During the century previous to the British conquest of New France in 1760 two distinct fur trading systems had emerged, one based on the St. Lawrence-Great Lakes river system and the other on the shores of Hudson Bay. The participants in each trading system, Indians and Eurocanadians, evolved distinctive practices that were appropriate to their own circumstances. With the Conquest, contrary to what the directors of the Hudson's Bay Company predicted, competition between the two trading systems did not end, but rather intensified.
In the century following the signing of the Peace of Paris in 1763, the fur trade was marked by two interrelated developments: the increasingly intimate and complex ties linking the London metropolis to its fur trade hinterland in British North America and the appearance of "new" sociocultural entities whose lives centred on the fur trade. These peoples, together with the Indian peoples, had reason both to favour and to question the emerging relationship between their hinterland homeland and the outside metropolis. "The Transfer", the phrase that some communities in the old Northwest applied to Confederation in 1870-71, was particularly ominous for their future.
The Fur Trade 1787-1820
Whatever else may be said of the Conquest, it did serve to link the St. Lawrence-Great Lakes fur trading system with a metropolis able to supply quality goods at cheap prices and to offer marketing services without peer. The London metropolis could also offer capital and personnel with managerial skills that the St. Lawrence, Great Lakes fur trading system required after the dislocation associated with the Conquest. The Highland Scots, English and Yankee pedlars who inherited the St. Lawrence, Great Lakes fur trade created the North West Company to put into practice the lessons they had learned during their first quarter century in the fur trade, when their commercial opponents, tied to a policy characterized as "the sleep by the frozen sea", had fallen increasingly behind. Only with the adoption of new policies did the Hudson's Bay Company lay the basis for a successful challenge to the preeminent position of the Nor'westers.
While the Hudson's Bay Company was scrambling to meet the competition of its opponents, one man kept them from being totally displaced in the interior. William Tomison, one of the few Orkneymen in the Company's service to advance from the ranks of a servant to that of an officer, was the "Inland Master" and proved to be an excellent trader for three principal reasons. He was a skilled diplomat, tying a number of bands to the Company's interest through assiduous attention to their needs and close personal relations with their leaders. He was an excellent manager of personnel. Whereas other officers appeared to seek confrontations with their servants, threatening the Company's inland transportation system, Tomison manoeuvred to avoid such incidents, winning the servants' loyalty and maintaining the flow of goods and furs on the inland waterways. Lastly, Tomison proved able to wring the utmost value from the too few goods and too few servants assigned to him in this critical period. Yet his strengths highlight his principal weakness: he failed to understand how important the Athabasca trade was to the North West Company and thus did not recognize the appropriate strategy of opposition for his employer. To occupy the attention of its opponents on the Saskatchewan, the North West Company willingly traded there at a loss to preserve the profitability of its unchallenged Athabasca trade. Tomison's failure to perceive this policy led him to subvert the Hudson's Bay Company's efforts to mount an effective opposition in the northern region.
The North West Company's Athabasca trade required an extensive transportation network, meaning that as many as 300 voyageurs gathered at the "Emporium of the North", Fort Chipewyan, during the winter months. The presence of such a large number of adult males in a single location upset the politico-military balance in the region. Some North West Company officers adopted a policy of intimidation and coercion to increase the quantities of fur and provisions supplied by the Indians. For a time a traffic in women, seized or extorted from Indian bands, existed. Ill-treatment led some bands to abandon the fur trade and retreat to more distant lands. Others were prepared to welcome an effective opposition should it appear.
The trader who succeeded the old Nor'wester, Peter Pond, at Fort Chipewyan was a young Highland Scot, Alexander Mackenzie. Mackenzie was intrigued by Pond's views of the geography of the area: that the large river flowing out of the western end of Great Slave Lake was the same river that Captain James Cook, during his third voyage of discovery in the Pacific Ocean, saw flowing into the Gulf of Alaska. Pond had believed that he was on the threshold of discovering the North West Passage, and in 1789 Mackenzie undertook the journey that would confirm or deny Pond's ideas. The river, which now bears Mackenzie's name, turned northward a short distance downstream from Great Slave Lake. Mackenzie and his party followed it to the Arctic Ocean before returning to Fort Chipewyan but their journey demonstrated that a North West Passage did not exist south of the Arctic Ocean. Three years later Mackenzie initiated the efforts that would take him up the Peace River, through the Rocky Mountains, across the interior plateau and coast mountains, to the Pacific Ocean where he arrived at Bella Coola on July 22, 1793. Other explorers such as Philip Turnor and Peter Fidler of the Hudson's Bay Company and Simon Fraser and David Thompson of the North West Company also made notable discoveries, but Mackenzie's achievement remained singular. For Mackenzie the significance of his discoveries lay in the possibility of creating an integrated world-wide British commercial empire, linking the fur trade of North America with the exotic goods of the Orient and the manufactured goods of Great Britain. Mackenzie's subsequent activities involved him in conflicts with Simon "The Marquis" McTavish and his nephew William McGillivray, the two leading merchants in the North West Company, and resulted in his joining the rival XY Company in 1800. Four years later, on McTavish's death, Mackenzie ended his opposition and retired from the trade.
Mackenzie's discoveries enabled the North West Company to expand westward into New Caledonia and later, after David Thompson's journey from Rocky Mountain House, into the Columbia River country. The Indians of the coast region did not welcome these traders at their back door, for the newcomers threatened the maritime fur trade that had arisen following Captain Cook's voyage to the region in 1778. Members of Cook's crew had traded sea otter pelts from the Indians, and later sold the pelts in China at undreamed of profits. In 1784, with the publication of the official account of the voyage, the Pacific maritime fur trade was born, conducted by British and American traders from ships rather than coastal forts. Farther to the north the Russian American Company's forts in Alaska offered competition.
The extraordinary profits obtained in the maritime fur trade diminished rapidly as the coastal Indians became aware of the prices that competing trading ships would pay for their furs. Pelts were traded at the coast for prices as much as 200 to 300 per cent higher than Indian traders paid in the interior. Much of the trade was assumed by leading chiefs who controlled trading networks extending along the coast and into the interior. The Indians of the region had been familiar with extensive trading systems long before European ships appeared. The impact of Europeans and their goods led the Indians to elaborate aspects of their culture, such as the carving of totem poles, that predated the maritime fur trade.
Europeans and their goods were cultural stimulants, not threats, to the Indians of the Pacific coast, but North West Company traders in the interior were another matter. Their activities could dry up the supply of furs that flowed to the coast. In 1812 the North West Company acquired Fort Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia River, established the previous year by John Jacob Astor's Pacific Fur Company. The land based fur trade was ready to begin the laborious process of challenging the maritime fur trade northward along the coast.
Meanwhile, in the years following the Hudson's Bay Company's penetration of the interior and the formation of the North West Company significant changes occurred in the lives of the fur trade participants. Most Cree and Assiniboine bands began to emphasize year round exploitation of the buffalo, partially in response to the loss of their role as middlemen traders. Through raiding, they acquired the horse from the Blackfoot and although its use made warfare endemic between them the horse furthered the interests of the Cree and Assiniboine as buffalo hunters and reduced their dependence upon European goods. The Plains Indians would hunt the buffalo using traditional weapons and reserve the gun for making war, further reducing their need for guns and ammunition and thus their dependence upon the trader.
Because of the Nor'westers' need for plains provisions, they cultivated the friendship of bands which could supply dried meat and pemmican. Along the North Saskatchewan, the North West Company emphasized the importance of provisioning posts such as Fort Augustus, Fort George and Pine Island. Its primary purpose was to acquire plains provisions to feed the crews of the fur brigades on their annual journeys across the continent and at their winter quarters at northern posts. Pemmican, which became a staple food of the voyageur was obtained by drying buffalo meat and pounding it into a powder to which berries and other edibles could be added, along with melted fat in an amount equal to the meat. The resulting product was cooled, then sewn into buffalo hide bags in ninety pound (40 kg) lots, which, if kept dry and cool, could be stored for years. Both companies pursued the pemmican trade, although the needs of the North West Company were far greater. This trade in plains provisions accelerated the movement of several Cree and Assiniboine bands towards a way of life emphasizing year-round exploitation of the buffalo. By the 1780s the "Plains" Assiniboine and the "Plains" Cree were cultural features of aboriginal life on the Western Plains. The fur trade was a significant factor explaining their appearance.
Indians, "Plains" and "Homeguard", were not the only new socio-cultural entities to emerge as a result of the fur trade. In both trading systems, Hudson Bay and St. Lawrence-Great Lakes, new communities emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the Bay tradition the new sociocultural entity was the "Hudson Bay English" or, as the Anglican clergy in the Red River Settlement termed them, the "Country-born".
During the Company's century-long "sleep by the frozen sea" relations between personnel of the Hudson's Bay Company and the Homeguard Cree saw the latter become a biologically mixed people while remaining culturally within a Cree context. The Company's official policy and tradition did not permit most of the men with native families to bring them into the posts to live, and so families remained with surrounding Homeguard Cree bands. As a result, both Indians and Britishers categorized individuals according to their lifestyle rather than their racial antecedents. Mixed-bloods who followed a way of life associated with the Homeguard Cree were termed "Indians" or "Natives", while those who resided in the trading post and followed its way of life were termed "English". On the coast most mixed-bloods were "Natives", but with the Company's move inland in the last quarter of the eighteenth century new circumstances saw a significant number of them become "Hudson Bay English".
The York boat, developed from the Orkney fishing craft which was itself modelled after a much earlier Viking ship, proved to be the Hudson's Bay Company's answer to its transportation problems. On the western rivers it could carry more than twice the payload of the Nor'westers' canot du nord with the same size crew. But York boats required crews of strong youthful "tripmen" capable of manhandling the large craft around various obstacles. Wars in Europe at this time caused a labour shortage in the Hudson's Bay Company's service. To man its boats the Company turned increasingly to the native sons of servants and officers. Most of these young men were Homeguard Crees who asked that their families be allowed to live at the trading post during the length of their contract, a traditional privilege of the native fort hunter or guide. In desperation the Company agreed. As young men renewed their contracts over the years their families became better acquainted with life in the trading post. Similarly, British born servants in the interior demanded and won the same privilege for their native families.
At the same time in the St. Lawrence-Great Lakes fur trading system, another socio-cultural entity was emerging. Both on the prairie and in the forests the MÄtis were becoming recognized as a distinct cultural component in the fur trade communities. Their origins lay in the role of cultural broker, performed in an earlier generation by the coureur de bois and later by the commis. Frequently they were of mixed parentage. In the St. Lawrence, Great Lakes trading system, many mixed bloods adopted this role and lifestyle. Similarly on the Great Plains the "freemen", engagÄs who had ended their contracts with the North West Company, grouped themselves into bands which in time were termed "MÄtis". Some bands pursued the buffalo in the parkland and on the prairie. As provisioners, they depended upon their "recognized hunter" to negotiate the necessary social and political relationship with the trading post that would maximize their interests. Similarly other bands, such as the Iroquois, Canadien and Saulteaux trappers north of the North Saskatchewan River, evolved MÄtis ways of life appropriate to the northern forest. In both instances the image of the cultural broker was central to the ways of life that emerged. The appearance of the MÄtis and the Hudson Bay English as distinct communities suggests that the fur trade cannot be considered simply as hinterland resource exploitation by a distant metropolis; it was also a complex of socio-cultural activities that gave rise to distinct communities which remain a part of Canada's social fabric.
The year 1810 introduced the closing decade of violence in the competition between the two giant fur trade companies. The violence has its origins in the philanthropic works of the young Scots Earl of Selkirk, Thomas Douglas. Concerned with the plight of displaced Highland crofters forced from the land to live in the slums of the industrial cities of northern Britain, Selkirk looked to emigration as a means of alleviating this acute social problem and strengthening British ties in distant parts of the Empire. He had already sponsored settlement experiments in Prince Edward Island and Upper Canada when, upon reading Alexander Mackenzie's published journal, he decided that parts of the Great Plains offered suitable sites for colonies. As the Hudson's Bay Company controlled access to such lands, Selkirk set about purchasing Company stock. By 1810 he and his circle controlled sufficient Company stock to place four of their supporters on the seven-man governing committee where they put forward their "retrenchment policy" to recoup the Company's fortunes and assist Selkirk's settlement scheme.
Retrenchment involved three initiatives. First, there were measures designed to cut expenses and place the fur trade upon a more efficient basis in regions where the Company already did business. Second, when this base was secure, the Company would carry competition to its rival in the Athabasca country. Third, the Company would grant Selkirk 300 440 square kilometres of land and cooperate with him in establishing a settlement compatible with the interests of the fur trade. It was hoped that, in time, Selkirk's settlement would supply provisions and personnel to the Company. Retrenchment quickly proved successful. Within a matter of months various cost-cutting measures changed the balance sheet from loss to profit. In 1811 the first settlers set sail for York Factory and the difficult journey inland in York boats to establish Selkirk's settlement at the junction of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers.
The North West Company did not accept Selkirk's settlement at face value. To them it was a clever ruse which would allow the Hudson's Bay Company to threaten the Nor'westers' cross continent transportation lifeline and the movement of plains provisions northward to supply the fur brigades. The suspicions of the North West Company were confirmed in the "Buffalo Running" and "Pemmican" proclamations of Selkirk's resident governor, Miles Macdonell. To ensure the colonists an adequate supply of buffalo, Macdonell forbade the running of buffalo from horseback near the colony, as well as controlling the export of pemmican from around the settlement. The MÄtis hunters viewed this as an unwarranted intrusion into their affairs. Many Nor'westers believed that the colony must fail, and they were prepared to make sure that it did.
In the region of the colony officers of the North West Company moved quickly to strengthen their relations with the MÄtis. The MÄtis supplied plains provisions more dependably than the Plains Indians and consumed more European goods than the Indians. These economic links with the North West Company were strengthened by kinship ties, established by officers taking Indian or mixed-blood women as country wives. Many MÄtis in the region of Red River, including their leader, Cuthbert Grant, were sons of North West Company officers. While some officers abandoned their native families when they returned to MontrÄal, the social ties linking the MÄtis to the North West Company were carried on by succeeding officers. As a result the MÄtis listened when the Nor'westers told them that through their Indian progenitors they were the owners of the soil of Red River, and Selkirk and the settlers were usurpers. This "aboriginal rights" view heightened the MÄtis' sense of themselves as a unique community and contributed to the events that culminated in the Battle of Seven Oaks, in the Red River settlement on June 19, 1816.
Provisions loomed large in the violence that marked the fur trade in the winter and spring of 1815-16. The Hudson's Bay Company's first approach to the Athabasca country in some years ended disastrously when sixteen men died of starvation. Inadequate planning was responsible in part, as were the strong arm tactics the Nor'westers used to induce Indians to refuse to supply the Hudson's Bay Company men with provisions. Six months later, when a party of MÄtis commanded by Cuthbert Grant was apparently conducting pemmican out of the Red River settlement, they were intercepted at Seven Oaks by Governor Robert Semple, Macdonell's replacement, and a party of colonists. Semple and twenty other colonists died in the resulting confrontation. The remainder of the settlers temporarily fled their homes. Yet the Hudson's Bay Company and Lord Selkirk were not intimidated by these losses, nor were they averse to the use of force when it suited their purposes. Within a couple of years they had turned circumstances about.
The union of the two fur trade concerns in 1821 ended the period of violence and competition in the fur trade. In the new Hudson's Bay Company certain Nor'wester practices were perpetuated. Profits were split between the Company's shareholders and chief factors and chief traders in the field, over half of whom were former wintering partners in the North West Company. Yet in spite of these Nor'wester survivals, the continental fur trade was lost to MontrÄal. The "defeat" of the North West Company has been attributed to the difference between the costs of transportation in each trading system; the Hudson's Bay Company possessed an insurmountable advantage with its shorter route to the coast. Yet factors other than economics also played a role.
The North West Company's fur trade traditions were those of the merchant adventurer rooted in their Canadien and Highland Scots past. Its success depended upon the Älan of its profit sharing partners who focussed their efforts on achieving the rewarding coup rather than devoting attention to the day-to-day details that reduced costs and improved efficiency. As long as the North West Company encountered new fur lands to exploit unchallenged it could indulge the expensive and frequently idiosyncratic interests of its partners. The demise of the North West Company occurred within the decade that it reached the last fur frontier on the Pacific coast.
In the North West Company, social and kinship ties to the partners and agents who were members of the Beaver Club in MontrÄal determined fur trade appointments. Promotion to a position of wealth, prestige and influence followed. Such circumstances were acceptable as long as expanding fur frontiers created opportunities for "meritous" kinsmen to advance. But when expansion slowed and opportunities declined, relations amongst the officers clouded amidst suspicion of favouritism. The split between the wintering partners and the MontrÄal agents gave the Hudson's Bay Company an opportunity to end the competition in a manner compatible with its interests. Its retrenchment policy demonstrated how the fur trade could be made profitable in spite of the lack of exclusive fur preserves and attracted the attention of Nor'westers, who faced increasing losses. Amalgamation with the Hudson's Bay Company was preferable to bankruptcy. In effect the North West Company was defeated by a management system that emphasized the efficiency of process over the importance of individual interests and social linkages.
The Fur Trade 1820-1870
The dominant theme in the fur trade in the ensuing half century was the changing nature of the relationship between the London metropolis and the British North American hinterland. Before 1820 the different peoples of the hinterland saw the British metropolis as a distant place that impinged only slightly on their affairs. Even Homeguard Indian bands and their British kith and kin in the trading posts were isolated from the metropolis, except for the annual voyage of the supply ship. Yet events in the decade before 1820 heralded a change that would be complete over much of the Company's territories by 1870. No longer was much of British North America isolated from Western Europe and the settled areas of North America and dependent upon a commercial corporation for its limited contacts with the outside. The metropolitan hinterland relationship in the fur trade was altered radically by changes occurring in the metropolis, largely technological and economic in nature but social and ideological as well, and by the pressure of increasing demand upon decreasing game and fur resources. Resources other than fur, such as farm lands, minerals and "souls", attracted metropolitan corporations other than the Hudson's Bay Company: governments, businesspeople and missionaries. Agents of other metropolitan centres, particularly in North America, expressed an interest in competing with London for a share of the benefits. Many of the communities in the Company's territories became disoriented, and a sense of foreboding emerged. People who had adapted their customs to the needs of the fur trade over the previous century and a half found their independence threatened by increasing dependence upon goods and institutions derived from the metropolis. At the same time a sense of alienation arose, as opportunities seemed to be reserved for the metropolis and its agents but not for the peoples of the hinterland. By 1870 a colonial relationship had replaced the independence of decision which once marked the world of the trapper and trader in the Hudson's Bay Company's territories.
The retrenchment policy formulated in 1810 remained dominant through to the 1860s. The Deed Poll of 1821, the document formalizing the coalition between the two competing companies, continued many North West Company traditions under the banner of the reorganized Hudson's Bay Company. The "Licencing" Act of the same year gave the Company exclusive right to trade in British North America in regions beyond the settlement and outside of Rupert's Land for a twenty-one year period. In 1838 the licence was renewed for an additional twenty-one year period. Neither of these documents impeded the realization of the objectives of the retrenchment policy; indeed, they facilitated its implementation.
The historical significance of retrenchment lies not only in the policy itself but in the system which gave it shape. The "new" system projected cultural changes occurring in the British metropolis into the heart of the hinterland society. The Company, in the nineteenth century, was an anachronism. It belonged to the age of exploration and the era of the first British Empire when great commercial merchandizers such as the Royal African Company and the East India Company pursued the national interest through commerce in distant parts of the world. In the nineteenth century, while other commercial adventurers found their monopolies challenged and retreated to extinction, the Hudson's Bay Company revitalized itself to become as efficient and energetic as any of the new industrial corporations. Retrenchment, with its emphasis on the efficiency of process and the energetic pursuit of objectives, placed the Company in the forefront of metropolitan changes associated with the industrial revolution. Young Scots Highlanders, graduating from their universities and enlisting as officers in the Company's service, "understood" the system and structure that ensured the Company's fortunes and their careers in the fur trade. The British North American hinterland was familiar to them because the retrenchment policy and its attendant features projected the way of life of the metropolis into the hinterland to an unprecedented extent. Yet while the young Highland Scots officer found much that was familiar to him, the servants with whom he dealt and the Indians with whom he traded found those same elements foreign. While the Company became an increasingly important, even necessary, institution in the lives of their communities, it also expressed values alien to their traditions. In a variety of contemporary documents one senses an increasing feeling of bewilderment and betrayal leading to animosity against the Company.
The man responsible for implementing the retrenchment policy in the Company's territories, and the herald of the social and cultural values that the policy called forth, was the "Little Emperor", George Simpson. The Governor and Committee recruited Simpson, an experienced businessman with a firm of West Indian sugar brokers, to lead the Athabasca campaign against the North West Company in 1818-19. Within a decade he rose to become the Governor of all the Hudson's Bay Company's territories. He became the linchpin between the Governor and Committee in London and the Company's operations in the field.
Simpson proved to be an outstanding employee of the Company. Honest and astute as well as respectful in correspondence with the Governor and Committee in London, he did not hesitate to press his views on basic business policy. Once a decision was reached, however, even though it might not accord with his own views, the "Little Emperor" gave his full support. In time he won the respect and accolades of his employers. In the eyes of his subordinates he was both admired and feared. His success, reflected in large profits which were shared with the officers, could not be rivaled, but his methods seemed to offer little tolerance for human foibles. The careers of many officers ended or levelled off when Simpson questioned their abilities or disapproved of their habits of life, public and private.
Simpson's "systematizing" and "regularizing" of the fur trade offered benefits to the participants that went beyond the profits shared between officers and shareholders. During their careers officers could hope to amass small fortunes, while servants could hope to acquire savings unknown amongst their compatriots in Great Britain. Similarly, standards of food, clothing, shelter and medical care were frequently much superior to those experienced by the vast majority of workers in Great Britain. Neither advantage would have been possible had the Company continued the wasteful, haphazard and idiosyncratic practices that marked the years before the adoption of retrenchment and the appearance of Simpson.
Organizational Chart
H.B.C. after 1820
GOVERNOR*
and Committee of H.B.C. in London
7 members elected at the annual
General Court of the stockholders.
GOVERNOR*
of the Company's Territories --
(appointed by the Governor and
Committee, from 1827-60 the Little
Emperor, George Simpson. The
Governor and Committee approved
promotion from Clerk to Chief Trader
and Chief Trader to Chief Factor,
recommended by Department Councils)
Northern Department Council
(composed of:) -
-Governor of the Co.'s Territories
-Chief Factors in attendance
-Chief Traders invited to attend
Southern Department (see Northern
Department)
(N.B. The boundary between the two
departments approximates that between
the provinces of Manitoba and Ontario)
Assiniboia
(Red River Settlement)
Council of Assiniboia composed of:
- Governor*
- Chief Factor
- Councillors - principal
settlers recommended by the Council
of the Northern Department and
approved by the Governor and
Committee in London
Columbia District
-Chief Factor in charge at
Fort Vancouver
-Chief Traders command individual
posts in the district.
-Clerks and Post Masters assist at
major posts or command small and/
or temporary posts
Saskatchewan District
-Chief Factor in charge at Fort
Edmonton.
-Chief Traders command individual
posts
-Clerks and Post Masters assist at
major posts or command small and/
or temporary posts
*N.B. - There were three different
governors in the HBC after 1827:
1. The Governor of the Company
in London.
2. The Governor of the Company's
Territories, who traveled
extensively.
3. The Governor of the District of
Assiniboia in the Red River Settle-
ment, responsible to the Governor
of the Company's Territories.
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 QuÄbec 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, MÄtis 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 MÄtis, 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 MÄtis in Red River joined the "free traders" from the Hudson Bay English community. Among the leaders of the MÄtis 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 MÄtis. Sayer was found guilty but the Company encouraged the court to suspend punishment. Unfortunately for the Company, the armed MÄtis 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 MontrÄal 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 MÄtis 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.
