Free traders and rival companies such as Revillon FrΦres offered competition to the Hudson's Bay Company in many areas of the North following 1870. An unusual competitor, however, was Christine Gordon, a woman trader at Fort McMurray on the Athabasca River. Gordon traded, practised amateur medicine and first aid on the local Cree, cultivated a garden and had an avid interest in natural phenomena. This photograph, taken in 1908 by Agnes Deans Cameron, shows Gordon dressed in her finest apparel displaying some of the wolf pelts that she had acquired.
Courtesy: National Museum of Man, National Museums of Canada
