In the late 1750s the French abandoned their western posts. It was not until the mid-1760s, after the Conquest of New France, that political stability was re-established in the east and Montreal-based traders could reoccupy the old French trading territory in the West and begin to push outward beyond the old frontier. Initially these Montreal trading operations were organized as small partnerships between city merchants, who supplied the goods, and the actual traders who travelled inland and dealt with the Aboriginal people. Appropriately, these latter men came to be known as wintering partners.
In the beginning these new opponents of the Hudson’s Bay Company faced two problems. Besides having to compete with a company that had more extensive financial reserves, they had to contend with one another. Furthermore, by the mid-1770s it was clear that the prime beaver country lay towards Athabasca in northern Saskatchewan and beyond. The hbc awoke from its slumber and, with the building of Cumberland House, a trading post on the Saskatchewan River, it began a program of expansion inland. In 1778 Peter Pond, the proud, impetuous, and intractable Yankee fur trader, demonstrated that Montreal-based traders could reach this new territory, difficult as the journey was; but it was clear that the small partnerships lacked the financial resources to exploit the new frontier on a large scale. Also, the unbridled competition among them led to violence and murder. To overcome these limitations and bring some order to the country, the Montreal traders began to join together, and in 1776 started to pool their resources into successively larger partnerships, the most famous of which was the North West Company (nwc). Among the early principals were Peter Pond and his second-in-command, Alexander Mackenzie (later Sir Alexander), both of whom played key roles in propelling the fur trade forward in the final surge to the Arctic and Pacific oceans.
Before a major invasion of the Athabasca-Mackenzie area could be carried out, however, the Nor’Westers, as they came to be called, had to resolve the logistical problems: financing was difficult; the region was too far from Montreal to be reached in a single canoeing season; the season was too short and game supplies too unpredictable to allow time for hunting and fishing en route; and, finally, the small, light woodland Native canoes could not carry sufficient quantities of food, trade goods, or furs over long distances. They overcame these obstacles in a number of ways. They divided the transport system into two components, one eastern and one northwestern; they adopted the canot du maitre or Great Lakes canoe—11 metres (36 feet) long, 2 metres (6 feet) in beam, and able to carry three tons of cargo plus a crew— for the eastern leg of the trip; and for the route beyond Lake Superior, which had too much shoal and white water for the canot du maitre, they developed the canot du nord—about 7.5 metres (25 feet) long, some 1.2 metres (4 feet) in beam, and carrying balf the cargo. Thus the NWC extended Native technology to suit its own needs. In turn, some Native groups, particularly Anishinabe bands who had moved into the Lakehead area, specialized in building canoes for the company. The NWC also improved portage trails, and at Sault Ste. Marie constructed the first canal on the Great Lakes so its canoes could pass beside the Saint Mary’s rapids; in later years, they also used small schooners on the Great Lakes.
To address the provision problem, the NWC drew upon local resources as much as possible. As a supplement to the pork and flour the voyageurs (canoe men) were given in Montreal, Indian corn was imported from the southern Great Lakes region and stored at Sault Ste. Marie for the passing brigades. Between the Lakehead and Lake Winnipeg the Nor’Westers canoe men, who were mostly Metis, depended on the local Ojibwa for corn, wild rice, and fish. Beyond the lower Winnipeg River they turned to the Plains bison hunters for food, and the prairies became the great pantry of the western fur trade. Pemmican was the ideal voyageur food; in fact, the western fur trade probably wouldn’t have taken place without it. The daily calorie expenditures of the voyageurs were enormous, and pemmican provided calories in a portable, lightweight, highly compact form: a 40-kilogram (90-pound) bag, tbe standard size, was the equivalent of the dressed meat of two adult female buffalo (approximately nine hundred pounds). Besides pemmican, the voyageurs developed a taste for such Native delicacies as buffalo tongue, and these prairie provisions were forwarded to depots at Bas de la Riviere and Cumberland Lake. But even with these caches in the north-west, 25 to nearly 50 per cent of the cargo capacity of canoes leaving Fort William in 1814 was taken up by provisions.
The activities of the Nor’Westers adversely affected HBC operations much more
Sir Alexander Mackenzie. Mackenzie made two great efforts to find a route from Lake Athabasca to the Pacific. On the first, in 1789, the river that now bears his name led him to the Arctic; but on the second, in 1793, he reached Bella Coola and the long search for a westward route was over. Oil (1893) by Rene Emile Quentin.
Than those of the French, and so these new opponents could not go unchallenged. The hbc faced many of the same problems but unlike the Nor’Westers it was not able to use enlarged canoes to carry its cargo
Because, except for Moose Factory and Rupert House, the bayside posts lay beyond the prime birch area. And it was impractical to buy canoes from inland Native groups. So the company men at Fort Albany began building shallow-draft boats for work on the rivers. In the nineteenth century these craft became the backbone of the HBC’s transportation system, and they came to be known as York boats because of the vital role they played in the shipment of cargo to and from York Factory, certainly the company’s most important depot for western Canada.
While the rival Nor’Westers and Hudson’s Bay men were laying the groundwork for their overland trading empires, a new phase of exploration began. Although the Nor’Westers were first off the mark in the 1760s when they moved northward towards the middle Churchill River area, it was the hbc that made the first major probe beyond the old French frontier. In 1771, prompted by repeated Native reports of mineral wealth.
Moses Norton, chief factor at Fort Churchill (the same Norton that kept several wives and a box of poison for unhelpfully honourable Indian husbands), sent Samuel Hearne off on foot on a gruelling expedition that took him as far as the Coppermine River, about a thousand miles to the north-west, over very rough terrain.
Hearne had already attempted two such expeditions, which had taught him and Norton two crucial lessons. Expeditions were doomed to failure without first-class Native guides; those selected for the first two journeys had been totally unsuitable. Secondly, Hearne had learned that you did not lead these guides in their homeland; you followed them, at the pace they set for themselves. With these lessons in mind, they chose Matonabbee, a Chipewyan leader whom the English greatly respected, as a guide on Hearne’s third attempt to reach the Coppermine. Matonabbee informed Hearne that he had failed previously for yet a third reason:
He attributed all our misfortunes to the misconduct of my guides, and the very plan we pursued, by the desire of the Governor [Norton], in not taking any women with us on this journey, was, he said, the principal thing that occasioned all our wants: “for,” said he, “when all the men are heavy laden, they can neither hunt nor travel to any considerable distance; and in the case they meet with success in hunting, who is to carry the produce of their labour? Women,” added he, “were made for labour; one of them can carry or haul, as much as two men can do. They also pitch our tents, make and mend our clothing, keep us warm at night; and, in fact, there is no such thing as travelling any considerable distance, or for any length of time.. .without their assistance.”
In other words, given that economic roles were sharply defined by gender in Native society, a guiding party needed both women and men to function.
Most of the territory Hearne traversed with Matonabbee was within the trading sphere of the Chipewyan, who had dominated the north-western trade of Fort Churchill since the post was established. This land bordered on that of the Inuit— the Caribou Inuit on the south-east near the fort and the Copper Inuit on the north-west. This was a war zone where bloody conflicts took place whenever Chipewyan and Inuit met. No quarter was given. Hearne witnessed an attack on a camp of sleeping Inuit by Matonabbee’s people in which all the men, women, and children were slain. The animosities between these groups seem to have been rooted in the distant past and their causes can only be a matter of conjecture. The hbc made efforts to end this violence, but it is likely that the company’s very presence intensi-Fled the conflict in some quarters, as the Indians and the Inuit sought to limit each other’s access to arms and goods.
Seven years after Hearne completed his trip, Peter Pond extended the frontier of trading posts to the Athabasca River when he built a small fort (Pond’s Fort) only 65 kilograms (40 miles) from Lake Athabasca. While in the Athabasca country, he learned from the Chipewyan that the river was tributary to larger lakes and to the Slave River (later called the Mackenzie River). Then, during the winter of 1784-85, Captain James Cook published an account of his voyage to the Pacific coast in which he reported that there was a river flowing into the Pacific from the north-east. Apparently, Pond believed that the Slave River the Native guides had told him about might be the one Cook had mentioned—that the river flowed to the Pacific rather than to the Arctic Sea. This was an exciting prospect, for an extremely lucrative fur trade was rapidly developing on the west coast, and the Nor’Westers wanted access to it. Besides this, if a water route could be found leading from the beaver-rich Athabasca-Mackenzie area to the Pacific, the high costs of overland transportation from Montreal could be avoided.
Pond was not able to test his speculation before retiring in 1789. It was Alexander Mackenzie, who had served with Pond, who took up that great challenge. He called it the “favourite project of my own ambition.” On June 3, 1789, Mackenzie set out from Fort Chipewyan. His party was guided by “English Chief,” a Chipewyan who formerly had belonged to Matonabbee’s band. In early July Mackenzie’s expedition reached the delta of the river that now bears his name. There he discovered an abandoned Inuit winter camp. He had found the Arctic Ocean, not the Pacific. Understandably, he was very disappointed; indeed, he called the river that led him to the Arctic the “river of disappointment.”
Despite his great frustrations, Mackenzie was not deterred. In the autumn of 1792 he set out from Fort Chipewyan once more, but this time headed westward up the Peace River. Near the confluence with the Smoky River he built a small trading post where he spent the winter before pressing on. Crossing interior British Columbia for the first time proved to be far more challenging than descending the Mackenzie River. The terrain was very rugged, most of the major rivers had vicious whitewater stretches, and frequently the explorer had to make major decisions about the route from among several alternatives. Mackenzie depended absolutely on the information his Native guides furnished him when making those choices, and judging from his account of the expedition, these guides were aware of their importance to him, teasing him about it and challenging his air of superiority. Mackenzie’s journals make it abundantly clear that he was not comfortable with this situation. For example, on June 23, 1793, he called them together to determine whether it was better to follow the Fraser River all the way to the coast or to leave it and head westward via the West Road River:
At the commencement of this conversation, I was very much surprised by the following question from one of the Indians: “What,” demanded he, “can be the reason that you are so particular and anxious in your inquiries of us respecting a knowledge of this country: do not you white men know everything in the world?” This interrogatory was so very unexpected, that it occasioned some hesitation before I could answer it. At length, however,
I replied, that we certainly were acquainted with the principal circumstances of every part of the world; that I knew where the sea is, and where I myself then was, but that I did not exactly understand what obstacles might interrupt me in getting to it; with which he and his relations must be well acquainted, as they had so frequently surmounted them. Thus I fortunately preserved the impression in their minds, of the superiority of white people over themselves.
Mackenzie then opted for the western route and abandoned the Fraser River, because his guides stressed the dangers of the latter and minimized the distance and difficulties of the former. Travelling partly by canoe and partly by foot, he reached the Bella Coola River at Friendly Village on July 17, 1793.
The two-hundred-year search for the Pacific begun by Cartier was over. Native people had guided the intruders from coast to coast. Most tribes had welcomed the newcomers to their territories; most let them pass beyond only reluctantly, seeing a golden economic opportunity going with them.
World History
