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Exploring Victorian Female Agency in the Western Canadian Fur Trade, 1830-51 University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository Graduate Studies The Vault: Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2012-09-13 Lovely tender exotics: exploring Victorian female agency in the western Canadian fur trade, 1830-51 Bakker, Amber Bakker, A. (2012). Lovely tender exotics: exploring Victorian female agency in the western Canadian fur trade, 1830-51 (Unpublished master's thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. doi:10.11575/PRISM/26790 http://hdl.handle.net/11023/190 master thesis University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission. Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY Lovely tender exotics: exploring Victorian female agency in the western Canadian fur trade, 1830-51 by Amber Bakker A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE SUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY CALGARY, ALBERTA SEPTEMBER 2012 © Amber Bakker 2012 ii Abstract: This thesis explores the ability of Victorian-era women to demonstrate agency in the colonial setting. The subjects of this study are Frances Simpson, Isobel Finlayson, and Letitia Hargrave, all upper-middle class European women who married fur traders of the Hudson’s Bay Company in the first half of the nineteenth century and relocated with their husbands to Rupert’s Land. While traveling to, and living in the fur trade, these women recorded their experiences and actions in the form of travel journals and letters, demonstrating how they purposefully and deliberately upheld the expectations placed upon them to be respectable, domestic, feminine women. This thesis argues that by acting in ways expected of them as Victorian-era women, Simpson, Finlayson, and Hargrave found the ability to display agency and negotiate their physical and social spaces in the fur trade. iii Acknowledgements: I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. George Colpitts, and the Department of History at the University of Calgary in assisting me and supporting me in the creation of this thesis. I would also like to gratefully acknowledge the financial support received from the University of Calgary, the Lillian A. Jones/Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies and the Social Sciences Humanities Research Council of Canada. Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends who supported me over the past two years and made the writing of this thesis possible. iv Dedication To Bob, Marie, Briana, Eric, and Geoff v Table of Contents: Abstract .................................................................................................................................. ii Acknowledgements .............................................................................................................. iii Dedication ............................................................................................................................. iv Table of Contents .................................................................................................................... v Introduction: Lovely Tender Exotics and the Western Canadian Fur Trade .......................... 1 Chapter One: Legitimizing the Presence of Lovely Tender Exotics: Frances Simpson’s Travel Journal, 1830 ................................................................................................. 26 Chapter Two: Filling the Space Made by Frances Simpson: The Arrival of Isobel Finlayson and Letitia Hargrave, 1840 ....................................................................................... 60 Chapter Three: Surviving the Fur Trade? Lovely Tender Exotics and their Health in Rupert’s Land ............................................................................................................ 91 Conclusion: ........................................................................................................................ 124 Bibliography: ..................................................................................................................... 130 1 Introduction: Lovely Tender Exotics and the Western Canadian Fur Trade In 1830 a young Englishwoman with “grace…in all her steps – heaven in her eye” arrived in western Canada as the new bride of George Simpson, the governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company.1 Ten years later, two other young women, “The English Rose,” and the “Bluebell of Scotland,”2 likewise married fur trading gentlemen of the Hudson’s Bay Company – Chief Factor Duncan Finlayson and Chief Trader James Hargrave – and similarly chose to embark on a wife’s “most scared and hallowed duty, to follow and share the fortunes of a beloved and affectionate Husband” by moving westwards into the Company’s fur trading territories.3 Frances Simpson (née Simpson), Isobel Finlayson (née Simpson), and Letitia Hargrave (née Mactavish), were among the first white, Victorian ladies to be relocated into the fur trade as the European wives of high-ranking fur traders.4 Referred to by their contemporaries as “lovely tender exotics,”5 these women were brought into Rupert’s Land not only to fulfil a domestic role as wives and mothers, but also were brought there to introduce an “air of high life and gaiety” into the fur trade,6 as it was 1 Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society in Western Canada, 1670-1870 (Winnipeg: Watson & Dwyer, 1980), 187. 2 James Hargrave, The Hargrave Correspondence, 1821-1843, ed. G. P. de T. Glazebrook (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1938), 435. 3 Hudson’s Bay Company Archives (HBCA) E.12/5, Isobel Finlayson Notebook 1840, 2. 4 As Frances Simpson, Isobel Finlayson, and Letitia Hargrave are the principal subjects of this thesis, I have chosen to refer to them using their married surnames, because of the fact that they travelled to Rupert’s Land only after they were married. To prevent confusion, when referring to their fur trading husbands, I have attempted to use the men’s first and last names. 5 Hargrave, The Hargrave Correspondence, 311. See also Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 173-200. 6 Hargrave, The Hargrave Correspondence, 61. 2 believed that these women embodied “the civilizing attributes of a Victorian lady,”7 and thus had the ability to herald “improved standards of morality and gentility” within Rupert’s Land.8 The arrival of these white, European women as the wives of fur trade officers caused “quite a stir” throughout Rupert’s Land (the area granted to the Hudson’s Bay Company by Prince Charles II in 1670) as these far-flung, mostly subarctic, British territories had long been considered no place for a white woman.9 As the Hudson’s Bay Company’s official policy had prohibited bringing white women into the fur trade, the result was that European fur traders had usually formed a variety of social unions with Native women.10 While initially fluid and unique in terms of the typical duration and nature of these relationships, they eventually came to duplicate aspects of European marriages, resulting often in the formation of “many tender ties” between the fur traders and their Native partners.11 The decisions by George Simpson, Duncan Finlayson, and James Hargrave to marry European women rather than Native women essentially broke with centuries of social tradition in Rupert’s Land and their actions were considered to have created a significant threat to the pre-existing social position of Native women, as the 7 Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, “Simpson, Frances Ramsay (Simpson, Lady Simpson),” http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?BioId=38309 (accessed 14 February 2011). 8 Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 187. 9 See Carolyn Podruchny, Making A Voyageur World: Travellers and Traders in the North American Fur Trade (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006); Elizabeth Vibert, “Real Men Hunt Buffalo: Masculinity, Race and Class in British Fur Traders’ Narratives,” Gender & History 8:1 (1996), 4-21. 10 Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 173. 11 Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties; see also: Sylvia Van Kirk, “‘Women In-Between,’: Indian Women in Fur- trade Society in Western Canada,” in Out of the Background: Readings on Canadian Native History, 2nd edition, eds. Ken S. Coates and Robin Fisher (Scarborough: Irwing Publishing, 1998), 102-117. 3 arrival of these new white brides in the early 1800s set important precedents in regards to the future marriage strategies of Company employees.12 This thesis does not focus on the Native or Metis women who were impacted by the arrival of Victorian women and European customs, but rather it explores the position of Victorian-era women, such as Simpson, Finlayson, and Hargrave, within the social and physical structure of the fur trade. These women are the primary subjects of this thesis for several reasons. First and most practically, these women penned narratives about their time in Rupert’s Land that still exist for the use of historians today. These documents also make up a commentary on the physical and social landscape of the fur trade from an educated, upper-middle class woman’s point of view, providing a unique perspective of her place in the fur trade in the mid-nineteenth century. Historians have used these sources to analyse the social complexities that were introduced into the fur trade with the arrival of European women. However, they
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