’s own phraseology survives in many passages; but the changes made were numerous and drastic. Few accounts of the fur trade have been quoted more frequently than Harmon’s, and the position of authority that his narrative has gained makes it important that an authentic text, and an adequate account of the author himself, should be published.

Harmon came of pioneer New England Stock. John Harmon, his great-great-great-grandfather, who was born in England in 1616, came to America and settled in Springfield, Massachusetts, where he died in 1661. One of this descendants moved to nearby Suffield, in Connecticut, and there the diarist’s father, Daniel Harmon, was born in January 1748 (New Style). Daniel in turn moved to Bennington, Vermont, where he married Lucretia Dewey in 1770. About the time of his marriage he built a tavern, which he kept for many years. This was a more important establishment than the word tavern now implies. It was in reality a hotel, and a social centre in the community. Pictures show that it was a substantial structure, and it became a well-known and popular stopping-place for travellers.

All eight of the children born to Daniel and Lucretia Harmon —seven sons and one daughter—are believed to have first seen the light in the tavern at Bennington. Daniel Williams Harmon, the fourth child, was born there on February 19, 1778.

The American Revolutionary War was then in progress, and, in August 1777, the father had fought on the American side in the Battle of Bennington, in which the Green Mountain Boys of Vermont defeated the British. By an odd coincidence the officers of the defeated Loyalist force included Captain Simon Fraser, who had come to America from Scotland in 1773, and had settled the following year on a farm on the outskirts of Bennington. There his famous son and namesake, Simon Fraser the explorer and fur-trader, was born in 1776. Years later he and Daniel Williams Harmon were to be colleagues in the North West Company.

A few months after the Battle of Bennington Captain Fraser was captured by the Americans and he later died in prison at Albany. When peace was concluded, his widow and children joined the Loyalist migration to Canada. The Revolution did not disturb the Harmons, who prospered quietly in Bennington, and later in Vergennes, to which they moved in 1795. They were active in community life and prominent members of the Congregational Church. Walter O’Meara, who has unearthed many references to them in contemporary records, goes so far as to describe the family as brilliant and cultured. The eldest son, Argalus, became town clerk of Vergennes and was later elected to the House of Representatives. Martin, the second son, "was a graduate of Dartmouth, a Phi Beta Kappa at the age of nineteen, and a brilliant lawyer until his tragic death at twenty-four.c 1 Calvin, the next son, prospered in business and in real estate. Lucretia, the daughter, married into a prominent Vermont family. Of the three sons younger than Daniel, we know that Stephen was looked up to as a scholar and that Reuben became a physician. Little is known about the youngest child, Joseph, except that he died in 1811.

As Mr. O’Meara remarks, this is not a milieu that one would expect to produce "a fur trader, content to remain for almost twenty years in the crude and brutal environment of the pays d’en haut…" 2 He suggests that the family competition offered by his clever brothers may have contributed to Daniel’s decision to leave home and seek his fortune in the western wilderness. Very likely this was the case; certainly the journal does not suggest that Harmon was either particularly able or ambitious. But there were other reasons. One was innate restlessness—the roving disposition to which Harmon refers several times, and to which he himself ascribed his entry into the fur trade. The latter offered action and adventure, and, as the great fortunes then being built up in Montreal showed, it could offer rich material rewards as well. Religion also influenced Harmon’s decision. The austere faith to which the family adhered with great sincerity must have produced an atmosphere that Daniel found irksome and confining. It is significant that in his younger days he was evidently not a member of the church. The respect for Christian morality that is reflected so strongly in his diary seems to have been due at first much more to conscience than to conviction. In later life he himself did not consider that he had been a true Christian until the conversion he experienced in 1813, at the age of thirty-five.

Many Canadian travellers had stayed at the tavern in Bennington on their way to Albany or New York; their tales may well have aroused Harmon’s interest in Canada. Some time after his twenty-first birthday—in 1799 or early in 1800—he left home and journeyed to Montreal, where he entered the employ of McTavish, Frobisher & Company as a warehouseman. The head of the firm, Simon McTavish, a colourful and commanding personality, was the leading figure in the flourishing Montreal fur trade. He and his associates controlled the North West Company. They purchased its supplies, marketed its furs, and recruited many of its personnel. A young man with a roving disposition could not be expected to remain long in a warehouse, and in the spring of 1800 the new recruits for the North West Company included Daniel Williams Harmon. He joined its service as a clerk for the usual term of seven years. The salary he was to receive is not recorded, but if we may judge from the experience of others, it was probably no more than £20 per annum. Harmon’s journal begins on April 29, 1800, the day he left Lachine for the West, travelling in one of thirty canoes, all heavily laden with supplies, and bound for the Company’s central rendezvous and depot at Grand Portage, on Lake Superior.

In the next nineteen years, the period covered by his diary, Harmon served the Company in five different trading-areas. His first five years were spent in the Swan River District, which lay to the west of Lake Winnipegosis, in what is now Manitoba and eastern Saskatchewan. The chief posts at which he was stationed were Swan River Fort and Bird Mountain, both on Swan River, and Fort Alexandria, on the upper waters of the Assiniboine River. Harmon travelled to this first assignment by a northern route, but when he left the district he made a great circle to the south, by way of Fort Qu’Appelle, the future site of Winnipeg at the junction of the Assiniboine and the Red, and the Red River itself.

Three shorter spells of duty in three widely separated areas followed. He spent two seasons in the valley of the Saskatchewan—the first (1805–06) at South Branch House, on the South Saskatchewan River, and the second (1806–07) further east at Cumberland House, one of the Company’s most important traffic centres. When the time came to assign staff to the various posts for the winter of 1807–08, Harmon was not well. For this reason he was sent to Sturgeon Lake Fort, in the Nipigon District, where Dr. John McLoughlin, then a young medical officer, was to be stationed. By the spring of 1808, Harmon’s health had improved greatly, and he was assigned to Dunvegan, on the Peace River, in the famed Athabaska District. There he spent two years and found life very agreeable.

The summer of 1810 was a dividing point in Harmon’s career. Hitherto he had served mostly on the prairies. He was now directed to cross the Rocky Mountains and take charge of a post in New Caledonia, a huge ill-defined area corresponding roughly to the Cariboo country and the central interior of what is now British Columbia. This was a new trading-district, for although Alexander Mackenzie had spied out the land beyond the Rockies on his famous journey to the Pacific Ocean in 1793, the North West Company did not begin trading there until 1805. Simon Fraser, Harmon’s Bennington-born colleague, built a post that year at McLeod Lake—the oldest continuously-occupied white settlement in Canada, west of the Rocky Mountains. Harmon spent nine years in New Caledonia, and the last pages of his journal describe his journey eastward to Fort William in the summer of 1819, when he finally left the district. For the greater part of his stay he was in charge of the post on Stuart Lake (later renamed Fort St. James), but he spent one long spell of duty, lasting almost two and a half years, at Fraser Lake (Fort Fraser).

No complete record of Harmon’s service in the North West Company is known to exist, but a good many details are now available.

His first engagement as a clerk, which it will be remembered was for a term of seven years, expired in 1807. It was then renewed for an eighth year. In July 1808, when he was being sent to Dunvegan, Harmon signed an agreement to remain at Athabaska at least three years, and his journal states that his salary was to be one hundred pounds Halifax Currency [the equivalent of ninety pounds sterling] per annum, besides being furnished with Cloathing and victuals &c. &c. 3

As already mentioned, Harmon remained only two years in Athabaska, and then moved on to New Caledonia in the fall of 1810. His journal shows that he was offered two alternatives at this time: he could assume the superintendency of New Caledonia immediately, or, if he preferred, he could go to the district as assistant to the superintendent (John Stuart), in the expectation of taking over the office in the spring. Harmon chose the latter course, influenced largely, it would seem, by reports that the salmon run in New Caledonia had failed, and his feeling that someone who knew the district well could cope better with the shortage of food and other difficulties that had resulted. This cautious decision was probably best for the Company, but it certainly delayed Harmon’s personal advancement. Spring came, but the expected transfer of authority did not take place; Harmon’s salary continued at the old rate of £100 Halifax currency per annum. No reference to the change in plan is made in the journal, and Harmon evidently bore no grudge, for he and Stuart became firm friends.

An enormous old North West Company ledger, now preserved in the Archives of the Hudson’s Bay Company, throws some light on Harmon’s later career. This volume contains the personal accounts of the Company’s servants for the years 1811–21. It shows that Harmon continued to receive a salary of £100 Halifax currency per annum until 1817. 4 The last credit entry, dated 1818, added a further £50 to his account, being salary short credited last year. This would seem to indicate that his remuneration was increased to £150 for the year 1817, and the absence of credit entries for later years shows that he became a wintering partner—a full-fledged bourgeois of the North West Company—in 1818. It would be this new and important status (to which, oddly enough, he makes no reference in his journal) that enabled him to travel eastward in the summer