Hudson's Bay Company Dock, Cumberland House Saskatchewan, 1899.
This photograph of men loading tea chests into a York boat shows one of the jobs performed for the Hudson's Bay Company by local Indian and MΘtis people. For their efforts in transporting the five metric ton boat-load of freight to various posts in the Cumberland district, a more than three-week trip throughout northern Saskatchewan and Manitoba, they received $1.50 per day plus a ration of flour, tea and salt port. Skilled workers brought from the British Isles performed more varied tasks for the company, but once they were rendered useless by old age, they were left to fend for themselves in their retirement.
Comparable to a large modern corporation with a head office outside the country and a hierarchy of regional headquarters managing districts in North America, the Hudson's Bay Company of the nineteenth century was entirely devoted to fur trading for profit. It dominated economic life in the Northwest Territories, and supplied and controlled virtually everything there including workers from whom it expected the maximum return on wages paid. Though the amenities were few and the physical and social environment bleak, the company's employees seldom expressed dissatisfaction during this early phase of wage labour. (For more information on the fur trade, see Sylvia Van Kirk, Life in the Western Canadian Fur Trade, 1770-1870, Canada's Visual History, volume 34, and David Richeson and John Foster, The Fur Trade to 1784 and The Fur Trade Since 1784, Canada's Visual History, Volumes 72 and 73.)
