Caesars of the Wilderness [antikvár]

Prologue "The management of their affairs is like a commercial tomb, closed with the key of death to all except a favoured few. " —Andrew Freeport writing to Lord Palmerston about the HBC his real name was Henry Fuller Davis and he was a Yankee from Vermont who headed northwest to the Cariboo during the gold rush of the late 1850s to try his luck. He could neither read nor write—but he could measure. One rainy night he latched onto the fact that a twelve-foot strip of land between two of the most productive claims on Williams Creek had not been properly staked. So he grabbed for himself that tiny wedge of ground, which quickly yielded gold worth $15,000 and made him known far and wide as Twelve-Foot Davis. The bonanza soon exhausted itself, but unlike most of the other fortune hunters, Twelve-Foot Davis stayed on. He spent the rest of his life swapping goods for furs with local Indians, competing for a fading trade with the mighty Hudson's Bay Company. They say he never forgot a debt and always kept his tiny trading cabins stocked with emergency provisions as a welcome for weary travellers. According to one story, when a trapper named Johnny Split-Toe died before collecting what was due him for his pelts, Davis spent ten years searching for Johnny's son so that he could pay for them. During the last half of the nineteenth century, Davis was on the trading circuit between Soda Creek on the Fraser River, Fort Dunvegan and Peace River Crossing at the junction of the Peace and the Smoky, trying with little success to buck the Company store. He grew to despise the hbc, not for any particular incident but because being a free trader up against the enormous enterprise proved as tough a way to scratch a living as there was, especially for a man of his generous, if somewhat impractical, nature. XV