Simpson effected similar changes in relations with the Indians. The exchange of pelts and other produce for products of British manufacture was the common denominator in Indian Company relations, but prior to 1820 much variation in the trade between individual traders and specific bands had been possible. As well, in the management of support services to the Indians, such as gifts, medical assistance and sustenance to the elderly, orphaned and indigent, much variation and irregularity had arisen. Ties of kinship between traders and bands had introduced practices that were not in the best interests of a profitable trade from the metropolitan viewpoint. Simpson stopped such practices and systematically regulated the giving of gifts and the provision of medical aid and assistance to the needy. New services, such as (after 1835) vaccination for smallpox, were made available to native peoples. Bands in resource-poor areas in effect were "subsidized" until they were relocated in more productive areas or until fur returns improved. Native peoples, of the woodlands in particular, were not insensitive to the benefits accruing from Simpson's pursuit of improved efficiency.
Simpson's trading system permitted Indian bands to push into more distant areas and harsher environments in their pursuit of fancy furs. In such circumstances the Company's support services were essential. In time many bands became dependent upon Simpson's system for physical survival itself, and found that Company officers were making decisions that affected band interests without consultation. After 1820, Simpson's systematization of the fur trade tended to colonize the relationship between trader and trapper. The Plains and the West Coast peoples could ignore the consequences of Simpson's activities for a time, but after 1850 they too came to share the experience of their woodland brethren.
While consolidating the Company's operations during the 1820s, Simpson did not ignore opportunities to expand its operations into new regions. West of the Rocky Mountains he challenged the American pre-eminence in the coastal trade and Russian influence among bands inland from the coast, extending as far as the Yukon River. To the north, as well, Simpson encouraged expansion down the Mackenzie River toward the Arctic coast and even in the Ungava region (Northern Québec and Labrador today). For Simpson, however, the major interest was the trade along the Pacific coast.
The Convention of 1818 signed by the American and British governments designated the Columbia region as open to joint occupation for a period of ten years. For this reason Simpson did not emphasize long-term strategies; rather he viewed the Columbia country as a temporary bulwark against competition, protecting the more valuable fur country to the north in New Caledonia (northern British Columbia). From Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River, Chief Factor John McLoughlin took energetic steps to keep competitors at bay.
For a time an effective measure was the Snake Country trapping expedition, begun in 1823. Parties of "freemen" -- Iroquois, Métis and Canadien trappers, under the command of a Hudson's Bay Company officer journeyed by horseback south and east from Spokane House, trapping beaver, frequently clashing with the Indians and competing with American "Mountain Men", trappers from east of the Rockies. The Company successfully "trapped clean" an area southeast of the Columbia River, creating a buffer zone against potential competitors. Later expeditions journeyed as far east as Idaho and as far south as San Francisco. This success allowed Simpson and McLoughlin to concentrate their energies on the problem of American competition in the maritime trade.
McLoughlin planned to thwart American coastal traders with a chain of shore-based posts and a willingness to purchase the goods and equipment of commercially distressed opponents. In contrast, Simpson, his superior, emphasized a naval service, commissioning the Beaver in 1836 to harry the opposition, not only in the Indian trade but also in their lucrative trade with the Russian posts in Alaska. Neither would Simpson assist competitors experiencing ill-fortune; bankruptcy would be their fate. By 1840 fortuitous circumstances in Europe and successful policies on the coast allowed Simpson to exclude American traders from the region and conclude an agreement with the Russians, occupying some of their posts, supplying others with provisions and paying an annual rent of 2,000 land otter skins. With this agreement the Hudson's Bay Company controlled the maritime trade and, together with the success of the Snake Country trapping expeditions, was assured of a trading monopoly of the rich fur resources of New Caledonia.
Simpson needed agricultural produce to fulfil the Company's agreement with the Russians. By 1839 in the Columbia region the Governor and Committee in London created a subsidiary, the Puget Sound Agricultural Company. Besides coordinating the farming operation of the Hudson's Bay Company in the region, the new Company suggested the possibility of an agricultural colony working in harmony with the fur trade. Such a possibility was implicit in the retrenchment policy, but the Hudson's Bay Company found that its subsidiary was not able to stem the challenge of a new rival.
"Oregon fever" captured the attention of thousands of potential settlers in the United States in the 1840s. Those who journeyed west and crossed the mountains to settle in valleys near the Company's establishments demanded their own institutions. While Simpson advocated rigid correctness in dealing with the settlers, McLoughlin encouraged accommodation, a difference in policy which led to McLoughlin's resignation. The Oregon Treaty of 1846 between the American and British governments extended the forty-ninth parallel as the boundary to the Pacific coast, excluding the southern tip of Vancouver Island. The Company transferred its Pacific coast headquarters to the island, founding Fort Victoria. Whereas the Company had successfully met the challenge of the American mountain man and maritime trader, the American settler, supported by his government, proved a different matter.
Settlement was causing similar problems in the district of Assiniboia. Where the Red and Assiniboine rivers joined, the families of retired officers and servants from the fur trade resided on river-lot farms. The settlement divided geographically along ethnic and religious lines. To the south and west the Métis, French-speaking and Roman Catholic, comprised more than fifty per cent of the population. Their way of life focussed on the summer and autumn buffalo hunts. The Hudson Bay English, about thirty per cent of the Red River settlers, lived to the north. They supported Anglican missionaries and pursued a way of life based on customs derived from the posts of the interior, rather than farming or the buffalo hunt. The Kildonan Scots, or Selkirk Settlers, farmed between Point Douglas and Frog Plain. The Indian village at the north end of the settlement underlined the fact that over three-quarters of the population of Red River consisted of native people.
During the 1820s Simpson ensured that the Red River settlement functioned in the interests of the fur trade. Besides serving as a haven for retired officers and servants and their mixed-blood families, the settlement supplied pemmican, dried meat, agricultural produce and knowledgeable workmen. Simpson encouraged some settlers to contract as private freighters, moving goods in York boat brigades between York Factory and the settlement. Others were licensed by the Company to trade with the Indians against its competitors. The first generation of settlers in Red River appeared to reach an acceptable accommodation with Simpson and the Company. Yet all was not satisfactory. Many of the sons of Hudson Bay English families wished to follow in their fathers' footsteps and enlist in the Company's service, but few were hired as officers. Simpson and the London Governors preferred the British-born and educated to those born and raised in the Northwest. Besides being familiar with the structure underlying the conduct of the fur trade, the British-born were not shackled with kinship ties in the fur trade hinterland. Such ties emphasized personal interests rather than the efficiency of the trading system. After 1830 many hinterland residents sensed that they had fewer opportunities to realize the "good life", as they defined it, through participation in the fur trade. A native heritage was becoming a liability rather than an asset in the social world of the fur trade, and the consequences for a hinterland heritage seemed ominous.
Renewed opportunities seemed possible after 1843 with the development of a cart trail southward from Pembina, a post on the Red River a few yards inside American territory manned by competitors of the Hudson's Bay Company. Pembina provided the inhabitants of Red River with an alternative market, challenging the Company's monopoly. The early leader in this illegal fur trade was James Sinclair, the hinterland-born, British-educated son of a Chief Factor and a Homeguard Cree woman. His older brother was one of the few mixed-bloods to rise to the rank of Chief Factor in the Company's service; a younger brother became a leading merchant in Red River; a sister had been a "country wife" of George Simpson. Kinsmen of similar social and cultural origins supported Sinclair's challenge to the Company.
A number of Métis in Red River joined the "free traders" from the Hudson Bay English community. Among the leaders of the Métis was Louis Riel, father of the resistance leader of 1869-70. In 1849, to stem the illicit trade in furs, the Company brought charges against Guillaume Sayer and three other Métis. Sayer was found guilty but the Company encouraged the court to suspend punishment. Unfortunately for the Company, the armed Métis assembled outside the courtroom misinterpreted the gesture, believing it signified "le commerce est libre". Henceforth the Company would compete with free traders, not through the legal threats implied in its Charter, but through the effectiveness of its business practices.
The golden age of the fur trade was ending. The isolation of the fur hinterland that had made it possible was over. For a generation, missionaries of various denominations had made their presence felt, sometimes abetting and sometimes hindering the Company's activities. Tourists, British gentlemen and others, had made their appearance. Scientific expeditions from Britain and Canada would demonstrate the metropolitan interest in resources other than fur. The process of change was accelerated with the death of the "Little Emperor" in 1860 and, in 1863, with the purchase of a controlling interest in the Hudson's Bay Company by a party of highly placed metropolitan investors known as the International Financial Society, whose primary interests were telegraphs, railroads and land sales, not fur. The Riel Rising, 1869-70, and the Saskatchewan Rebellion, 1885, were attempts by portions of fur trade society to make a place for their traditions in the new order that was bursting in upon them. But with the end of the isolation of the hinterland, the fur trade ceased to be the dominant factor in the economic, social and cultural life of British North West America. The Transfer, the joining of the Company's territories to the Canadian Confederation in 1870, prepared the way for the primacy of agriculture.
Epilogue: The Fur Trade After 1870
The fur trade did not end when the Company's territories joined Confederation in 1870, nor did the ways of life associated with it. Confederation, and the transcontinental railway that followed, dramatized the changed relationship between the fur trade hinterland and the London metropolis. With the assertion of metropolitan ambitions in Montréal and Toronto, the relationship with London was altered significantly as the two Canadian centres sought to bind the Company's former territories to themselves.
In the fifty years following Confederation the fur trade was abandoned over vast stretches of territory. Resources other than fur, particularly agriculture, captured the attention of the agents of metropolitan centres. None the less, on the fringes of settlement, some farmers supplemented their income with the returns of a winter trap-line and in remote areas unsuitable for agriculture the fur trade remained viable.
After 1870 the North attracted fur trade activity. The pace of the northward movement of the new fur trade can be measured roughly in terms of the dates when treaties were signed with native peoples. By the turn of the century enduring contact was made with numbers of Inuit people. The social and cultural ways of much of this new fur trade were derived from past experience in the Company's former territories. But with these developments came problems as well as advantages.
The intimacy of contact between metropolis and hinterland grew after 1870, reducing the buffer that distance and mercantile monopoly previously placed between the participants in the fur trade and markets to the east. Whereas before 1870 contact with the outside was limited to a few basic goods offered by the Hudson's Bay Company, it was now marked by a variety of goods and services offered by other trades, missionaries and government officials. The economic laws of supply and demand, as they were experienced in the metropolis, became a major part of the world of the trapper. Northern Indians were used to the cyclical nature of animal populations but the presence of "professional" trappers constituted a new threat to fur supplies. Motivated by values distinct from those of the Indian peoples, trappers, who appeared in numbers after 1900, "mined" rather than "harvested" pelts. While they frequently produced more pelts per capita than Indian trappers, they threatened the long-term viability of the trade, taking more furs than the environment could produce. In addition, other types of resource exploitation, mining, oil exploration, drilling, pipelines and defence projects, threatened fur resources in particular regions. As metropolitan institutions protected these outsiders and their ways, the Indians of the north found their most appropriate strategy to be imitation of the professional trapper. While this strategy tended to maximize the number and variety of goods available to them over the short term, it hastened the decline of fur resources.
The varying nature of the demand for furs in the centres of the industrial world became a cardinal economic factor in the lives of Indian trappers and traders. Since the decline of the staple fur trade and the rise to pre-eminence of the fancy fur trade during the 1830s, "fads" in fashions had caused the price of furs to vary erratically. When the Hudson's Bay Company enjoyed a monopoly it could use its extensive purchasing and marketing system to reduce the degree of variation in prices. When it lost its monopoly and faced competition, the Company could not and would not do this. Elsewhere in the hinterland, fur farms arose, producing pelts which competed directly with those of the Indian trapper. The boom and bust cycle that followed led northern Indians to use additional means to sustain themselves over the increasingly lengthy periods of lean times. Missionaries were sympathetic to Indian needs but frequently lacked the resources to help them. Thus the task fell to government. The cost of government assistance proved significant. Believing that they alone were capable of analyzing the problems of the native peoples and effecting appropriate courses of action, government officials, until recently, did not consult with their charges. As a result cultural change, often unexpected, arose out of their directives. In 1940 the introduction of family allowance and its concomitant, compulsory schooling, led to cultural changes which mark the end of the "historical" fur trade. Trapping continues today, but as a way of life it is restricted to a relatively few remote locations.
For more than 300 years the fur trade influenced the relationship between metropolis and hinterland in various regions of Canada and constituted a fundamental factor in the lives of the inhabitants. At first inhabitants were minimally influenced by the metropolis and responded to opportunities on their own terms. The agents of the metropolis could influence the inhabitants' perception of opportunity only through their presentation of goods and services. Such a relationship did not threaten the inhabitants of the hinterland and in a very real sense it was a partnership. This partnership of hinterland and metropolis was the basis of the fur trade in both its St. Lawrence, Great Lakes and Hudson Bay dimensions.
As time passed individuals and communities altered their traditional practices and new ethnic and cultural groups emerged. The fur trade played a major role in the creation of the Homeguard Indians and the Plains Cree and Assiniboine, as well as the Métis and the Hudson Bay English. The trade defined major institutions and in the final analysis constituted the vehicle through which practices inimical to hinterland communities were thrust upon them.
Changes in the metropolis were responsible for reducing the isolation of the hinterland and increasing the intimacy of contact with the metropolis. The material benefits which resulted were counterbalanced by the pervasive influence of the metropolis which, in effect, "colonialized" the relationship. This paved the way for conquest by settlement which followed at different times in different places and manifested itself in myriad ways.
