Alexander Henry | Biography

Alexander Henry, the Elder--so named to distinguish him from his son, Alexander, and from his nephew, Alexander Henry, the Younger, who also kept memorable journals of his twenty-three years in the fur trade with the North West Company--is remembered today principally for his account of sixteen important years in his life and in Canadian history. Travels and Adventures in Canada and the Indian Territories, Between the Years 1760 and 1776 was first published in 1809 and has since been published and reprinted in many versions, some of them abridged, with the first edition edited and corrected by an unknown hand to smooth the rough edges of Henry's style. The importance of Henry's account of his travels, which he divided into two parts, lies not so much in its documentary accuracy--there are errors in chronology, and his estimates of distances between points in his travels are sometimes inaccurate--as in its vivid portrayal of Henry's experiences as the second Englishman (Henry Bostwick was the first) to travel from Montreal via the Ottawa River, Lake Nippissing, and the French River to Michilimackinac (Mackinaw City, Michigan) in order to trade with the Indians. Henry's account of his adventures, including his observations of the Indian character and way of life, is celebrated as a classic adventure tale; in particular, his firsthand recollection of the infamous massacre at Fort Michilimackinac on 2 June 1763-from which Henry barely escaped with his own life--is the most vivid rendition in Canadian writing of what has become a legendary episode. This section of Henry's journal has also been drawn upon by other writers in their historical and fictional reconstructions of this period--by the American historian Francis Parkman (The Conspiracy of Pontiac, 1851), for example, and Canada's first native-born novelist, John Richardson, in his best-known work, Wacousta (1832). On the strength of Travels and Adventures, Henry is usually grouped with four other writers of roughly the same period whose works are essentially shaped as documentary accounts of travel and exploration in Canada: Samuel Hearne, Alexander Mackenzie, David Thompson, and Capt. John Franklin.

Henry was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in August 1739 to English parents: Alexander Henry, a merchant, and Elizabeth Henry. His life in Canada began when, at the age of twenty, he traveled as a supplier to the British forces on their advance to Montreal in 1760. Montreal's surrender on 8 September opened the country to English traders, and in 1761, guided by Etienne Charles Campion, Henry traveled by canoe to Michilimackinac, the central trading post in the region. The Indians at this time were still allies of the French and suspicious of the English; Henry therefore (unsuccessfully) attempted to disguise himself as a French trader but was eventually "adopted" as a brother by Wawatam, an Ojibway chief, and was able to trade with both the French and the Indians.

The massacre at Michilimackinac was precipitated by the Ottawa chief Pontiac, who led an Indian uprising in 1763 against the British in the Northwest. The Indians' ruse to gain entrance to the fort has also become part of the lore about this incident: outside of the enclosure, the Chippewa and Saakie tribes began a fierce game of "baggatiway," or as the French in Canada called it at the time, "le jeu de la crosse," from which la crosse derives. On the pretext of retrieving a ball that had fallen inside the fort, the Indians rushed in and attacked the English. Henry ran to the house of Charles Langlade, where he hid for a time before being discovered; he was threatened with death several times but was rescued by Wawatam. Henry then lived with Wawatam and his family for almost one year, moving with them on their rounds of fishing and hunting.

Henry's account of the attack at Michilimackinac is vivid and immediate, although his description of the Indians is steeped in the conventional language and style of the period: "Through an aperture, which afforded me a view of the area of the fort, I beheld, in shapes the foulest and most terrible, the ferocious triumphs of barbarian conquerors. The dead were scalped and mangled; the dying were writhing and shrieking, under the unsatiated knife and tomahawk; and, from the bodies of some ripped open, their butchers were drinking the blood, scooped up in the hollow of joined hands, and quaffed amid shouts of rage and victory. I was shaken, not only with horror, but with fear. The sufferings which I witnessed, I seemed on the point of experiencing."

Although the passages recalling this episode are the ones most often cited from Travels and Adventures, the work also remains interesting for Henry's many detailed observations of Indian customs, for his accounts of his extensive travels in the upper Great Lakes region, and, in part 2, his journeys on Lake Superior and into the Canadian Northwest, where he traveled in 1775 with Peter Pond and Joseph and Thomas Frobisher in a bid to challenge the Hudson's Bay Company's hold on trading in the area.

Pursuing his interests in fur trading in the Northwest, Henry traveled to England and France in 1776, and returned to England in 1778, 1780, and 1781, eventually settling in Montreal, where he became a merchant but remained involved in the fur trade. In the 1780s and 1790s Henry was active in helping the North West Company ship furs to China, an enterprise that had become involved in the fur trade; in 1812 brought him into contact with John Jacob Astor, the noted American merchant. In 1785 Henry married Julia Ketson; their daughter Julia had been born in 1780, and four sons, Alexander, William, Robert, and John, were born between 1782 and 1786. The year of his marriage he was also one of the nineteen founders of the famous Beaver Club of Montreal, and he served as a justice of the peace from 1794 to 1821. By the time he wrote Travels and Adventures, a new generation Henry was appointed "vendue master and auctioneer for the district of Montreal." He died in Montreal at the age of eighty-five in 1824; the travels and adventures that he had so vividly recreated had taken place over sixty years earlier. Nearly 230 years later, his experiences, recollected in a narrative that has itself been transformed by later historians and novelists alike, resonate as faint but persistent echoes and trace the filaments of legend in the contemporary Canadian imagination.