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Alexander Henry and the
Historical LandscapeAnne Kelsch

 by Dr. Anne Kelsch
University of North Dakota
History Department
 

 Alexander Henry

See Alexander Henry the Younger’s Life in a Timeline Here
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 In many ways Alexander Henry the Younger was a man typical of his time and place. Born in the British colony of New Jersey around 1765 to a family of educated merchants, his ancestry in the New World traced back to early eighteenth century immigrants from the west of England. Henry’s uncle, Alexander Henry the Elder, made important commercial connections by supplying the British Army during the French and Indian War (1756-63). With a British victory, these relationships opened the vast, newly conquered land of former French North America to the family business. In fact, Henry Alexander Henry the Elderthe Elder (left) missed being the first Englishman to receive a fur-trade pass in this new reach of the Empire by only a few days. Working first on the Hudson River out of Albany, the Henrys moved their operations north to Montreal during the era of political tension that led to the American Revolution. As leader of the family’s fur-trading business, Alexander Henry the Elder would stretch their interests from the Great Lakes to China.1

 Like a number of his male cousins and his brother Robert, Henry the Younger joined the family business. Under his uncle’s patronage he became a shareholder in the Montreal-based North West Company in 1792, and until his death twenty-two years later he traveled through the western regions of the British Empire in North America, from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean, in the Company’s service. Were it not for the existence of his journal, little else would be known about him.2  While the North West Company required all its traders to maintain a post journal,3 the depth and uniqueness of Henry’s has saved his memory from the fate that met most of his contemporaries in the trade. To quote a vast understatement by the journal’s most recent editor, “Henry possessed an intense interest in the world around him.”4  Furthermore, while others in the trade directed their eyes toward their eastern home base, “Henry kept his on the wilderness and its realities.”5 An astute observer, as well as a prolific diarist (his writings fill both sides of 1,642 pages of legal paper), Henry kept record of his everyday life in the region which would become northeastern North Dakota: first at the confluence of the Park and Red rivers (1800) and then at the Pembina and Red rivers (1801-1808). He also built and returned to feeder posts at Pembina Mountain, Turtle River and the confluence of the Red and Red Lake rivers. As well, Henry made extensive journal entries (some 63,000 words) about his month-long stay at the Mandan and Hidatsa villages on the Missouri River, which he left just days before Lewis and Clark returned on the eastward leg of their famous expedition in 1806. Henry continued to write as he left the Red River Valley in 1808, heading west. His last entry came in the evening of May 21, 1814 at Fort George (Astoria). The next day Henry’s boat capsized on a notoriously difficult passage across the Columbia River and he drowned.

 While Elliot Coues, the original editor of Henry’s journals, overstated the case when he wrote, “Henry’s is an absolutely unvarnished tale,”6 it is indisputable that in faithfully recording his observations, Henry created a remarkably useful source. Ethnographers, historians of the fur trade, and anthropologists have examined his abundant detail to understand Indian life and trade relations in the Northern Great Plains and the Pacific Northwest. Henry’s flowing descriptions of terrain, flora, and fauna have provided rich resources for students of geography and natural history. Henry’s frequent descriptions of the land and the environment in which he lived and worked also offer the historian of society and culture a unique opportunity. While the land has its own reality, Henry molded that into a meaningful image — a “landscape.”  This landscape tells us much about Henry and his world for “landscape is defined by our vision and interpreted in our minds . . . landscape displays us as culture.”7 In fact, Brian Osborn argues, “European renderings of the ‘natural world’ of North America were more projections of European ideas, values and tastes than reflections of American realities.”8 The impressions of the land and environment that Henry left allow us to see how the remote prairies and plains of the British Empire were viewed in the early nineteenth century, and that view reveals important political, cultural, and social assumptions of the era.
 

Henry and the Landscape of the Red River Valley

 Henry had a history that would imply a deep interest in imperial affairs; he came of age at the time of the American Revolutionary War and his family made the decision to relocate in British North America during the birth pangs and founding of the New Republic. He also lived in the Red River Valley at a time when the region played an important role in international disputes. The Northern Great Plains was a rich and important resource for the British Empire, both in terms of its own development and its competition with expanding American interests in the Northwest. Furthermore, despite distance, imperial matters were not remote from Henry’s daily life. Like other North West Company traders, Henry moved in 1803 from summer gatherings in Grand Portage to Kaministiquia (renamed Fort William in 1807) as the company sought to avoid international tariffs set after the American border was drawn at Pigeon River. Henry also arrived at the Upper Missouri villages a few months after the visit of Lewis and Clark, who had left numerous signs and symbols of a growing American political presence in their wake. Yet even though Henry saw evidence of larger political forces at work, his journal is surprisingly apolitical. Henry did not describe the land in terms of its relationship to Britain and there is little direct evidence in his writings that he inhabited a region at the crux of two great expanding empires.

 Henry thought of the land in terms of trade, rather than politics. For him “the opposition” was not American expansion, but the Hudson Bay and XY companies. Appropriately then, Henry approached his natural environment primarily as a businessman, and his written landscapes typically reflect the land’s role in helping or hindering his trade. Henry uses the word “ugly” to describe portages that slowed his progress across the arteries that connect Fort William to Lake Winnipeg, muskeg swamps that hindered his path across the plains, and bogs that pocked the region around the Red Lake River, sinking Henry’s horses in mud “sometimes to their knees.”9 On the other hand, good travel conditions inspired Henry’s aesthetic appreciation: “At twelve o’clock we came to the firm ground, of fine plains and as delightful a country as on the west side.”10  “A fine level country” meant ease, a “beautiful road” accelerated travel, and “pretty rising grounds” featured easily crossed short grass. This utilitarian aesthetic led Henry to describe the land south of his Pembina River Fort as “beautiful, level and open.”11  The same was true of the environment: harsh or temperate weather conditions inspired vivid descriptions that convey Henry’s frustration or relief as a man with places to go and profits to maintain.

 Henry’s descriptions of the land also ring with its abundance, which he primarily perceived in terms of human consumption. Frequent passages reflect Henry’s wonder at “buffalo as far as the eye could reach . . . the meadows alive with them.”  They came in immense waves (Henry counted fifteen herds from the Park River Post one morning), covering the ground “at every point of the compass, as far as the Eye could penetrate,” making the surrounding plains “black  . . . and as if in motion.”12  Massive flocks of geese, swans, ducks, cranes and passenger pigeons darkened the sky each spring and fall, providing fine sport and eating.13  Henry’s men caught sturgeon, catfish, doré, laiche, and other fish in great numbers. Numerous bald eagles fed on buffalo carcasses in the spring and even served as a meal in a pinch.14  Henry marveled at the seemingly infinite supply of whitetail deer, elk and bear, and at the thickness of their backfat when dressed.15  The size and beauty of the trees, especially the oaks — “as straight as a reed, and not a branch to be seen for 30 to 50 feet from the ground” — allowed his men to construct the fort easily. Henry wrote enthusiastically, “There is an abundance of wood on the banks of the river to answer every purpose for civilization for many ages to come.”16 A few years later he records that his men have used “an Oak Stick of 75 feet without splicing” as a flagpole.17  Amazed at the resources there for the taking, Henry declared that the Red River runs “through as pleasant a country as there is in America, with plenty of water for navigation, an excellent fertile soil, and the best of wood for every purpose.”18

 Henry’s appreciation of this tremendous bounty went hand and hand with his exploitation of it. When he arrived in the Red River Valley, Henry seemed to perceive no end to the wildlife and other resources on the land around him. Indeed, the extent of that bounty is difficult to perceive from a twenty-first century perspective.19  Today it is virtually impossible to imagine a buffalo population so great that for weeks in the spring their carcasses clogged the river thickly enough for Indian women to walk across them to collect fat and tongues.20 In his journal John McDonnell, another North West Company trader, noted that he sat down on the bank of the Red River near the confluence of the Assiniboine in May of 1797 to count floating buffalo corpses and tallied 7,360 in one day.21 In light of this, it is not surprising that from the very first buffalo Henry sighted (which he proudly shot, taking only the tongue and leaving the remainder for “the crows and wolves”22), through hundreds of pages of journal entries, he recounts innumerable hunting parties — “fine sport” — in which carcasses are abandoned entirely. Typical of his time and culture, Henry assumed that the land and its resources were limitless.

 Increasingly this assumption would directly contradict Henry’s experience in the fur trade, which suffered greater pressure and competition due to depletion of resource.23  In 1800 Henry frequently recorded an abundance of beaver in the region. Just five years later he remarked ominously, “the country was almost destitute of beaver and other furs.”  In July of the following year (1806), his visit to the Hair (Pembina) Hills led him to write: “The country is now destitute of beaver and other good furs, and the returns would not pay expenses.”  While travelling to the Souris River the next month, Henry observed, “Beaver formerly were plenty[ful] here also, but at the present they are getting scarce, a few vestiges only are now to be seen.”24  The fur trade required a “continued extension of its limits into new countries”25 as animals became scarcer. Indeed, this is what determined Henry’s own movement westward. In 1800-01 the region yielded 1, 475 beaver pelts. In 1807-08 that number had dwindled to 542.26

 One of the most striking attitudes Henry exhibited in his writing was his determination to overcome the environment in order personally to monitor his outposts and business interests. In the harshest winter months, Henry continued to travel regularly to his feeder posts, other North West Company forts and even into new territory to create business opportunities. Trudging through ice and snow, facing brutal wind, suffering from snow blindness, frostbite, thirst and hunger — at one point lost for days in an extreme winter storm, “starving with cold and hunger”27 — Henry relentlessly ventured forth in pursuit of profits. During the months of January and February he typically made several journeys that lasted between four and thirty days in duration. En route Henry and his men camped, at times forced by blizzards to hunker down in the open.

 While Henry was surprisingly mobile and apparently thought little of setting off cross-country, his journeys were not easy endeavors even under the best circumstances. Dog teams facilitated travel when there was a sound snow pack. At all other times horses served unreliably at best. Although he constantly worried about his horses being stolen, more often they loosed their hobbles and returned to the fort rider-less, or escaped entirely. Abandoned by his horse on one occasion, “choking with thirst” and with shoes “entirely worn out,” Henry encountered porcupine grass “not more than two inches high, about the thickness of an awl, and fully as sharp.  . . . When it pierces the skin the point breaks off and remains in the flesh.”  He “crawl[ed] along in great misery and pain.”28  Horses repeatedly floundered in the ice and mud. “Plagued by mosquitoes” the animals threw their riders, threatened to roll with them, or trampled them in their beds at night. They tripped violently over tree roots in the woods and deep cracks in the soil created by drought on the plains, scraped men on branches and trees, came precariously close to falling into pits dug to capture wolves, and inflicted frequent injuries.

 While the environment made travel difficult, it also made daily life incredibly uncomfortable and annoying. “Swarms of fleas, hopping in every direction” infested Henry and his men, and they had to remove vermin from their clothing daily.29  Henry described “droves” of mice, running over the floors, destroying all non-metal objects at the fort, and taking everything they could carry. At night buffalo bellowed, wolves howled, and rodents woke them “by passing in numbers over our faces, and playing in swarms upon our bed coverings.”30  Wolves followed Henry and his men, hounding their tents at night. 31  Summer besieged them with insects. While smudges or “bitter smoke” provided minimal relief, it blinded the eyes and choked the throat.

 Among all the aggravations the physical environment imposed, mosquitoes drove Henry most to distraction. Travelling to the Mandan and Hidatsa villages on the Missouri, a deep stream forced Henry and his men to raft their dry goods. The raft drifted too far and they had to retrieve it “intirely [sic] naked so that the Misquitoes [sic] had their pleasure with us.”  That evening “clouds of Misquetoes . . . annoyed us to such a degree as to prevent us from taking any supper.”  After being kept awake all night by the pests, Henry tersely noted the following day (July 9, 1806), “Misquitoes always tormenting us as usual. . . . We suffered such intolerable swarms of those troublesome insects hovering round us in such thick clouds as nearly to prevent our taking breath.”32 On the return trip a month later, they swam across to collect wood for a raft. The raft supported little weight and transporting their goods proved difficult. Henry noted: “The Misquitoes were most intolerable and as we were obliged to remain naked for about four hours, we suffered very much. It may be more easy to form an idea of our unpleasant situation than I can describe it.” Harassed by insects, Henry’s horse broke his fetters and ran, leaving him “under the cruel necessity of persueing [sic] him in the Plains intirely [sic] naked and not a shoe to put upon my feet.”  After this ordeal Henry observed: “the stings of Misquetoes [sic] . . . almost covered my body.”33

 A source of constant irritations, the Northern Great Plains environment also posed a number of real threats to its inhabitants. Extremes of both cold and hot weather were common. Flooding regularly required the movement of supplies even though the Pembina Fort stood thirty feet above the river’s level in the fall. Fires were a persistent hazard. In one eight-month period (March 24,1804-November 25, 1804), Henry recorded seven fires, most of which were widespread “appear[ing] in the Plains in every direction all over the country,” “raging in every direction,” and leaving decimation in their wake.34 Henry poignantly notes the “blind buffalo to be seen wandering about every moment. The poor blind beasts have all their hair singed off.”35 During his stay on the Pembina River, fire spread twice to Henry’s fort (May 5, 1804 and December 18, 1805), burning the stockade and some buildings. Henry’s own home was in danger of loss and fire singed his library.

 Sheer physical danger and hardship characterized much of Henry’s life in the fur trade. While at times the frustration of his physical environment inspired terse reflection, for the most part Henry took the circumstances with tremendous calm.36 Ironically, the very real threat to survival that this isolated and hostile environment posed did little to alter his immediate vision of the land as beautiful and abundant.37  Rarely did Henry dwell on the difficulty of or danger to his life. In fact Henry’s stoic response reveals an opportunity the land and environment provided to prove his masculinity and his worth. Henry’s need to establish mastery over the land (or his refusal to acknowledge the land’s dominance) reflected cultural definitions of appropriate male behavior. In this remote territory, far from established legal systems, Henry had little coercive authority over his post and needed every instrument available to maintain his position in the class and race hierarchy of the trade.38  For example, hunting (which became the ultimate symbol of masculinity in the Victorian era39) allowed Henry to exhibit his skill and prowess. He hunted frequently, more often than not for sheer sport and at times with great recklessness. On his first buffalo hunt, Henry took pride in accomplishing a feat his Indian guide stated was impossible and thereby earning respect.40  Henry’s environment allowed him to display courage, strength, individualism, and resourcefulness: all qualities that granted and maintained his status. Thus he constructed a reputation as a man of power and authority which was essential to his ability to manage and direct the affairs of the post.41
 

Aesthetic Response

 Perhaps Henry’s most interesting and distinguishing response to the difficult environment he inhabited was an aesthetic one. While other traders typically “described the territory as a wasteland” or indicated that its comforts were only suited to native peoples,42 Henry reveled in its beauty and had a genuine interest in the land. In this way he was unique: the Mandan and Hidatsa on the upper Missouri found it difficult to accept that he had come “so far [from the Red River Valley] out of mere curiosity, as they said that all white People that came here, came with a view to trade.”43  One of the first things Henry did after selecting a building site at the confluence of the Park and Red rivers was to choose a tall oak, cut down small trees that obscured his view, and open up a vista across the Plains. While this served as a look out, it also inspired Henry’s pen. Taking “my usual morning view from the top of my oak,”44 Henry absorbed the “delightful country” — a phrase he used repeatedly — surrounding him. In contrast to the image of masculinity that Henry projected publicly, his private reflections on the landscape were sensitive and finely drawn. Perched alone atop his tree, Henry could retreat from both the responsibilities and the challenges of his work and allow a different voice to emerge.

  The landscape that Henry described was often idealized. As one of the first Europeans to inhabit the region, Henry found himself confronted with his own cultural image of it as wilderness, even though he understood its place in the midst of an old and sophisticated trading network. Wilderness, so often equated with Eden, was untouched, pristine. Henry’s internal image of this idealized landscape at times contrasted with the land he experienced. In reality, the landscape was marred, most often by nature itself, which created disorder and disarray. Thus Henry wrote:

 The ravages of the buffalo at this place [near the confluence of the Red and Pembina rivers] is certainly astonishing, to a person not accustomed to the meadows. The beach which was once a soft black mud .  . . is now as hard as pavement, occasioned by the numerous herds, coming down here to drink. The willows are intirely [sic] trampled and torn to atoms; even the bark of the smaller trees is rub’d off by the Buffalo rubbing or scratching themselves against them.The Grass upon the bank of the river is entirely worn away. The numerous paths (some of which are a foot deep in the hard turf) which comes out of the Plains to the bank of the River, and the vast quantity of dung which lays in every direction, gives this place the appearance of a civilized Country where Cattle have been kept for many years.45

 At another spot on the Red where buffalo commonly crossed the river Henry remarked,

 The Ground along this river is beated (sic) by the Buffalo particularly at every turn in the river to the westw’d (sic) where the Plains run quite down to the water side and where there are herds coming down day and night to drink  . . . . The ground on both [sides] is beaten as hard as pavement and the numerous roads leading to it some of which are a foot deep, is really surprising the hard sod through which these tracks are beaten.46

 Ironically, Henry used the imagery of civilization (pavement and cattle yards), which he believed he had escaped, to depict this “ravaging.”  Similar to the buffalo, bears made “prodigious ravages” and Henry remarked, “The havoc they commit is astonishing; their dung lies about in the woods as plentiful as that of the buffalo in the meadow.”47
 

Conclusions

 Alexander Henry, like most Europeans pushing into the backcountry, had a very complicated relationship with the land. As one of the first Europeans to inhabit this region, Henry encountered the land in its “pristine” state and found it muddy and cold, full of dead buffalo, animal droppings, and mosquitoes. His journal threatens modern Romantic visions of “wilderness” which envision the land prior to European settlement in an idealized state. Understandably he saw the land in terms of potential profits and his reflections on the landscape often related to that utilitarian focus. But he also used his relationship with the land and its resources as a way of defining his own identity as a trader and a man. The land tested him against his understanding of himself and his culture. Furthermore, Henry viewed the land in aesthetic terms, as a source of tremendous beauty and relief from the hardship it was capable of inflicting. For Henry, the land provided wonder and joy in a life wrought with the very dangers and difficulties it created.

 The Northern Plains, no longer frequented by bison, elk or bear, have changed dramatically in the past two hundred years. Henry’s journal gives us both a view of the landscape as seen through the eyes of an early nineteenth century inhabitant and a rare glimpse into a land in which we now reside, but whose past is in many ways beyond our experience and imagination.
 

Endnotes

   1. David Armour,  “Alexander Henry, The Elder,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography (University of Toronto Press, 1987) 6: 316-318. Henry the Elder’s well-known writings are entitled Travels and Adventures in Canada and the Indian Territories between the Years 1760-1776, James Bain, ed. (Toronto: George N. Morang Co., 1901).

   2. Elliot Coues, the noted naturalist and author, edited and published Henry’s journals in 1897 under the title New Light on the Early History of the Greater Northwest: TheManuscript Journals of Alexander Henry and David Thompson, 1799-1814, 3 vols. (Minneapolis: Ross & Haines, 1897). The journal was recently re-edited by Barry Gough, ed., The Journal of Alexander Henry, the Younger, 1799-1814, 2 vols. (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1988, 1992). Henry’s actual journal is no longer extant. All published editions come from a handwritten copy created by George Coventry around 1824 which is housed at the Library of Parliament in Ottawa.

   3. L.F. Masson collected some of these journals in Les Bourgeois de la Compagnie du Nord-Ouest (New York: Antiquarian Press, 1960; reprint of 1889 ed.). In contrast to Henry’s, most are brief and centered solely on the trade.

   4. Gough, xv.

   5. Gough, xvii.

   6. Coues, xix.

   7. D.W. Meinig, ed., The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 3.

   8. “The Iconography of Canadian Art,” in Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, eds., The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolism, Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 163.

   9. Gough, 193 (7/8/1806); 77 (10/27/1800).

   10. Gough, 77 (10/27/1800).

   11. Gough, 41 (11/10/1800).

   12. Gough, 46 (9/ 6/ 1800); 54 (9/17/1800); 107 (1/14/1801).

   13. In describing the Indians near Fort Dauphin Henry notes, “Eggs of all sorts they also collect in abundance, even Canoe loads.” Gough, 195 (7/9/1806).

   14. Gough, 111 (3/9/1801); 66 (10/9/1800).

   15. For an accounting of the animals Henry writes about see Russell Reid and Clell Gannon, “Natural History Notes in the Journal of Alexander Henry,”North Dakota Quarterly 2 (1928): 168-200. Reid and Clell calculate that Henry and his men took 999 black bear skins and 21 grizzly skins between 1800 and 1808 (194).

   16. Gough, 92 (11/01/1800).

   17. Gough, 124 (11/28/1802).

   18. Gough, 92 (11/10/1800).

   19. It is striking to note that many of the animals Henry saw in great abundance (for example elk, black and grizzly bears, buffalo, wolves, and passenger pigeons) are no longer present in the region and many have faced extinction or near extinction.

   20. Gough, 113 (4/1/1801).

   21. “Some Account of the Red River (about 1797) with Extracts from His Journal 1793-1791” in Masson, 294.

   22. Gough, 33 (8/25/1800).

   23. See Ann Carlos, The North American Fur Trade, 1804-1821: A Study in the Life-Cycle of a Duopoly (New York: Grebner, 1986).

   24. Gough, 167 (1/1/1805); 283 (8/3/1806).

   25. James Ronda,  “Dreams and Discoveries: Exploring the American West, 1760-1815,” William and Mary Quarterly 46 (January 1989): 149.

   26. Ried and Clell, 184.

   27. Gough, 177 (10/5/1805).

   28. Gough, 68 (10/11/1800).

   29. Gough, 140 (4/19/1803); 290 (8/9/1806).

   30. Gough, 83 (11/4/1803).

   31. According to Henry, “mad wolves” commonly attacked people. On November 2, 1800 he records an attempt by a wolf to steal an Indian child from a tent (Gough, 82).

   32. Gough, 193-4 (7/8-9/1806).

   33. Gough, 291-2 (8/11/1806).

   34. Gough, 165 (9/24/1804); 166 (11/11/1804).

   35. Gough, 166 (11/25/1804).

   36. In this regard the journal of Francois Victor Malhoit offers a dramatic contrast to Henry’s. “A Wisconsin Fur-Trader’s Journal, 1804-5,” Collections of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin XIX: 163-233.

   37. Annette Kolodney discusses this response to the American landscape, which she refers to as the “pastoral impulse,” in The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975).

   38.  See Leslie Ritchi, “Expectations of Grease and Provisions: The Circulation of Fur Trade Foodstuffs,” Eighteenth Century Life 23 (1999): 124-142 for a discussion of how the distribution of food maintained this hierarchy. See also Scott Hamilton, “Dynamics of Social Complexity in Early Nineteenth-Century British Fur-trade Posts,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 4 (2000): 217-271.

   39. John MacKenzie, “Imperial Pioneer and Hunter and the British Masculine Stereotype in Late Victorian and Edwardian Times,” in J.A. Mangan and James Walvin, eds., Manliness and Morality: Middle Class Masculinity in Britain and America 1800-1940 (New York: St. Martins, 1987), 176-197.

   40. Gough, 65 (8/25/1800).

   41. There is a growing body of literature on cultural definitions of masculinity (see for example Mangan and Walvin, above), however little of this work deals with the fur trade.

  42. R. Douglas Francis, Images of the West: Responses to the Canadian Prairies (Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books,1989), 5. Traders often described the region as hostile in order to discourage settlement that would hinder the trade.

  43. Gough, 218 (7/17/1806).

  44. Gough, 99 (9/18/1800).

  45. Gough, 32 (8/26/1800).

  46. Gough, 47 (9/6/1800).

  47. Gough, 102 (9/22/1800).