That region, amazingly, contained nearly half the world’s supply of fresh water. It was swampy, featuring innumerable lakes and ponds, and was covered with aspen and birch forests, providing prime beaver food. It was one of the greatest beaver habitats in the world.
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AS THE THREE-MASTED SHIP HOVE TO IN A FLOOD TIDE in an estuary off the mouth of the Hayes River at York Factory, it triggered a flurry of frantic activity from the bedraggled onlookers. The Hudson’s Bay Company vessel was burdened with supplies and new recruits who were destined for the distant outposts of the company, located on the desolate, pebbly shores of the northern bay where they plied their trade. The small flotilla of which it was a part was the annual convoy that serviced the forts and returned with bales of shiny beaver pelts. These rodent pelts from the wilds of North America had become one of the most valuable commodities in the transatlantic trade.
For much of the eighteenth century the company quietly soldiered on, consolidating its foothold in Hudson Bay and gradually increasing its profitability. There were some attacks from French raiders from Canada during the War of the Spanish Succession and the War of American Independence. Forts had changed hands and trade had been disrupted for years at a time, but for the most part the company posted consistent if unspectacular returns. The Hudson’s Bay Company was a small enterprise by the standards of the day, puny even in comparison with the English East India Company, which was still decades away from its glorious rise under Robert Clive. The company retrenched into small-scale trading according to a conservative pattern that saw it devote no efforts to expanding its supply of furs. It peacefully and unobtrusively prospered, dividends flowed and stability reigned.
The company opted for its conservative approach because it was able to take advantage of ancient native trade and travel networks along waterways that wended their way deep into the interior of the continent. The Cree who dwelt closest to the company forts and factories along the bay, and eventually the Assiniboine and Chipewyan, became the middlemen of the trade, operating their own jealously guarded monopoly on trade with the Europeans, and passing on goods at inflated prices to native peoples farther afield. They resisted the movement of European traders into their lands. But nearly a century of contact between these very different cultures had transferred technology both ways: not only did European metal goods bring Stone Age peoples into the Iron Age, in which knives, axes, kettles and guns were the most obviously useful items, but they in turn provided these traders with the means to venture inland, with clothing, snowshoes, bark canoes and toboggans and the knowledge of how to survive in the wilderness. Eventually even the company, with its ossified commercial operations, had to send its employees into the country in quest of more furs. The previously plentiful supply nearer the forts had been exhausted.
In the mid-eighteenth century, the company sent several explorers into the hinterlands to discover what lay beyond the bay. Henry Kelsey canoed and hiked inland to the south and west; James Knight sailed north, along the coast, searching for gold and a northwest passage; Anthony Henday pushed thousands of kilometres west, to within sight of the Rocky Mountains; and Samuel Hearne, led by his “lively and agreeable”
Cree guide Matonabbee, ventured north and west searching for copper and the elusive northern waterway to Cathay. In all, the Hudson’s Bay Company sponsored nearly sixty inland expeditions at this time to stimulate an increase in the trade—the demand for pelts had increased in Europe and the company feared, accurately, as it turned out, that the rival traders from Montreal were strangling its commerce by meeting the Indian fur trappers inland, along their canoe routes, before they reached the Hudson’s Bay Company’s forts.
The traders from Montreal, the coureurs de bois, had been pushing west and north throughout the eighteenth century in search of new markets and a “Great Western Sea.” One indomitable wanderer, Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, Sieur de La Vérendrye, had wandered as far west as the Black Hills of South Dakota and along the shores of Lake Winnipeg. By the late eighteenth century, the Montreal-based traders were establishing their own trading outposts upstream on rivers leading to
Hudson Bay in an attempt to capture the trade, which was in any case being hindered by the Cree who lived close to the Hudson’s Bay Company’s forts and who were also aggressively persuading other native trappers to conclude their trade with them and not bother canoeing the remaining distance to the company forts. The company hoped that the defeat of Quebec by British forces in 1759 would rid it once and for all of its pesky competitors, but the opposite proved true. A few years later, the lakes and rivers of the interior—territory granted to the company by its monopoly charter—were packed with canoes dispatched from Montreal. The Montreal traders were now being financed and organized into aggressive partnerships.
The intense competition led the Hudson’s Bay Company to reluctantly establish its first permanent inland trading outpost, Cumberland House, in 1773. Six years later, the traders from Montreal were officially organized into the North West Company, which for several years remained a small-scale loose affiliation of Montreal merchants probing the interior with a view to breaking the Hudson’s Bay Company monopoly. In 1783 they consolidated into a permanent enterprise with a head office, led by Benjamin and Joseph Frobisher, Simon McTavish and other well-financed investors. Soon they were dominating the fur trade, opening up new regions with forts and outposts further inland. Quick to make decisions and with authority resting with inland field partners, they reacted swiftly to changes and took advantage of opportunities in a way that the entrenched and bureaucratic Hudson’s Bay Company, with its rigid command structure and low-paid employees who were powerless to make meaningful decisions, could not. While the employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company could be likened to passive branch managers acting for distant shareholders, the partners of the new North West Company were a loose affiliation of individualists who shared in the profits. They were dynamic and entrepreneurial rather than aristocratic and tradition-bound. The rivalry that quickly developed between the two enterprises, a rivalry that stemmed from the original battles between the English company and the French traders along the bay prior to 1713, was a struggle between two distinct business models—one imperial, the other colonial. Such different corporate philosophies could not easily blend and were essentially irreconcilable.
Soon North West Company partners led the trade deep into unexplored territory, cutting out the native middlemen and hauling increasing numbers of furs east to Montreal. Their profits were enormous, their expansion quick, their competition sleepy and moribund. when the buckskin-clad voyageurs of the North West Company launched their huge canots du maître into the St. Lawrence River near Montreal to head for the western trading frontier, they had a long and unrelenting trip in front of them. Loaded with up to four tonnes of metal trinkets and tools, kettles and muskets, bales of blankets and cloth, with pouches of black powder, tobacco and tea packed around kegs of whiskey, the massive birch bark canoes, holding over twelve oarsmen and passengers, lumbered west along the Ottawa River, through Georgian Bay and Lake Huron to Grand Portage on the western end of Lake Superior. There they transferred the goods into the smaller canots du nord and struggled up the rapids-riddled rivers from the Lake of the Woods. They fanned out across the vast prairies as far west as the Rocky Mountains to supply the increasing number of trading posts in the Athabasca country. And each fall they remained there, prepared to be frozen in for the long winter.
When the traders hauled their towering bales of pelts back east the following spring, they followed the same arduous and unreliable route in a trip that could take many months.
Although they were making enormous profits and had captured the majority of the fur trade from the sleepy factors of the Hudson’s Bay Company, for the Nor’Westers running a profitable and stable business was becoming more difficult as each new region became “beavered out.” So the fur brigades ventured farther west, and by the early nineteenth century the precario
us and inefficient route was almost five thousand kilometres long. And as the fur trade spread west, its shipping costs rose with every mile of travel.
Both of the fur trade companies faced hardships, though. The North West Company had to send its canoes much farther than the Hudson’s Bay Company, which could send its ships into the heart of the continent. But the Hudson’s Bay Company suffered from a lack of manpower—it maintained only a few hundred employees. The North West Company drew on Quebec’s population of sixty thousand, people who were in their homeland, rather than relying on foreigners to board a ship bound for the distant shores of a frozen bay to toil in drudgery and for low wages for several years before returning home to move on to better things. Each business enterprise had its competitive advantages and disadvantages.
The competition between the two companies became so intense that they often built their forts and outposts within sight of each other, each hoping to attract the native fur traders with their unique variation on the standard package of metal trade goods: the Hudson’s Bay Company offered good wool blankets and copper pots; the North West Company offered high-quality French brandy and tailored coats. The competition no doubt delighted the native fur trappers, who could bargain hard for their furs, visiting both posts to gain the best deal. But for the companies this commercial conflict was a war of attrition that would slowly exhaust them both.
At some point during the interminable struggle for dominance, the commercial war became an actual war. The companies captured prisoners from each other and then treated their hostages barbarically. They ambushed and shot at each other along the canoe routes. They attacked each other’s forts and plundered each other’s trade goods and annual fur shipments. They pushed cheap rotgut hard liquor in liberal quantities on the local peoples, which had a demoralizing and destructive impact on the native cultures. The warring companies never outright attacked their customers; they only urged them to violence and trickery against each other and against the other company. With no overall police force to ensure civil conduct or impose civility, no single tribe or nation strong enough to enforce universal customs or laws, the companies, at least in the field, became gangs of unscrupulous hoodlums who roamed northern North America without any restrictions on their behaviour. Soon the traders’ ruthlessness began to threaten the very business of trading for furs that justified their existence.
After years of cutthroat competition that was driving both companies to the brink of bankruptcy, the conflict came to a head in 1816, in the Red River Valley, in what is today the Canadian province of Manitoba. It was a conflict in which a young George Simpson emerged as a charismatic and powerful leader.
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GEORGE SIMPSON WAS BORN OUT OF WEDLOCK IN THE small Scottish town of Dingwall in 1792. He was raised by his father’s family, particularly by his Aunt Mary. After his aunt married and gave birth to a son in 1807, George set out on his own. Boarding a ship, he sailed from the Scottish north to the city of London to apprentice at his uncle’s sugar brokerage firm.
Hardworking, shrewd and charismatic, Simpson quickly gained the confidence of his employers and was particularly liked by the senior partner, Andrew Wedderburn. Simpson was a short but energetic dandy in fine clothes, who frequented the coffee shops as he learned the job of a clerk in the overseas trade. For some reason, he also cultivated an unfashionable fascination for Napoleon Bonaparte, who by then had seized power in France and was at war with Britain.
Simpson’s involvement in the sugar trade, which included several trips to the West Indies, introduced him to the slave trade and its prejudices and brutality. This use and abuse of human beings, based on the assumption of the inherent superiority of one’s own culture and skin colour, undoubtedly influenced Simpson’s attitudes towards First Nations people in Rupert’s Land years later. Simpson’s most recent biographer, James Raffan, notes in his book Emperor of the North that “Simpson would have taken with him into the fur trade and into the rest of his life disturbing notions about the relative power and authority vested in skin colour.” The Canadian popular historian Peter C. Newman famously quipped, somewhat less diplomatically, that Simpson was “a bastard by birth and by persuasion.”
When Wedderburn’s sister married a quixotic gentleman named Thomas Douglas, the fifth Earl of Selkirk, it opened the door for Simpson to try an entirely new career. Extremely wealthy and having a philanthropic disposition, Lord Selkirk took a personal interest in displaced Highland crofters and devised a plan to find them a home in the Canadian territories. At the time, Hudson’s Bay Company stock was depressed due to the decreased demand for furs during the Napoleonic Wars and the company’s ongoing, commerce-destroying struggle with the North West Company. Selkirk and Wedderburn began buying up Hudson’s Bay Company stock and eventually acquired enough shares to give them a controlling interest. As a result, Wedderburn took a position on the board of governors in London, and in May 1811, the company gave Selkirk 300,000 square kilometres of prime land at the forks of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, south of Lake Winnipeg, for his agricultural utopia. The land belonged to the company as part of its original charter. The proposed settlement site, not accidentally, was situated directly on the main transportation route used by the North West Company, between Montreal and the prime fur territory of the northwest.
About one hundred of Selkirk’s settlers arrived in the wilds of the Canadian prairies in 1812. They were met with hostility from the North West Company fur traders and their bison-hunting Métis allies, who drove them off their settlement concession, burned their crops and scattered their cattle. Sel-kirk moved west from Montreal with a hundred mercenaries to help defend the settlement and his crofters. He issued a decree restricting from his territory the export of pemmican, a staple food source for the coureurs de bois consisting of dried bison meat, berries and fat. It was a decree that, if enforced, could destroy the North West Company’s operations and endanger the livelihood of the Métis hunters.
The Métis responded by electing a Scots-Cree named Cuthbert Grant as their military leader and preparing for war as they continued to trade with the North West Company. On June 19, 1816, at Seven Oaks, what is now Winnipeg, two hostile bands encountered each other. In the ensuing melee, the governor of the Selkirk colony and nineteen settlers were shot and killed by the Métis. Outraged, Selkirk promptly led his private mercenaries to the North West Company fort at Fort William, on Lake Superior, and arrested most of the trading partners, while throughout the fur country officials from each of the competing companies began attacking and arresting each other on trumped-up charges. As the fighting and reprisals were degenerating into chaos, the Hudson’s Bay Company governors made an unorthodox decision, prompted by Wedderburn: they would hire a new backup governor from outside the ranks, and that person would be George Simpson. Simpson was given five days’ notice to wrap up his sedate London life. In a letter to a colleague, he related that he was engaged in “important business connected with the affairs of Lord Selkirk, the Hudson’s Bay & North West Compys.” He would be the acting governor-in-chief of Rupert’s Land, ready to assume command if the current governor was arrested or killed by agents of the North West Company.
Simpson sailed for New York, continued overland to Montreal and then proceeded to the interior, ironically following the traditional route of the North West Company rather than that of the Hudson’s Bay Company. He travelled by canoe west up the St. Lawrence River and across the Great Lakes to Fort William, where he delivered a letter from Lord Bathurst, British secretary of state for war and the colonies, that called on both companies to immediately cease all hostilities or face the intervention of the British government. Simpson continued on to the Selkirk lands and then pushed through the heart of the fur territory to Fort Wedderburn, on Lake Atha-basca. Here, on the lake’s frigid, wind-lashed shores, he spent his first North American winter—something he could not have prepared for in terms of harshness or duration, but which he nevertheless seemed to thrive on. For a man who had s
pent his entire life in Britain, Simpson adapted to the ways of the wilderness unexpectedly well. Primitive conditions, severe weather and isolation from the life he had known seemed not to have perturbed him. Free from the constraints of polite society he could indulge his instinct to impose his authority on the world around him, to reorder it to suit his desires and ambitions. He was in his element.
Simpson proved a tough and stubborn traveller, immediately setting out to learn as much as he could about the land over which he would be in charge. He crammed his head full of knowledge about the geography, the climate, the territory and customs of the various tribes and their politics. He also seemed unconcerned about canoe travel, which he had never done before, or about sleeping in mosquito-infested lowlands or during torrential downpours, claiming in one letter to a friend that his cloak would “answer the purposes of a bed.” He was a shrewd observer, quickly taking stock of the situation on the ground. “The N.W. Co. are not to be put down by Prize fighting,” he observed, “but by persevering industry, Oeconomy in the business arrangements, and a firm maintenance of our rights not by the fist but by more deadly weapons.” Discipline and hard work, not violence, would win profits. A stern, stubborn manager with an iron will, Simpson usually prevailed in a dispute and was remarkably adept at banging some semblance of order from the chaos that had overtaken the trading enterprise during the decades of commercial war.
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