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Home , Factory (trading post), Hayes River, James Knight (explorer), Prince of Wales Fort, York Factory

CHAPTER TWO TheLongStruggle with Montreal 1713–1821

ork was “nothing but a confused heap of old rotten houses,” Yreported to the Company’s London officers in September 1714. The first Bayman to visit since the end of the French wars, Knight had come ashore to find that the jewel of the Company trading posts had been reduced to ruins.

From 1686 to 1713, Britain and Company wanted its trading had been almost continuously at posts back, and it got them. The Duke of war. Throughout those years, Pierre de Marlborough, ’s greatest general Troyes, Pierre d’Iberville and other and a former governor of the Company, fighting soldiers of had had helped defeat France’s armies on attacked Hudson’s Bay Company’s posts the battlefields of Europe. As part of the by land and sea. They had given New price of peace, the French King, Louis France almost complete control of Hudson XIV, had to hand back the territories and (Opposite) The Duke of Marlborough had Bay. The posts that survived sent few furs to Hudson’s Bay Company trading posts which been the Company’s third governor. His London, and the Company’s partners suffered New France had held for twenty years. victories as a military commander forced through the “years of no dividend,” which lasted The revived company shifted its business west and the French to return the Company’s posts. (Left) Fort Prince of Wales as it looked twenty-eight years. By the time the war ended, the north, away from its earliest outposts on . and (above) as it is today. Built at the Company’s business had dwindled to something In 1717, James Knight sailed up the west coast of mouth of the Churchill River to protect the much less than the founders had expected. Now the Hudson Bay to open trade with the Chipewyan, a Company’s lands from the French, the fort surrendered to a French fleet in 1782 Company’s hopes were reviving. Dene-speaking people who lived north of the Cree before a single shot was fired. The stone territories. At the mouth of the Churchill River, he fortress, which had taken thirty-eight years v to build, was torched and destroyed by erected a small trading post. A few years later, the Com- the French in half a day. Now only its “There is nothing more persistent in the world than pany would replace it with Fort Prince of Wales, where blackened battlements survive. these claims of the Hudson’s Bay Company,” said heavy cannons loomed from stone bastions over the Britain’s envoy to the peace talks with France. The frozen tundra and the icy waters of the Churchill River.

10 11 Asleep by the Frozen Sea York Factory stood farther south, on the Hayes those came from Scotland’s Orkney Islands, the last River. It had no stone walls, but it was the Company’s British stop for Company ships before they put out or most Hudson’s Bay Company employees, working at the single most valuable post and it grew into a cluster of into the North Atlantic, bound for Hudson Bay. FCompany’s posts scattered around the great bay was more a some thirty storehouses and barracks. Year after year, Young Orkneymen did not sign on to be wilderness test of endurance than heroics. Shipped out from Britain, usually it did more business than any other trading post. explorers in the mould of Radisson or des Groseilliers. from the north of Scotland, they signed on for periods of up to five years. The spring and summer months were spent trading with York Factory’s advantage was its location. The They expected only to spend several years working the various Natives who arrived at their posts, but it was the long provided the traders’ best highway to the or trading at York Factory or Churchill or winter,when the great bay filled with ice and the darkness seemed prime beaver country of the lakes and Factory. In that role, the Company found its Orkney never to end, that the Baymen found hardest to endure. Their sole the country far to the west. That recruits hardy, diligent and loyal. contact with the outside world came via the once-a-year supply ships, which brought in trade goods and mail and took away the ensured that York Factory would long remain the The Company was getting all the furs that the furs and the meticulous accounts the traders kept — written in gateway to most of Rupert’s Land. London market needed, and the shareholders’ profits the dead of winter by flickering candlelight, using ink that had to Although the Royal Charter of 1670 had granted were steady. The governors of the Company were con- be thawed for the purpose. Many of those who voyaged to the the Company a vast territory, York Factory and the tent to let others venture inland, even though some frozen bay to earn their fortunes never returned, and their graves can be seen at York Factory to this day. handful of other trading posts at the edge of the great people in Britain complained that the “Company of salt bay were still its only footholds in North Amer- Adventurers” seemed to be “asleep by the frozen sea.” ica. Baymen rarely visited the interior of Rupert’s Land themselves, and their Native customers far inland rarely came down to Hudson Bay or saw the The Courage of Thanadelthur Company’s trading posts. Yet every year beaver, Thanadelthur was a Chipewyan, part of the Dene- (Above) Coins and paper currency marten and muskrat pelts came down to Hudson Bay, speaking peoples of the barrenlands north and west issued by the Company for use at its while trade goods that came ashore at York Factory of Churchill. About 1713, she staggered, half-starved, trading posts. (Left) The cemetery at York travelled far inland. into York Factory after escaping from years of captivity Factory. (Below) The main building at among the Cree, her people’s traditional enemy. York Factory as it looks today. It was still the Cree and their allied traders who Governor James Knight wanted peace between the linked the Company with the inland beaver hunters. hostile Crees and Chipewyans, and Thanadelthur They had never accepted the Company’s claim to own became his ambassador. She convinced the Cree and vast territories of northern . This was their Chipewyan trading bands to stop fighting each other land, and the beaver trade was their trade. (below), and the Chipewyans began coming to Fort Prince of Wales to trade.When she fell ill and died The Company, in fact, needed only a few dozen in 1717, Governor Knight praised her as a woman employees to manage its trading empire. Most of “of a very high spirit and of the firmest resolution, and of great courage.”

12 13 The pushed farther inland, coming ever closer to the Company’s trading routes. The Bay- men found themselves in a life-or-death competi- tion with Montreal’s NorthWest Company, which threatened to choke off the supply of pelts to the bayside trading posts. In 1774, after a hundred years by Hudson Bay, the Company made a dramatic decision. The governors decided they must go head-to-head with the “Nor’Westers.” That year built Cumberland House, far upriver from York Factory in what is now northern Saskatchewan. A forty-year battle — the Baymen versus Montreal for control of the — had begun.

Samuel Hearne (1745–1792)

(Above) Birchbark on display In 1769, stories of at the Canadian Museum in copper deposits far Peterborough, Ontario. (Right) Voyageurs to the northwest during a portage. (Below) An illustration reached Fort Prince of a typical Montreal voyageur. of Wales. Samuel Hearne, a newcomer to Hudson Bay but already an enthusiastic snowshoe traveller,set out with native guides, moving slowly and following the migrating caribou. It was “all feasting or all famine,” Hearne said. After terrible hardships, the travellers reached the and got safely back. Hearne went inland again in 1774 to Montreal’s fur traders, mean- the 1740s, soldier and explorer Pierre de La Vérendrye build the first inland Hudson’s Bay Company while, were happy to see their had built French forts almost within sight of the trading post at Cumberland House, in what is now Saskatchewan. The Company never rivals staying close to their Rocky Mountains. found any copper mines, but Hearne’s book, posts on salt water. The Mon- In 1763, after James Wolfe had captured Quebec A Voyage from Prince of Wales’s Fort, is a treal traders travelled far inland City, France ceded most of its North American Canadian adventure classic. in pursuit of furs, much as des domains to Britain. The Company’s governors hoped Groseilliers had done long before. at first that the end of French rule might put an end The voyageurs’ hard-driving canoe to Montreal’s annoying rivalry in the competition brigades carried more furs to for furs. Instead, as British businessmen settled in (Top) The crest of the . Montreal than reached all the Montreal, the city’s fur enterprises become better (Left) Samuel Hearne carved his name in the Baymen’s posts combined. By financed, better organized, and much larger than ever. rock near Churchill, Manitoba.

14 15 From 1774 to 1820, Baymen and settlers to Red River, right on the North Nor’Westers waged a desperate struggle West Company’s route to Montreal, for furs. Each side built dozens of trad- the Nor’Westers reacted furiously. ing posts. Rival posts confronted each At Seven Oaks, Selkirk’s governor, other at portages and river mouths Robert Semple, and twenty settlers throughout Rupert’s Land. Together were gunned down by allies of the the rival companies pushed the Nor’Westers. trade farther west and farther north. There were too many forts Nor’Wester Peter Pond reached the and too many clerks, buying too Athabaska lakes in 1778. Alexander many pelts just to keep the other Mackenzie, another Nor’Wester, side from getting them. Both sides travelled to the in 1789, and were going broke. Finally, in 1821, he pushed over the mountains and all the Baymen and the Nor’Westers the way to the Pacific Ocean in 1793. reached a truce. The Nor’Westers had David Thompson, a Bayman gone over won most of the battles — their explorers to the Nor’Westers, mapped much of western had consistently gone farther and fought Canada as he opened new trading territories. At harder — but the Company had deeper pockets every step, new alliances drew new tribal groups into and more friends in the British government. It won the trade. the war. The arrangement they made was called an Beaver were being trapped out in broad stretches “amalgamation,” but one of the Nor’Westers said, of the fur trade territory, but the relentless race west- “This is not amalgamation, it is submersion.” In a few ward brought pelts in ever-increasing numbers down years, Montreal’s two-hundred-year-old fur trade was to Montreal and Hudson Bay. When Lord Selkirk, winding down. At last the company Prince Rupert a Hudson’s Bay Company investor, sent Scottish had founded, truly ruled the trade of Rupert’s Land.

(Opposite) On June 19, 1816, the competition between the Baymen and the Nor’Westers turned violent. At Seven Oaks, Robert Semple and A Diet of Pemmican twenty of the settlers sent by Lord Selkirk to establish a Red River were gunned down by ecause the voyageurs travelled light Nor’Westers enraged that their Band fast, they couldn’t carry much settlement blocked the canoe route food, and they didn’t have time to hunt to Montreal. (Above) Lord Selkirk. for it along the way. Instead, in this era (Left) Prompted by their competition before refrigeration, they depended on with the Baymen, Nor’Westers such pemmican. Said to taste like cold beef as Mackenzie,Thompson and Simon mixed with rancid fat and hair, pemmican Fraser pushed ever farther north and was made of buffalo meat cut into strips, west, searching for new territories. and then left to dry on a rack (right) or over a fire. The strips were pounded into a pulp, then placed in a rawhide sack made from the buffalo’s hide — along with copious amounts of boiling buffalo fat and saskatoon berries, which helped prevent scurvy. On a typical trip, a voyageur would go bad, no matter how long the trip. Indeed, there consume about a pound and a half of pemmican a day. are reports of people eating pemmican that had been It could be eaten as it was, made into soup, or covered prepared more than fifty years before — without any with flour and then fried. Pemmican never seemed to apparent ill effects.

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