Divided between the St. Lawrence and Hudson Bay, but heavily concentrated in Montreal, the fur trade was seriously disrupted by the Seven Years War. The hostilities actually began in the Ohio Valley, two years before France and England officially declared war in 1756. Cut off from the St. Lawrence, most French posts in the Saskatchewan country closed before the fall of Quebec, and by 1760 the English traders on Hudson Bay had a monopoly of western furs. But their pre-eminence was short-lived. With their impressive skills and experience, and with brandy and high-quality English goods to exchange, French-Canadian voyageurs, interpreters and traders soon, and again, became formidable competitors for the furs of the West. Early in the 1770s the Cree Wapinesiw, who had brought twenty or thirty canoes a year to York Factory between 1755 and 1770, conveyed, through an intermediary, his hope to Hudson’s Bay Company factor Andrew Graham that “you will knot Be angre with him as has Drank So much Brandy this winter he canot Com.” The willingness of the Montreal traders to mingle with the Native peoples, and their supplies of ammunition, tobacco, and liquor meant, concluded Graham, that “every inducement to visit the Company’s Factories is forgot, and the prime furs are picked out and traded. The refuse is tied up and brought down to us.”
Through most of these years of vigorous expansion, the Montreal-based trade
The original Fort Garry was built by the Hudson’s Bay Company between 1817 and 1822, at the junction of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, and named after Nicholas Garry, who helped arrange the merger of the hbc and the North West Company in 1821. The stone-walled Upper Fort Garry seen in this view (c. 1884) by H. A. Strong was begun in 1835 at a site just to the west, and the following year it became the administrative centre of Assiniboia.
Was a fragmented, highly competitive business. With the conquest the monopoly of New France gave way to a trade pursued by individuals, partnerships, and loose coalitions among them. Competition was often fierce—Peter Pond was twice implicated in the deaths of rival traders—but gradually firmer groupings emerged. Foremost among them was the North West Company (nwc), dominated by Scots who first combined their resources in 1776. In 1779 the company’s sixteen shares were divided among nine partnerships, and a year later the group was expanded further. Competitors remained, but the most powerful of them were added to a new coalition in 1787 and allied to the company by co-operative agreements in the early 1790s. Then Jay’s Treaty, signed by the United States and Britain in 1794, forced British traders out of American territory and the area south-west of the Great Lakes. Some of them joined the NWC in 1795, but others remained independent and began to challenge the Company in the interior. To strengthen their position, in 1798 the Forsythe-Richardson and Leith-James companies formed a New North West Company (also known as the XY Company after the identifying mark on its bales of furs). They were soon joined by Alexander Mackenzie and other wintering partners
Of the original Nwc who were unhappy with their standing in that organization. Bitter and costly competition between the two Montreal groups ensued across the interior. It sorely tested the smaller XY Company, and with the death of Simon McTavish, the imperious “Marquis” of the original nwc, the competitors merged their operations in 1804.
Facing decline as the aggressive Montreal traders spread through the West, the hbc began to emulate and challenge its competitors by carrying its trade to the Native peoples. In its attempt to catch up to its rivals, it was characteristically methodical; rivers were mapped and posts were built. But the company was twenty years behind Peter Pond in reaching the “Eldorado” of the Athabasca, and was unable to exploit the riches of that area effectively until it recruited voyageurs into its service in 1815. The durable, roomy York boat formed the basis of the hbc transportation system into the interior; slow and cumbersome, but requiring less skill to operate than the canoe, it might stand as a metaphor for the company itself during these years.
For three decades, St. Lawrence and Hudson Bay interests jockeyed for position and advantage in the fur trade. Posts proliferated. By 1789 over 100 had been built, almost two-thirds of them by St. Lawrence traders. Through the next sixteen years another 323 posts were erected, some 40 per cent of them by the hbc. Such rivalry could not continue. The expense to the Montrealers of maintaining the interior posts was enormous, hbc costs also climbed, although it had fewer than five hundred permanent employees in the interior in 1805. Competition drove up prices and depleted fur stocks. And when European fur markets shrank during the Napoleonic Wars, the difficulties increased, hbc dividends, 8 per cent in the late eighteenth century, were nil between 1809 and 1814. By 1814 barely 100 posts (42 of them HBC establishments) were operating in the West. Still, competition jeopardized the trade, and in 1821 the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company amalgamated. By 1825 the Hudson’s Bay monopoly operated a mere 45 posts.
For the Native peoples of the interior, who outnumbered Europeans by ten to one until they were decimated by smallpox in 1818-21, the consequences of the frantic European commercial penetration of their territory after 1760 were immense. By 1800 few inhabitants lived much more than 25 kilometres (15 miles) from a trading post. Relieved of the burden of travel to distant markets, and less constrained by the capacity of their canoes, the Native people were able to trap more intensively. Robbed of their strategic “middleman” position and the power it conveyed, Cree and Assiniboine had to find a new niche in the changing West as provisioners of the
European fur traders. So the Cree moved west from the interlake and Lake of the Woods area, and the Assiniboine migrated southward to the parkland-grassland margin, whence they pursued the buffalo of the plains. But these were the traditional resources of the Blackfoot and the Mandan, who now had horses from the south and guns directly from American, Hudson’s Bay, or St. Lawrence fur traders. Conflict between the Cree-Assiniboine and their south-western neighbours escalated. By the 1830s the Blackfoot had assumed a new dominance on the plains, as suppliers of buffalo hides to the American Fur and Hudson’s Bay companies. Profiting from a trade that yielded at least eighty thousand robes a year, they enjoyed a decade or two of cultural flowering that led all too quickly to disillusionment with the rapid depletion of once-vast buffalo herds after 1860.
For the Ojibwa who expanded into the territory vacated by the Cree, and the Chipewyans of the northern forest, the 1820s and 1830s brought a similar if less dramatic plight. Beaver, moose, and caribou, mercilessly hunted for trade and food, were increasingly scafce in these regions. Communal hunting over large areas in bands of twenty to thirty-five gave way, among the Ojibwa, to dependence on small, private, family hunting territories. As the Ojibwa’s mobility declined, they hunted rabbits and other small animals more intensely. In the 1820s the people of Rainy River depended on buffalo hides, brought to them by the HBC, for moccasins and clothing. By 1840, the food and fur-bearing animals had been hunted to depletion and the ecological foundations on which traditional Aboriginal life rested were severely weakened. Many Native peoples were left dependent, at least intermittently, on European assistance, and their centuries-old autonomy was compromised.
Added to this were the effects of alcohol—over twenty-one thousand gallons reached the interior in the highly competitive year of 1803 alone—and disease. Smallpox devastated the Chipewyans in the 1780s; Samuel Hearne’s estimate, though likely high, was that 90 per cent of the population died. It also took a heavy toll among the Ojibwa, Sioux, and Assiniboine. Between 1818 and 1820 measles and whooping cough may have killed half the Brandon Assiniboine, and a third of the Western Cree and other groups. In 1838 smallpox again carried off large numbers— possibly two-thirds or more of the Assiniboine, Blackfoot, and North Saskatchewan Cree—although the new vaccine administered by Hudson’s Bay Company men reduced the death rate among the plains Cree and the woodland and parkland Native people of south-central Manitoba, southern Saskatchewan, and eastern Alberta areas. Ravaged, debauched, dislodged, and increasingly dispirited by their incorpo-
In Wanderings of an Artist Paul Kane noted that one evening in June 1848, after leaving The Pas, on the Saskatchewan River, he arrived at the place of encampment ahead of the rest of his party: “I got out my drawing materials and took a sketch of the brigade, as it was coming up with a fair breeze, crowding all sail to escape a thunder storm rolling fast after them.” His Brigade of Boats shows the HBc’s fur-laden York boats on their way to Lake Winnipeg. Oil, c. 1850.
Ration into the periphery of the European commercial world, by 1840 the Native peoples of the interior were firmly embarked on a path that led to the reserves, unrest, and abject despair of the 1870s and 1880s.
As the fortunes and the mansions of the McGills, McKenzies, McTavishes, Frobishers, and Ellices of Montreal, and the stylish lives of hbc shareholders in Britain demonstrated, there were significant profits in this trade. But like those of the fishery, the profits from furs concentrated in the centres from which the trade was organized rather than in the areas from which the staple came. Because Native demands were met with goods from Europe, the trade generated little economic development locally. Its significance lay in its impact on the indigenous peoples and its consequences for the political and institutional development of British North America. The fur trade was the mould in which modern Canada was cast. Focused on the beaver of the northern woodlands, channelled through the two great north-
This late nineteenth century woodsman may be from Manitoba or north-west Ontario, yet his costume is much like that of his fellows in eastern Canada. Lumherman Chopping Tree in Winter (c. 1870),byW. G. R. Hind.
Ern entries to the continent, and extending along the rivers that led into them, the fur trade ultimately defined the boundaries of the nation.
World History
