When the natives came to the posts, bringing the products of their hunting and trapping from far-off swamps and forests, business was postponed till they had indulged in a wild drinking-bout. Liquor made them furious, and turned them into fiends incarnate, desperate and murderous to all within their reach; so that this drunken and reckless riot was prepared for by the squaws, by taking away and hiding all the weapons of their lords and masters.
The name “fire-water” has a most expressive signification, and a pertinence not always found when we go to the roots of words. A cheap and maddening kind of intoxicating liquor, manufactured in England, was brought thence in great quantities by the Company's vessels, and distributed among its posts. For convenience of transport by boat or portage, it was divided from the barrel into small kegs or runlets, holding one or two gallons. The appreciable value of the liquor for barter, and its ferocious effects upon the savages in its full proof, soon led to a custom of reducing it by equal or larger parts of water, so that the contents of one keg might be parted into two or three. But the Indians had become expert enough to test the deception. The reduced commodity palmed on them as the pure article would extinguish fire; but the real, original, true stuff would support a flame. Hence rightfully the term “fire-water.” The mischief wrought by intoxicating liquors among the Indians has had a more deadly effect upon them all over the continent than has war, or the small-pox, or the plague. Very early in the operations of the Hudson Bay Company, restraints, and then an interdict, were put on the introduction of spirituous liquors among the Indians. Occasionally the restriction may have availed, but for the most part it was futile. More than one plain-spoken savage who had had experience of this “fire-water” is credited with this description of it: “It could only have been distilled from the hearts
