After the council of war in the Great Hall at Fort William, Grant readily went to work. Raiding parties of voyageurs and their Indian allies swept down on unsuspecting farmers in their fields. Meanwhile, nature itself turned against the settlers, as drought and Red River floods took turns ravaging their crops. Finally, by the end of the summer of 1815, all but 13 die-hard households had abandoned their landholdings-and their dreams. Eventually, even these hardy survivors gave up and trudged off, their last sight the howling French Canadians and Métis putting to the torch their beloved cottages.

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On their way out, the refugees ran into Colin Robertson, a Hudson’s Bay officer, who persuaded them to return to the settlement to harvest what was left of their crops. At the same time, more Scottish immigrants arrived under the leadership of Robert Semple, who was not only the new governor of the colony (the Nor’Westers had jailed the impetuous Mcdonnell) but also the head of the Bay Company’s northern and southern departments. There was now no doubt in the mind of the Nor’Westers that the Selkirk Settlement and the Hudson’s Bay Company were one and the same.In the growing tension, Robertson struck first. On March 17, 1816, Robertson attacked and seized the Nor’Westers’ Fort Gibraltar. In the fort, Robertson found information that the Nor’Westers planned to attack the Red River colony in force that summer. He informed Semple of this alarming news and, before he left the region, told the governor to prepare for war. But he gave Semple no orders to strike first.

Nevertheless, the fire-breathing governor-on the very day in June that Robertson departed-dealt the first blow by torching the captured Fort Gibraltar. Aroused to fury, the voyageurs were led to all-out war by Grant. The result was the fatal confrontation between the Nor’Westers and Semple’s party at the Seven Oaks, on June 19, 1816. Semple and his followers were no match for the hard-riding Nor’Westers, who could kill a bull buffalo with one shot from their rifles while at the gallop on their wiry Indian ponies. That night, the mournful cry of the loon was the only sound heard over the mutilated bodies of Semple and his men.The shots fired in Seven Oaks grove transformed a sporadic backwoods conflict between the two companies into full- scale war. On August 12, just two months after the Seven Oaks massacre, Douglas himself led an attack on the Northwest citadel at Fort William with a mercenary army composed of veterans of the de Watteville regiment and others who had fought against Napoleon. Taking the post, Douglas not only captured senior partner William McGillivray, who had raised Grant, but also damning evidence of the rewards paid to the voyageurs for the atrocity at Seven Oaks.

Nowhere did the trade war flare so dangerously as in the Athabasca country, the plentiful beaver area surrounding Lake Athabasca in Saskatchewan and Alberta provinces. The Nor’Westers retaliated for the seizure of Fort William by striking fast and hard to take five Hudson’s Bay posts in the Athabasca land. The richer Bay Company, however, responded by sending a brigade of 200 men under Robertson, which quickly shifted the balance of power in the area. Then, in a daring move, Nor’Westers Simon McGillivray, Jr., and Joseph Black kidnapped Robertson at gunpoint while he was outside the Bay Company’s Fort Wedderburn reading the funeral service for a man killed in a fishing mishap.But Robertson was not a man to be undone easily. He was imprisoned at Fort Chipewyan in a shack located next door to the outpost’s maladorous privy. Yet from his cell, he managed to spirit messages outside the fort to Bay Company comrades in Fort Wedderburn. Discovered one day busily writing another coded note, Robertson was bundled off in a canoe for Montreal, the capital of the North West Fur Company, where he could be kept under more watchful eye. As the birchbark canoe ferrying him tried to shoot the rapids at Ile-á-la-Crosse, the fragile craft capsized. Two of his keepers drowned, but Robertson survived. When the party passed Cumberland House, Robertson asked permission of the voyageurs to go inside to say farewell to some old friends. Once inside, Robertson simply made his escape by having the doors barred and refusing to come out again. The voyageurs, their prize quarry eluding their grasp, traveled on without him.

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