Les Annales du FAS

À travers les remarquables exploits des aventuriers de la North West Company, qui défièrent courageusement pendant plusieurs décennies le pouvoir et la majesté de la Hudson’s Bay Company dans leur conquête du nouveau continent, le livre relate durant quelques pages les activités hivernales de ces “barons de la fourrure” :

The fur trade was a demanding but highly seasonal entreprise. While the rivers were frozen the Montreal-based nouveaux riches devoted their energies to outdoing one another at lavishly catered sleigh rides, card tournaments, private musical recitals and masked balls. One former winterer shod his favourite horse with silver and galloped through the city’s poorer districts, scattering showers of coins. He also loved riding into particulary fancy restaurants and ordering the animal a full-course meal. It was a comfortable if self-indulgent existence, but like veterans who can never transcend their time in the trenches, the citified Nor’Westers yearned to recapture the wild freedom and excitement of the frontier. Something, anything, to make the adrenalin pump again.

Thoses urges found their outlet in February 1785 with the founding of the Beaver Club, which became the quintessential NWC institution. Nothing like it could have been created by the prosaïc ramrods then in charge of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Despite its astronomical liquor consumption, the Beaver Club was much more than an urban watering hole. Here the Nor’Westers could abandon artificial dignities and re-create those heady times that had given meaning to their lives. Because it was only among their own that such nostalgia was lifted above it’s more mundane level of providing an excuse to get drunk and break furniture, membership in the Beaver Club was limited to fifty-five fur traders who had spent at least one full season in le pays d’en haut. Club rules were simple but rigidly followed. On admission, each new member had a gold medal struck, engraved with his name, initial wintering date and the club motto : “Fortitude in distress.” […] The repasts were convened at prestigious local dining-rooms […] where meals were served on the club’s crested crystal and china with matching silver cutelry. […]

Usually no one was sober enough to keep minutes of the proceedings, but Georges T. Landmann, a visiting British officer, left this description of a typical meeting in his Adventures and Recollections : “In those days we dined at 4 o’clock, and after taking a satisfactory quantity of wine, the married man… retired, leaving about a dozen to drink to their health. We now began in right earnest and true Highland style, and by 4 o’clock in the morning, the whole of us had arrived at such a state of perfection, that we could all sing admirably, we could all drink like fishes and we all thought we could dance on the table without disturbing a single decanter, glass or plate… but on making the experiment we discovered that it was a complete delusion, and ultimately, we broke all the plates, glasses, bottles, etc., and the tables also, and worse than that all the heads and hands of the party received many severe contusion, cuts and scratches… I was afterwards informed that one hundred and twenty bottles of wine had been consumed at our convivial meeting.”

Landmann diary noted the presence of a dozen guests at the gathering, which translated into an incredible ten bottles of wine each - but that tally did not include the large quantities of ale, porter, gin and brandy also drowned on these occasions.

Peter C. Newman, Caesars of the Wilderness

Moi qui pensais que nous avions un quotidien délirant