The Hudson’s Bay Company posts placed the English on the northern flank of the French Empire and represented a threat that could not go unchallenged.
Furthermore, it was clear from the early results of hbc operations that the best furs were to be found to the north of the Great Lakes, and not to the south-west in the Ohio and upper Mississippi country. The French responded to the English advance in a series of armed skirmishes in both Hudson Bay and James Bay between 1682 and 1712. Although they were more successful in these clashes than the English, managing to capture and hold most of the posts, they were never able to dislodge the hbc completely. In the end French military successes in the two bays did not matter; the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, ending the War of the Spanish Succession, awarded the HBC complete control over the northern maritime approach, and the French had to withdraw from the shores of Hudson Bay.
More important to the Aboriginal people, while naval battles were being fought in the bay, the French set up a few small French trading posts in the Lake Superior country, at Lake Nipigon in 1684 and on Rainy Lake in 1688. This was but a prelude to a major thrust overland by the French after 1713. Although the Treaty of Utrecht gave the hbc a monopoly on bayside trade, it left the interior open to both the English and the Erench. The two groups responded very differently. Rather than taking on the added costs of developing inland trade, the Governor and Committee of the HBC decided to leave it in the hands of Native middlemen. Critics who wanted the company to take aggressive action against the French sarcastically called this the policy of “sleeping by the frozen sea.” In contrast, the French began to build a string of posts to encircle the bay and cut the English posts off from their surrounding hinterlands.
French expansion began under the leadership of Zachary Robutel, Sieur de La None, who had re-established an old French post on Rainy Lake in 1717. However, it was Pierre Gaultier de Varennes et de La Verendrye, who carried the trading forward. In 1727 he devised a plan that linked the development of inland trade, and the profits it would generate, with the continued search for the western sea. La Verendrye hoped that such a strategy would enlist the support of colonial officials who opposed expansion but were still interested in exploration. He was successful, but he placed himself in a difficult position. He was expected to pay the exploration costs out of his own fur-trading profits; but if he paused to develop the trade he was subject to criticism for not promoting exploration, while if he failed to generate enough income he was placed in an awkward financial situation. Thus La Verendrye’s position was not unlike that of the hbc, and in the end he was less successful in dealing with his critics than the company directors were with theirs. Despite these difficulties, he pushed
The inset above Philip Bauche’s 1754 map is a copy of the map that Auchagah, a Cree guide, drew for La Verendrye some twenty years earlier, to show him the way from Lake Superior to Lake Winnipeg.
Exploration and the fur trade into new areas, beginning in 1732 with the establishment of a post on Lake-of-the-Woods.
As was customary, La Verendrye was guided on his explorations by Aboriginal people:
... the man I have chosen is one named Auchagah [a Cree], a savage of my post, greatly attached to the French nation, the man most capable of guiding a party, and with whom there would be no fear of our being abandoned on the way. When I proposed to him to guide me to the great river of the West he replied that he was at my service and would start whenever I wished. I gave him a collar [necklace] by which, after their manner of speaking, I took possession of his will, telling him that he was to hold himself in readiness for such time as I might have need of him____
According to La Verendrye’s journals, Auchagah, also known as Ocliagach, traced a map for him showing the route between Lake Superior and Lake Winnipeg. To the modern observer, the map appears odd; in fact, it is a reasonable rendering of the canoe route which shows most of the pertinent information a traveller needed. It is not unlike a modern subway or bus route map. Equipped with this map, his guides, and a fund of geographical information obtained by interviewing a number of other Native people. La Verendrye was able to move on to explore the area that is now Manitoba.
By the early 1740s, French posts reached across southern Manitoba into central Saskatchewan near the forks of the Saskatchewan River. The only European known to have visited the area and left an account before this was young Henry Kelsey of the
Tlingit miniature mask of wood, paint, shell, and human hair (c. 1850), from the north-west coast of British Columbia. The native people in each region developed distinctive art forms utilizing local raw materials, and the result was a rich cultural mosaic.
Top to bottom;
1. Charm: Plains
2. Blanket and pattern board: Chilkat, Northwest Coast
3. Bow and arrow kit; Copper Inuit
4. Painted coat (back): Naskapi (Eastern Subarctic)
5. Birchbark basket: Slavey (Western Subarctic)
6. War shirt: Plains
7. Conical basketry hat: Northwest Coast
8. Ulus: Inuit
9. Pipes and pipe bags: Plains
10. Snowshoes: Eastern Woodland, Subarctic, and Inuit
11. Bow drill: Inuit
12. Spoon and cedar box: Tsimshian, Northwest Coast
13. Armbands or garters: Cree
14. Button blanket: Nass River, British Columbia
15. Clay pipe: Woodland
16. Shirt, leggings: Plains Cree
17. Necklace of Russian trade beads: British Columbia Indian
18. Earrings: Inuit
Facing page: Traditional clothing, tools, and art from the early-contact period. With the exception of some of the beadwork on the pipe bag, and the metal blades on the ulus, the materials are of local origin.
Above: Post-contact decorative art. The ready availability of beads led to a flowering of bead-work; basketry was applied to trade pipes; west-coast blanket-makers added European cloth and buttons to their repertoire; cloth was used to make traditional garments until European clothes were adopted: and even jewellery-making benefited from the exotic new items.
Scene in Indian Tent: The artist has portrayed the domestic life of the Plains Indians under ideal conditions; their life in winter was much more miserable. Watercolour (c. 1829-34) by Peter Rindisbacher.
Facing page: Portrait ofSa Ga Yeath Qua Pieth Tow (called Brant). In their struggles for control of the new continent, Europeans sought strategic alliances with native peoples. This oil (1710) by John Verelst (c. 1648-1734) was painted during the visit to London of the “Four Indian Kings.” Some of the Iroquois chief Brant’s descendants remained loyal to the British during the American Revolution, and were awarded a reserve near Brantford, Ontario.
Facing page: Return of the War Party. Paul Kane probably never saw the event he depicted in this 1847 oil painting; he has the lead canoe being paddled backwards, stern-first. To the right is a munka, a Nootkan war canoe, and in the left foreground is a Salish canoe.
Above: Snow Cottages of the Boothians. This watercolour by Sir John Ross (1777-1856) shows an encounter during his second voyage in search of a Northwest Passage (1829-33), at an Inuit village known as North Hendon, near Felix Harbour on the Boothia Peninsula. The placenames honour Felix Booth, the distiller who funded the expedition.
Canoes in a Fog, Lake Superior. Frances Ann Hopkins (1838-1918)—married to the private secretary of Sir George Simpson, governor-in-chief of the Hudson’s Bay Company—accompanied her husband on numerous company journeys. She included herself in this 1869 oil, seated in the mid-section of the birchbark freighter canoe in the foreground.
A North West View of Prince of Wales' Fort in Hudsons Bay, North America. This magnificent stone fort was in fact a “white elephant”; although built to protect the company’s interests against a French assault, it was completely unsuited to the environment. The scant tree-cover of the surrounding land was burnt as firewood in a vain attempt to heat the fort in winter. Engraving (c. 1797) after a drawing by Samuel Hearne (1745-92).
HBC. In 1690 “boy Kelsey,” as he was then called, had travelled as far as the border of eastern Saskatchewan, guided there by a party of Assiniboine who traded regularly at York Factory. But the precise route Kelsey and his party took remains a mystery, and unfortunately his account is cryptic and does not reveal a great deal. So for all practical purposes French records, beginning with those of La Verendrye, are the earliest useful first-hand accounts of Native life in the western interior.
La Verendrye and his followers arrived in the northern plains just before the horse did. His journals make it clear that inter-tribal raiding and trading had spread horses from the Spanish colonial frontier north-eastward as far as the Mandan villages of the upper Missouri River, but no farther. The Plains Assiniboine and Cree of south-eastern Saskatchewan and southern Manitoba did not obtain them until the second half of the eighteenth century. Their rapid acquisition of horses after that was doubtless made easier by their greater access to English and French goods, which they traded with the Mandan. Farther west, in what is now southern Mberta, horses had reached the western prairies by the early eighteenth century.
The horse was the single most important aspect of European culture to reach the prairie Aboriginal people before the post-Confederation reservation era. For one thing, it led them to abandon the traditional buffalo hunt in favour of headlong mounted pursuits. Although “running buffalo” on horseback was undoubtedly less risky than hunting them on foot, it was still dangerous. Managing a smooth-bore flintlock gun on a galloping horse in a blinding cloud of dust amid a thundering herd of buffalo was a real feat. Most Plain’s hunters in fact continued to rely on lances or bows and arrows until repeating rifles began to replace flintlocks in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Using their traditional weapons on horseback a hunter was able to dispatch animals at the same rate as a Metis using a flintlock, with relative ease and without having to buy the equipment. So European weapons did not at first have the enormous impact on the prairie nations that they did on their woodland neighbours. As the primary symbol of wealth, however, the horse served to increase competition among Plains men. Firearms, ammunition, tobacco, kettles, knives, and hatchets obtained from the fur traders were valued also, but these too had less of an impact here than in the woodlands.
With the establishment of Fort a la Come near the forks of the Saskatchewan River, the French push north-west of Lake Superior finally came to an end. Their system was strained to its limits, and without streamlining and reorganizing their transportation arrangements it is unlikely that they could have effectively extended themselves any farther. Given that the hbc did not respond in any major way to their expansion overland, there was little reason for the French to make the added investment other than to continue the search for the western sea. Similarly, the HBC had little incentive to abandon its policy of “sleeping by the frozen sea.” Although the French apparently secured the largest share of the furs. Native traders were still bringing enough to hbc posts to enable the English to conduct a highly profitable trade. The only major new investment the company made during this period was the establishment of Fort Churchill in 1717—a move that had nothing to do with combating French activities, but was intended to outflank the Cree who were blocking the Chipewyan from visiting York Factory.
The fact that the English and French were content to compete at a distance worked to the advantage of Assiniboine and Cree traders. Although the French posts reached into the heart of Cree and Assiniboine territory, they lacked the transport capacity to bring in enough goods to satisfy Aboriginal demands. So the French tended to exchange lightweight, high-value goods for prime furs, while the more Remote hbc posts, supplied by cheap ocean transport, were able to offer a full range of goods and to accept lower grade furs. This situation allowed Assiniboine and Cree middlemen to handle the important carrying trade, and it gave them the advantage of a competitive market.
World History
