209 Fur Traders, Racial Categories, and Kinship

209 Originally published as part of: 6th Algonquian Conference Papers (1974) FUR TRADERS, RACIAL CATEGORIES, AND KINSHIP NETWORKS Jennifer Brown University of Chicago Resume. Avant le fusionnement de leurs compagnies en 1821, les hommes de la Compagnie de la Baie d'Hudson et ceux de la Compagnie du Nord-Ouest employaient normalement des termes different pour designer les indigenes metisses des territoires indiens. Ces usages contrastants semblent refleter la difference d'attitudes et d'antecedents de ces deux groupes d'employes ainsi que les structures sociales distinctes dans lesquelles ils etaient integres—avec des implications quant aux genres de rapports sociaux que ces commercants entretenaient avec les groupes indigenes (en grande partie algonquins) et leurs membres. 210 Originally published as part of: 6th Algonquian Conference Papers (1974) FUR TRADERS. RACTAT, CATEGORIES, AND KTWSHIP NETWORKS In the decades between the 17cOs and 1821, the country of numerous Algonquian groups, as well as of many groups farther north and west, was also increasingly familiar territory to two varieties of European fur trader—Hudson's Bay Company men employed from London, England, and Canadian-based traders serving the interests of the various Montreal fur trade partnerships that eventually combined into the North West Company. The Hudson's Bay and North West Companies had strikingly different origins, histories, and organizational structures, and their personnel differed widely in their social origins, backgrounds, and 1 affiliations. This paper attempts first to sketch some of the social contrasts between these Companies and between their men, and then to pursue some possible relationships between these contrasts and the racial categories and attitudes of Hudson' s Bay men and North Westers in the Indian country. The Hudson1 s Bay Company was founded in 1670 as a royally chartered monopoly claiming exclusive rights to trade in Hudson Bay and its water shed. For a century before the first North West Company partnerships were formed, this London-based concern had been sending officers and servants to Hudson Bay to establish and build up permanent posts along the Bay shores. These men were not drawn from the North American colonies; they were Englishmen and Scots (particularly from the Orkneys) who came directly from the British Isles to the Bay to serve out contracts of a fixed number of years at fixed wages or salaries. There was a con siderable gulf, social as well as geographic, between these men and their 211 Originally published as part of: 6th Algonquian Conference Papers (1974) employers. Company authority was vested in the so-called London Committee a group of substantial shareholders. These merchants, investors, and minor nobility typically never travelled to the fur trade country, but directed their enterprise on the basis of second-hand information carried home to them on their annual ships from the Bay. And correspondingly, the Bay servants on whom the success of their trade depended, rarely became stockholders or Committee members. Numerous Hudson's Bay Company servants shared certain other distinctive characteristics. In the 1680s, the Company began to hire boys in their early teens (and sometimes younger) as apprentices for seven-year terms (Rich, 1961, I: 157, 296). These boys were to be brought up in the fur trade, and the London Committee hoped that they would become loyal Company men and skilled traders and officers. The chances that such apprentices would develop lasting allegiance to the Company were good. Removed from their homeland at an early age, they were unlikely to develop or maintain strong family or other social ties that would conflict with Company loyalties. Often their non-Company ties were few and weak to begin with; the numerous apprentices who were poor "parish boys" or drawn from charitable institutions such as Christ's Hospital or the Grey Coat Hospital at Westminster (Davies 1965: 63; Rich 1961, II: 98) had few strong links to British society to begin with. Furthermore, once their Bay service began, employees were subject to regulations discouraging them from forming ties that would divert them from Company business. The London Committee early expressed a strong preference for unmarried servants, and by 1684, had further ruled that no white women were to be granted passage to the Bay (Rich 1945, Second 212 Originally published as part of: 6th Algonquian Conference Papers (1974) Series: 230). Traders' long contracts and the infrequency of their furloughs from Hudson Bay made it difficult to maintain family relation ships in Britain. And they were directed, while in the Bay, to live lives of monastic celibacy and quasi-military discipline, segregated from Indian women as well as from white (Rich 1961, I: 145, 496). Hudson's Bay men responded to these regulations and to their isolated situation by seeking out sexual, familial, and friendship attachments within their restricted circumstances. In growing numbers, as time went on, they departed from Company rules to form alliances, often long-lasting, with Indian women. And many developed strong friendships with their fellow employees in the Bay. One common type of friendship link was the asymmetrical bond of patronage between senior officer and apprentice or junior officer. In later years, many men cemented these ties by marrying their patrons' native daughters according to a "custom p of the country" well recognized as such by the early nineteenth century. Hudson's Bay Company man J.E. Harriott described the "custom," as he knew it in this period, to a Canadian law court in 1869: When I say married, I mean according to the custom of the country, which was by an agreement between the father of the girl and the person who was going to take the girl for wife. We lived as married people, when married this way...I was married after the custom of the country myself.. .When I took a wife as above mentioned, I made a solemn promise to her father to live with her and treat her as my wife as long as we both lived. ("Johnstone et al. vs. Connolly," 1869: 285-286) Such men might become the more firmly attached to Hudson Bay through kin ties both to Company colleagues and to native relatives among the so- called Home Indians, largely Cree or of mixed descent, who were con nected with the various posts. 213 Originally published as part of: 6th Algonquian Conference Papers (1974) The social origins and organization of the North Westers from Montreal were strikingly different. The North Wester Company grew out of assorted business partnerships to become the BLBC's most dangerous competitor until the two Companies combined in 1821. It was built on two solid bases; firstly the fur trade skills and knowledge that French Canadians had been acquiring for 1 50 years before the British conquest of Canada, and secondly, the enterprise and capital of the Britishers, largely Highland Scots, who began to arrive in Montreal in the 1760's, after the conquest, to make their fortunes. The Britishers who so quickly took over the Montreal fur trade stand in marked contrast to their Hudson's Bay rivals. As K.G. Davies (1966: 168) has remarked, the North West Company was helping to create Canadians, whereas Hudson' s Bay men contracted to come directly from Britain to their assigned posts and to retire directly back again once their terms of service ended. Many North Westers had migrated to North America from Scotland before they entered the fur trade; some had settled in New York until the American Revolution roused their loyalist sympathies and brought them to Montreal or other parts of eastern Canada such as Glengarry in eastern Ontario. North Westers were therefore often familiar with colonial society both south and north of the St. Lawrence River; they had lived in it, and some had even been born in it. In another respect too, they contrast with Hudson's Bay men. Scottish migrants commonly brought with them numbers of family members and "High land cousins," or if they found success in the New World, encouraged relatives to follow and join them once they were established. Scottish North Westers were no exception. One of their major figures, Simon McTavish, brought several of his relatives into the fur trade, and 214 Originally published as part of: 6th Algonquian Conference Papers (1974) numbered over a dozen other North Westers among his kin by blood and marriage before he died in 1804. The directors of the fur trade firm f Phyn, Ellice, and Forsyth, which backed some of the North Westers' o partnerships from Montreal after leaving its original home in Schenectady, New York, were similarly interrelated (Wallace 1934: Appendix A). Such kinship solidarity or "clannishness" was also conspicuous among other Highland Scottish North Westers such as the Mackenzies and McTavishes, and persisted among traders of North West Company background for some decades after they and their Company became part of the HBC. North Westers who were not already part of these kinship networks might join them by marrying in. And cousin marriage was an acceptable means of consolidating families and fortunes. The family of Sir Alexander Mackenzie, Scottish immigrants first to New York and then to Canada, showed, as W. Kaye Lamb has noted, a great and long-standing "propensity for marrying kinsmen." Following the example set by several earlier Mackenzies, Sir Alexander married fellow clanswoman Geddes Mackenzie in 1812 (Lamb 1970: 45). (Similarly, another Mackenzie connection, HBC Governor George Simpson, married his own first cousin in 1830.) The structure of the North West Company, unlike that of the HBC, lent itself well to the purposes of Scottish fur traders seeking to advance their family and clan interests. Company authority was vested not in a remote London Committee but in the hands of "Partners," many of whom had wintered in the Indian country.

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