The Canadian Fur Trade - Essay Example

Running Head: The history of the Canadian Fur Trade and the effects it had on the Native community The history of the Canadian Fur Trade and the effects it had on the Native community Authors Name Institution Name Westward and northward exploration in what is now Canada was inextricably linked with the twin desiderata of a profitable fur trade and an easy passage through North America to the Pacific and thus to the rich trade of the Orient. Voyaging into the Hudson Bay region, British explorers failed to locate the easy passage to the South Sea but did discover an abundant fur resource. Similarly, the French, from their colonial base of New France in the St. Lawrence Valley, searched westward for a passage to China and discovered instead a potential fur trade that would dominate the economy of their North American colony. Just before the establishment of the Hudsons Bay Company by the British in 1670, the geographical information obtained by explorers searching for the Pacific was joined with economic data on the fur trade. "Two Frenchmen [Pierre Radisson and Sieur de Groseilliers] who have lived long in Canada & have been up in ye great lakes that lye in the midst of that part of America" informed English merchants that they had discovered a plentiful fur resource in the Great Lakes region; they added, "There is great hope of finding some passage through those Lakes into the South Sea." 1 On the strength of this information, the "Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudsons Bay" was founded; for more than a century "the Company" dominated exploration and economic utilization of the drainage basin of Hudson Bay. 2 At the same time that the company was expanding west and northwest from posts at the mouths of the major rivers flowing into Hudson Bay, the French in the St. Lawrence Valley explored westward from Montreal through the Great Lakes to Lake Winnipeg and the upper Missouri and beyond. Although France lost its colonial possessions in North America in 1763 after the French and Indian Wars, this Montreal-based fur trade continued. Thus two commercial enterprises devoted to the fur trade and to the continuing search for a route to the Pacific existed in the late 1700s: the Hudsons Bay Company, English in origin and dominated by Englishmen and Scots; and the North West Company of Montreal, originally French but now controlled by English merchants (although still employing many French-Canadians). 3 As rivals for the fur trade of the western interior, these two companies were responsible for nearly all major explorations in interior and western Canada in the late 1700s and early 1800s, carrying the fur trade economy as far as the Pacific shores of British Columbia and the interior of the American Pacific Northwest. As soon as the fighting ended in North America, the fur trade frontier revived and within a few years was more flourishing than ever. All through the war the fur brigades had left for the west. In 1758 over two hundred voyageurs from the Montreal region alone went to the western posts -Michilimackinac, Detroit, Chagouamigon, the Mer de lOuest. Even in 1759, over one hundred men went out. The following year, with British armies investing Montreal from three directions, only thirty-three men were sent. In 1761 over two hundred voyageurs were hired; significantly, seven of the thirty-two merchants who hired canoe men bore English or Scots names, Alexander Henry, from Albany, among them; but they hired only some twenty voyageurs. Within a few years the preponderance of Canadian merchants in the trade was reversed and before the end of the century the names of only twelve Canadian bourgeois appear. These twelve sent out seventy-six men; the British merchants. During those intervening years the role of the Canadians in the fur trade, for a variety of reasons, was steadily reduced from that of the bourgeois, the entrepreneur, to that of wage earner, voyageur and commis. The fur trade was now a partnership. British capital and direction joined with Canadian technical skill, the profits going to the former. In 1763 and 1764 the trade was disrupted by Pontiacs uprising. Once again the Anglo-American frontier was threatened as the Indians, disgruntled at the treatment they received from the new men at the old western posts, tried to regain control of their lands and their destinies, which, they realized too late, they were losing. The garrisons at the western posts were taken by surprise and several of them overwhelmed. War parties fell on the frontier settlements south of the Great Lakes, burning and destroying. Over 2000 settlers were slaughtered; the survivors fled to the east. Once again the Anglo-American frontiersmen and the colonial authorities proved incapable of dealing with the problem which they themselves had created. Pontiacs warriors had to be crushed by British regular troops. During the ensuing half century the Montreal fur traders -- Scots, English, American, and a handful of Canadian merchant traders -- with Canadian voyageurs pushed the fur trade frontier ever farther into the northwest, into the Peace River country and over "the shining mountains." By 1778 Peter Pond, late of Connecticut, was trading on the Athabasca. On July 14, 1789, Alexander Mackenzie reached the Arctic Ocean at the mouth of the river that today bears his name. Four years later he crossed the Rocky Mountains. On a rock overlooking the Pacific he wrote in bold letters with trade vermillion: "Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the twenty-second of July, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-three." The Canadian fur trade frontier had now reached its outermost limits. Just as the new men in the fur trade employed old Canadian techniques, so the new political rulers of Canada after 1763 were forced to continue old Canadian policies. It seems ironic that after fighting a savage war to wrest the Ohio country from the French, the British were obliged to continue doing what the French had sought to do: to bar the region to Anglo-American settlement. The old conflict between the fur trade frontier and the settlement frontier continued there a while longer. The American Revolution however, in part caused by this problem, ultimately resolved it; and again it is ironic that the Americans finally won this area only with the aid of France. It is ironic too that the new masters of the Canadian fur trade had to take up the bitter struggle with Canadas old rivals, the merchants of Albany and the Hudsons Bay Company. The former were virtually eliminated during the American Revolution-many of them merely transferred their operations from New York to Montreal. Then in 1783 came the division of the continent north of the Spanish empire. In the west this division was made along the Great Lakes line first suggested by the Canadian, Denis Riverin, in 1696. Toward the 1850s, it appeared increasingly unlikely that company offspring placed in Canada would join or form such enterprises as Dicksons. Canada was growing in population and wealth, and company sons began to find a diversity of careers there like their counterparts in Britain. And unlike the situation in the fur trade country, references to racial distinctions and handicaps were decidedly rare in the context of eastern Canada. Nor did Canadian whites seem to make subtle distinctions based on gradations of color; individuals with dark complexions and Indian mothers were not assigned a lower status than, for example, light-skinned persons with mothers of mixed ancestry. The apparent success of the family of North West Chief Factor John Dugald Cameron and his Indian wife in southern Ontario is of interest in this regard. A broad tendency of senior officers with native families to follow their children to Canada to look for favorable retirement prospects was remarked by John Tod in a letter of 21 March 1844. Canada was growing; the fur trade was not, and by some estimates it was even waning. "Old Factors" were retiring, "guided, no doubt, by the same instinct that teaches rats to leave a falling house-- Canada -ward, seems to be their favorite roosting place". The Cobourg area of southern Ontario became the home of several families--the Camerons, Cloustons, and others of both old companies. In 1840, Hudsons Bay Chief Factor Jacob Corrigal retired to Cobourg. His will of 1844 named as one executor a former North West Company trader, Robert Henry, and a Hudsons Bay son-in-law, William Nourse, who was to retire to Cobourg in 1851. In 1821 the North West Company and the Hudsons Bay Company merged; the new company (still called "the Hudsons Bay Company") maintained oligopolistic control over the fur trade of Canada and also held a monopoly on most of the exploration that took place into the Canadian West and North until the emergence of the scientific explorers of the interior in the 1850s. With the possible exception of the explorations of David Thompson, no nineteenth-century Canadian fur trade explorations could rival the eighteenth-century fur-trade explorations of Alexander Mackenzie or the American fur-trade explorations of Jedediah Smith in the 1820s. But several significant explorations conducted by Canadian fur trappers in the 1800s not only helped to fill the map of western and northern Canada with geographical data but also provided the information on which the Canadian settlement of the interior and farther West would be based. During the first half of the nineteenth century, three primary motivations propelled fur trade explorers toward the Pacific and the Arctic. 4 The first was geopolitical. Just as the U.S. government viewed the American fur trade of the upper Missouri and the Rocky Mountain regions as a tool of imperial ambition, so the English used the Canadian fur trade (whether by the North West Company, the Hudsons Bay Company, or the merged concerns after 1821) as an instrument in the clash of rivals for domination of western North America. British, Spanish, Russians, and Americans all cast covetous glances at western North America as the key to ultimate control over both the economic and the political destiny of the entire continent. The continued expansion of the fur trade, as well as the acquisition of knowledge through fur trade exploration, was essential to imperial ambition. 5 The second motivation for fur trade exploration was simple economic competition. In the years before the merger of 1821, the North West Company and the Hudsons Bay Company competed with one another for access to both territory and tribal loyalty among the various Native American populations on which they relied for much of their fur supply. Both companies competed with the St. Louis--based fur trade of the upper Missouri; after the merger, the Hudsons Bay Company continued to seek geographical information through exploration that would allow it to outflank its new rivals, the American Fur Company and the Rocky Mountain Fur Company based in St. Louis, for both the upper Missouri and the Rocky Mountain trade regions. Also before the merger, the North West Company competed with John Jacob Astors short-lived enterprise at the mouth of the Columbia and, after the War of 1812 and the purchase of Astors establishment by the North West Company, with the continuing encroachment of other American companies working their way into the Rocky Mountains via the Platte Valley. After the merger, the Hudsons Bay Company planned to expand its domination of the fur trade of the western slope of the Rockies and even engaged in a "scorched earth" policy in the Columbian Basin and Snake River country to forestall American trade. 6 Similarly, along the Pacific coast, the company engaged in exploration designed to intercept furs that might otherwise have been traded by Native Americans to Russian and American enterprises. Part of this competitive incentive was tied to Great Britains imperial ambitions for western North America, but an equal part was related to the extractive nature of the industry itself. New territory with unexploited resources and with native populations unaffiliated with other fur companies was a basic requirement for the continued economic growth and success of the fur trade enterprise. Trading furs with the white traders allowed a native man who didn’t have a lot of status within his tribe to increase his wealth and by doing that increase his status within the tribe. Introduce alcohol into the picture and elements of that cycle are irreversibly affected. The traders take advantage of the native man. He loses all he has, loses status and respect, he becomes depressed and or violent. When many in the community followed this path, the community itself became depressed. http://www.montana.edu/wwwai/imsd/alcohol/Jessyca/furtrade.htm Finally, a third motivation for fur trade exploration was the need for geographical information. Often this information was practically oriented and was used in the annual operation of the fur trade. Other times it had a more continental focus and was related to longer-range ambitions for good transportation routes to western North America, the Pacific, and the Orient. Certainly, the fur trade explorations of the late eighteenth century were motivated by the search for routes to the western sea. Although the belief in a "Great River of the West" or in an easy all-water commercial route across the continent was less pervasive after Mackenzie and the Lewis and Clark expedition, the members of the fur trade still sought to locate the lowest and easiest mountain passes that could give their companies an advantage over rivals. Thus, the explorations of the Canadian fur trade in the first half of the nineteenth century were a blend of imperial ambition, economic motivation, and geographical curiosity. As the explorer-traders of the Hudsons Bay and North West Companies moved into the West and North in the early 1800s, they encountered regions that were poorly known and even less understood. The Hudson Bay trade and the Montreal trade had made extensive contacts with Indians who provided data on the western and northern interior regions (much more so than had their American counterparts to the south). The traders themselves, on their journeys toward the interior, had gathered much data on the forest and grassland regions east of the Rockies, adding to the mental maps of Canada before the early 1800s. And the travels of Mackenzie between 1789 and 1793 had added the Mackenzie River basin and the upper Peace River-upper Fraser River region of the Canadian Rockies to the fund of available geographical lore by 1800. In the basic geographical image of western Canada in the early 1800s, 7 four major regions lay west of Hudson Bay and north of the Great Lakes: (1) the narrow taiga-clad coastal plain region of "New South Wales" in the southeastern corner of Hudson Bay, where the primary Hudsons Bay Company posts of Churchill Factory, York Factory, and Severn Factory were located; (2) the lake-dotted Canadian Shield region or "Stoney Region," stretching northwestward from the Great Lakes to the Arctic shores, with the northeastern section from Churchill Factory to the Coppermine River being defined as the "Barren Grounds" of the tundra ecosystem, the region to the west of the barrens and north of Lakes Athabasca and Great Slave as the "Land of Little Sticks" or taiga ecosystem, and the remainder as the "Great Western Forest"; (3) the "Great Plains," forest north of the North Saskatchewan River and grassland to the south with an aspen and park grove (the " Îclets de bois ") transitional zone between forest and grassland, separated from the "Stoney Region" by a line running northwest from Lake of the Woods to Lake Winnipeg and thence to near the Hudsons Bay Companys Cumberland House on the lower Saskatchewan and continuing northwestward just east of the Athabasca and Mackenzie Rivers; and (4) the virtually unknown (except for Mackenzies narrow traverse to the Pacific) forested and rugged region of the Rocky Mountains or "Stoney Mountains" extending from the western margin of the plains all the way to the Pacific, with the Pacific slope portions of the mountains being known as "New Caledonia." In addition to these four major geographical provinces was a fifth transitional region: the "Valley of the Lakes" extending from the Great Lakes to the Beaufort Sea, roughly approximating the boundary zone between the Canadian Shield and the Great Plains and containing the major lakes Winnipeg and Winnipegosis, Reindeer, Athabasca, Great Slave, and Great Bear. Although it was not viewed as a major geographical province, this fifth region was of crucial importance and was probably the best understood of the regions of the interior, partly because of the traders long reliance on water travel. Both the Hudsons Bay Company and the North West Company based their administrative divisions on drainage basins or river-lake regions. The Northern Department of the Hudsons Bay Company consisted of Canada west of the Severn River and included Churchill Factory of the Churchill River basin, York Factory of the Nelson and Hayes basins, Winnipeg Factory of the Lake Winnipeg region, and Saskatchewan Factory of the Saskatchewan River west of Cumberland House, which lay northwest of Lake Winnipegosis. The North West Companys administrative departments often overlapped those of the Hudsons Bay Company. North and west of Lake Superior were the Nipigon Lake district, the Lac de la Pluie (Lake of the Woods) district, and the Lake Winnipeg district; more or less coterminous with the latter were the Red River and Assiniboine district southwest of Lake Winnipeg and the Fort Dauphin district west of Lake Winnipeg. Northwest of Winnipeg were the overlapping English River and Saskatchewan districts between the Churchill River and the North Saskatchewan; still farther northwest was the huge Athabasca district, which extended from the North Saskatchewan to Great Bear Lake. Through these administrative regions ran the three major transportation routes on which the Canadian fur trade depended: a southern route, primarily used by the North West Company men (the "NorWesters"), from Lake Superior following various river systems into the Lake Winnipeg region and then up the north branch of the Saskatchewan to the mountains; a central Hudsons Bay Company route from Churchill and York Factories west into the interior, where Hudsons Bay Company traders used the same river systems as did the NorWesters to penetrate southward to the upper Missouri and westward to the Rockies; and a northern route pioneered by North West Company explorer Mackenzie and including the routes of the Athabasca and Peace Rivers west to the mountains and the Mackenzie River route north to the Arctic. 8 In the northwest the struggle between the Hudsons Bay Company and the North West Company of Montreal was waged by the Montreal men as ruthlessly as the earlier military conflicts between Canada and the English colonies. When in 1812 Lord Selkirk of the Hudsons Bay Company established a settlement at Red River athwart the North West Companys main supply line, it was savagely attacked in much the same way that Schenectady, Deerfield, and Haverhill had been dealt with in the Anglo-French wars. The fur trade frontier in the north was not yet ready to yield to settlement. The new masters of the Canadian fur trade, tough Scots, Englishmen, and some few from the old northern colonies, were themselves in many subtle ways conquered by the way of life of the Canadians. The Nor Westers had quickly adopted the techniques and many of the cultural traits of the old Canadian military and fur trade noblesse. Become bilingual and tri-cultural, they too spent money recklessly, built fine homes, married into the old seigneurial families, and entertained lavishly. The annual meetings of the wintering partners at Grand Portage, and at Beaver Hall in Montreal, are legendary for the liquor consumed as these men roared out the old voyageur songs and gloried in the hardihood the life of the pays den haut had demanded of them. Their moral values too acquired a flavor of the old frontier. While in the northwest these men took Indian wives, "savoured the wine of the country," and Montreal society accepted the custom by feigning ignorance. When one compares the attitudes and values of these fur trade bourgeois with those of the old Canadian noblesse and of the mercantile class of either Britain or the colonies to the south, it is apparent that they had abandoned those of the class whence they had come, adopted those of their new environment. The Canadian frontier had, in fact, assimilated them to a remarkable degree. Eventually rising costs over the long haul to and from the northwest, declining prices for furs, the profligacy of the Nor Westers and their resulting lack of financial reserves, drove them to the wall. In 1821 the surviving partners were glad to merge with the old foe, the Hudsons Bay Company. Montreal had finally been defeated; the fur brigades of grands canots de maître no longer departed from Lachine every spring. The furs and supplies moved through Hudson Bay by ship, then by York boat to the posts on the northern plains. The life of the voyageur was over; the western frontier was closed to the French Canadian. His world was no longer one of vast horizons, but the restricted world of the St. Lawrence Valley, its economy dominated by grasping men who thought only of profit -speculators in the essentials of life, land, and wheat. There was no intendant, no capitaine de milice, to appeal to for social justice or redress of grievance. The consequences of this are still being felt today. The cartographic records of the major fur-trading concerns seem to indicate that the western and northern interior of Canada was much better known in the early 1800s than was the western interior of the United States to the south. To a certain degree this is true. The Canadian fur trade, after all, had been active over a longer period of time than the St. Louis fur trade and had, until the 1830s, many more men in the field than the American fur trade ever did. But even though much was known about the country bounded by Hudson Bay on the east, the Great Lakes on the south, the Rockies on the west, and the Arctic on the north, major portions of the interior were still virtual terrae incognitae, and much basic geographical information was either inaccurate or missing altogether. Even less known were the regions of the Rockies, the Columbian Plateau, and the "New Caledonia" Pacific slope. References 1. Arthur S. Morton, A History of the Canadian West to 1870-71, 2d ed. (Toronto, 1973), 48. 2. Edwin Ernest Rich, Hudsons Bay Company, 1670-1870, 3 vols. ( New York, 1961); Peter C. Newman, Company of Adventurers, 2 vols. ( New York, 1985-87); Douglas MacKay , The Honorable Company ( Freeport NY, 1970). 3. Marjorie Wilkins Campbell, The North West Company (Toronto, 1957); Gordon Charles Davidson, The North West Company (New York, 1918). 4. Theodore J. Karamanski, Fur Trade and Exploration: Opening the Far Northwest, 1821-1852 (Norman, 1983), xiii. xvi. 5. Barry Gough, The Northwest Coast: British Navigation, Trade, and Discoveries to 1812 ( Vancouver, 1992). 6. James P. Ronda, Astoria and Empire (Lincoln, 1990), chap. 1, and William H. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (New York, 1966). 7. Eric Ross, Beyond the River and the Bay (Toronto, 1970), maps and chap. 1; R. Cole Harris and John Warkentin, Canada before Confederation (New York, 1974), 232-84. 8. J. B. Tyrrell, ed., David Thompsons Narrative of His Exploration in Western America, 1784-1812 (Toronto, 1916). 9. http://www.montana.edu/wwwai/imsd/alcohol/Jessyca/furtrade.htm Read More