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theological hybrids-Presbyterian Jesuits who believed that a fixed dose of
piety could be exchanged for a prescribed sprinkling of grace.*-
With all that self -righteousness burning inside him, Smith could never
forgive himself for having taken up with Isabella Hardisty, then another
man's wife. It had happened in Labrador under perfectly understandable
circumstances, and his own marriage to Isabella lasted sixty-one vears,
but the whispers never let up. As late as 1888, two decades after Smith
had left the North, Sir Henry Tyler, president of the Grand Trunk Rail-
way, confided to Lady Tyler that Smith's "wife is said to have another
husband." Smith grew so desperate to quell such rumours that at nearly
every important juncture of his career, he remarried Isabella-no fewer
than four times.
An equally serious source of guilt was Smith's sly betrayal of his fellow
fur traders. Although he had been one of their number for most of three
decades -and they had entrusted him with their savings and with repre-
senting their case for better working conditions to the London board,
Smith instead struck a deal that allowed the Company to acquire for next
to nothing the traders' legitimate 40-percent share of profits. The once
proud partners were reduced to ill-paid employees, shut out

*Scottish puritanisin knew few linuts. Canadian novelist Hugh MacLennan
recalled that Sir William Dawson, the renowned Scottish -educated
peologist who became principal of McGill University in 1855, once led
fifty-seven other members of the congregation out of the Presbeterian
church on Montreal's Stanlev Street when the minister dared install an
organ. The choir had previously used only a tuning-fork to pitch their
hyms, and Dawson was convinced that the new musical instrulnent would
sully the austcre purity of the service.
THE MAN WHO BECAME A COUNTRY 19 THE MAN WHO BECAME A C

from revenues generated by sale of the land they and their predecessors
had claimed and protected for two centuries.
All in all, Donald Alexander Smith may have been the most intriguing
rogue in Canadian commercial historya distinction that covers a lot of
territory. Certainly, he was the most successful.
 CHAPTER 2

GROWING UP COLD

'A nian wbo bas been fi-ozen and roasted
b - 1, turns ez er), year must be the tougbei-fior it,
ifbe survi. le it at all.
-Donald A. Sinith

DONALD SMITH'S PEREMPTORY ARROGANCE was particularly galling to those
aware of his inconspicuous beginnings. He wai born on August 6, 1820, at
Forres, a storied Scottish trading town in that brooding countryside where
Shakespeare's Macbeth and Banquo encountered the prophetic trio of
witches. One of three sons and three daughters, lie was much less
influenced by his father, a shopkeeper clinging to solvency with alcoholic