The Fur Trade Gamble: North West Company on the Pacific Slope, 1800-1820
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The Fur Trade Gamble: North West Company on the Pacific Slope, 1800-1820
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Overview
They were businessmen first and explorers second, and their era is a story of grand risk in both lives and capital—a global mercantile initiative in which controlling the mouth of the Columbia River and developing the China market were major prizes. Traversing the world in search of profit, these fur moguls gambled on the price of beaver pelts, purchases of ships and trade goods, international commerce laws, and the effects of war.
In the process, partners and clerks quarreled, surveyed transportation routes, built trading posts, and worked to forge relationships with both French Canadian and Native American trappers. The loss of valuable natural resources as well as the intermixing of cultures significantly impacted relationships with the region's native peoples. Ultimately, their expansion attempts were economically unsuccessful. The Astorians sold their holdings to the North West Company, who later accepted a humiliating 1821 merger.
Drawing from a reservoir of previously unexploited business and personal correspondence, including the letters of clerk Finnan McDonald and a revealing personal memorandum by Fort George partner James Keith, the authors examine Columbia drainage operations and offer a unique business perspective.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780874223408 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Washington State University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/25/2016 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.94(d) |
About the Author
The late John C. Jackson's many publications include Shadow of the Tetons: David E. Jackson and the Claiming of the American West, and Children of the Fur Trade: Forgotten Metis of the Pacific Northwest.
Read an Excerpt
Duncan McGillivray, Simon Fraser, 1793-1808 1
The realization of a trans-continental trade route from western North America to an oriental market was the long-sought goal of fur trade merchants in North America. Because beaver was a fur that repaid the costs of acquisition and transportation, finding new sources of those pelts became crucial to those engaged in the fur trade. As distances stretched ever farther into the remote north, logistical problems became acute. Northern streams and lakes were only free of ice for five months, barely enough time to deliver packs of furs to the Grand Portage on Lake Superior, take on new cargoes of trade goods, and make it back to a distant western post in a short traveling season. Expansion into each new river's drainage system increased the deadly risks of being stopped by ice. As the costs of three- to four-thousand-mile round trips approached the value of the furs to be sold, further northern expansion would eventually become a money-losing proposition.
Alexander Mackenzie's overland route of 1793 to the Pacific had proved to be a barren accomplishment, but using the familiar Saskatchewan River approach might be a better answer and he professed interest in “the broad continental strategy of the trade.”2 Having marched upstream in lockstep with other Montreal competitors and the rival Hudson's Bay Company, the partners of the North West Company considered finding a way to break over the imposing barrier of the Rocky Mountains to open a potential bonanza of beaver swimming in the waters of the Columbia River. However, due to founding member Simon McTavish's experiments in maritime trade and reluctance to undertake expensive new ventures, western expansion did not get underway until the first year of the nineteenth century.
But Simon McTavish's caution was more than an ambitious NWC partner like Alexander Mackenzie could endure. His explorations had confirmed the Fraser River was too dangerous to descend and gained him notoriety and British honors. Throwing in with rival Montreal interests, Mackenzie made himself the inspiration for a “New North West Company,” which eventually took the more illustrious (and just a tick imperious) designation, “Sir Alexander Mackenzie & Company.” Despite his easily consulted book, Voyages From Montreal On The River St. Lawrence…To The Frozen And Pacific Oceans, Mackenzie actually hindered British trade expansion by distracting western impetus.3 As far as North West Company was concerned, Mackenzie's competition drew off the resources necessary to support worthwhile expansion.
During the month preceding his 1802 knighthood, Mackenzie wrote a letter to Lord Hobart, the Secretary of State for War and Colonies that included an enclosure he titled “Preliminaries to the establishment of a permanent British Fishery and Trade in Furs &c on the Continent and West Coast of North America.” Among proposals in this communication was his recommendation that a British settlement be established “in the River Columbia.”4 He was too late again. The mercantile development of the Pacific Northwest had already begun--with a whisper that was almost lost to history.
While Alexander Mackenzie's ghost-assisted book was being tidied up for publication in London, a more conservative approach to western expansion in the fur trade was being explored on the upper reaches of the Saskatchewan River. The visionaries driving that plan were well-placed nephews of Mackenzie's aging nemesis Simon McTavish. Despite criticism by other partners, their inclusion into the fur trade wasn't nepotistic, it was just clannish.
William,5 Duncan,6 and Simon7 McGillivray were sons of McTavish's sister, Anne, who had married a poor Inverness-shire tenant farmer. The three boys faced an unpromising future in Scotland until their successful uncle brought them to Montreal to learn the northwest fur trade. While William and Duncan were being groomed for a larger role in the operations of the McTavish, Frobisher & Company agency of the North West Company, their lame brother Simon was sent to the London agency.
William entered business in 1784 at age twenty, and six years later had saved enough to buy the share of the retiring Peter Pond and become a wintering partner in the NWC.8 “Wintering partners” were part owners in the concern and lived year round in the interior, returning east only for the summer “rendezvous” at Grand Portage (later Fort William) on the Great Lakes. They were responsible for supervising the trade in the districts assigned to them. As field managers, they sought Indian groups, developed new transport routes, and even altered the prices offered for furs. Wintering partners chose their post sites, selected and requisitioned trade goods, enticed Indians to trade, and drove the men under their command to render a profitable return on their time.
William McGillivray's experience as a trader in the Red River, English River, and Athabaska districts gave him a broad understanding of fur trade geography and a taste of competitive tactics. He had learned provisioning in the Red River pemmican trade and the problems of transport in the Athabaska department two years before fellow partner Alexander Mackenzie's 1793 journey to the Pacific Ocean. Forgoing barren discovery, McGillivray returned to Montreal where he was made a partner in the agency of McTavish, Frobisher & Company that handled the downstream business for the inland-locked North West Company.9
McGillivray's younger brother Duncan began his career in the NWC along the North Saskatchewan River as a clerk for Angus Shaw, a sometimes ruthless trader. During the winter of 1794—95 Duncan learned the hard rules of “the skin game” from a master. Fort George was sandwiched between the hunting ranges of the beaver-producing Strong Woods Cree Indians and the provision producing northern plains tribes. According to the personal journal Duncan kept (perhaps for his older brother's edification) “7 different nations” of Indians traded there.10
McGillivray was dismissive of the northern plains tribes because they preferred to trade provisions and did not actively trap beaver. When NWC operations moved up the Saskatchewan River in 1796—97 to build NWC Fort Augustus within musket shot of the HBC's Edmonton House, he became quarrelsome and aggressive with his neighbor William Tomison, the rough-hewn HBC inland master. Duncan declared in a letter written between November 8 and 14, 1797, “I am a young Man in the beginning of my Career, I have all to gain & nothing to lose but my reputation & Life...and I will always hold it ready to be sacrificed in support of the former and of the Interest of my employers.”11
Having proved himself as an Indian trader, in 1798 Duncan McGillivray returned to Montreal where he was also made a partner in McTavish, Frobisher & Company. William and Duncan McGillivray realized that the way across the mountains had to be launched from the upper Saskatchewan, and in September 1799 his associate, John McDonald, ascended the upper Saskatchewan to build closer to the “Stoney Mountain.”12 The Nor'wester was trailed by the ever-watchful HBC inland master, James Bird, to the fork of the Saskatchewan and Clearwater River where Bird built Acton House to oppose McDonald's Rocky Mountain House.13 The primary objective of both parties was to have a more convenient place to receive the trade of the Piikani (Peigan) and Kainai (Blood) Blackfeet, as well as that of the “Southern” (western Cree) Indians. Both houses also hoped to attract Kutenai from across the mountains.
Preceded by former HBC clerk David Thompson, who had a reputation as a surveyor, Duncan McGillivray hurried to the recently established Rocky Mountain House in fall 1800 with the responsibility of extending the search for new beaver resources. Recognizing that something more than trading was up at Rocky Mountain House, Bird accompanied McGillivray upstream where they arrived on October 23, 1800.14
By the time they arrived Thompson had just sent off some visiting Kutenai, who agreed to guide two engaged men west across the Rocky Mountains where they would winter and induce Indians to hunt and properly prepare beaver pelts. Although Thompson did not acknowledge Bird's presence, the bayman observed the departure of McGillivray and Thompson to visit to the scattered Piikani winter camps southwest of present Calgary, Alberta.
Bird remained at Acton House through most of the winter, watching the Nor'wester activities and some trade from Kutenai who were eager to obtain guns and ammunition. Before he returned downstream in mid-February 1801, Bird was on amiable terms with Piikani, whose chief promised to steer Kutenai to Acton House when they next appeared.15 But the bayman suspected that Duncan McGillivray had come to Rocky Mountain House with a larger purpose than running a store for the Blackfeet or Kutenai.
Duncan McGillivray and David Thompson returned from visiting the Piikani at the beginning of December, believing (or perhaps claiming) that a Piikani civil chief had made no objection to the introduction of contracted trappers on the South Branch of the Saskatchewan.16 By now, unfettered competition on the upper Saskatchewan from multiplying competitors threatened the extinction of beaver. Traders could no longer depend on tribal hunters to meet their needs. To increase production two Montreal operations had already taken to importing contracted Nipissing, Ojibwa, and Iroquois First Nation people, whose steel traps swept beaver from the streams or lakes. It was no surprise that imported Iroquois trappers were unwelcome by resident tribes who also depended on that hunt.
Duncan McGillivray envisioned the extension of the hunt across the mountains, where there were believed to be untouched sources of beaver skins. His visit to the Piikani winter camps near present-day Calgary was intended to get their agreement to tolerate the presence of the NWC's contracted Iroquois trappers. Piikani, who were the best beaver hunters among the northern plainsmen, were unlikely to welcome competitive strangers or the introduction of arms and ready supplies of ammunition to peoples they customarily intimidated. But in the longer view, McGillivray needed their cooperation if operations were extended to the Pacific Slope.17
Believing the opinion of a civil chief represented the temper of the tribe; the Nor'westers now had to find a suitable road across the mountains, because the trail Kutenai recently used from the headwaters of the Red Deer River was open to Piikani harassment. Raiders used several other trails to mine Kutenai pony herds, but McGillivray was looking for a practicable way to transport outfits to his traders and return peltry.
A second exploration caused bayman James Bird to comment on NWC plans to go in the summer of 1801 to “examine the country west of the mountain as far as the borders of the South Sea & ascertain if possible whether as is supposed an advantageous trade can be carried on with those parts or not either from hence to China….” This time Bird made sure that a trustworthy HBC clerk went along.
…in Decr. last Messrs. Mc Gilvery & [the HBC clerk John Peter] Pruden sett off with men to ascertain if possible the truth of this report: after traveling many days thro” the mountain in which they never saw the mark of a Beaver their guide by accident was unable to accompany them farther; the former Gentlemen however proceeded on alone til the snow had increased to the depth of five feet and the precipices became so high & Steep that he could find no method (being unacquainted with the proper passes) of descending one which he made a shift to Climb from this side much more to descend others which presented themselves beyond; he was Consequently under the necessity of returning.18
Blocked by deep snow that aggravated his rheumatism, Duncan McGillivray failed to find a practicable passage through the awesome mountains.19 In spring when the ice finally broke on the upper Saskatchewan, he hobbled to the canoe, a mountain-broken man who only stopped at Fort Augustus long enough to convince the NWC clerk James Hughes to make another attempt at finding a road across the mountains suitable for a pack train.20 That became the exploratory failure on the Ram River recorded by Thompson in his “discovery” book and blamed on the Indian guide.21
Discovery devolved on the two almost anonymous NWC engagés Thompson had sent off from Rocky Mountain House with the Kutenai. In October 1800 the dutiful Charles La Gassé and the lower Saskatchewan River mixed-blood Pierre Le Blanc trailed a band of twenty-eight Kutenai men and seven women across the northern Rocky Mountains. The pair was equipped to spend the winter with those western Indians, learning what they could of their curious lisping language.22 Despite the levy that Piikani made on their horses and packs of furs, La Gassé and Le Blanc encouraged Kutenai to risk bringing their trade at Rocky Mountain House.23
The two traders en derouine should have guessed that they were being asked to do more than accompany Indians.24 Around Rocky Mountain House the two men had only seen the mountains at long-distance, a string of jagged teeth biting the sky, and La Gassé and Le Blanc were not mountaineers. Abstractions did not interest them as much as the footing of the horses they rode across steep shale slopes. But they were breaking into a new world.
Unfamiliar with the language of their hosts, questions about distances, geography, or tribal associations probably depended upon gestures, pantomime, or maps drawn in the sand. That they returned in late May by way of the headwaters of the Red Deer River suggests that they followed the Kootenay River as far south as the Tobacco Plains and their Kutenai guide took them back by a trail up the Elk River.25 There was a close call when the guide was killed by Stoney Assiniboine, but La Gassé and Le Blanc returned to Rocky Mountain House with that news before Thompson and Hughes left on their unsuccessful exploration on June 6 with a Cree guide in a party of eleven with thirteen horses. Perhaps discouraged by the failure of his exploration, David Thompson recorded very little about what the two men did west of the mountains.26 His reticence makes it difficult to determine the value of their accomplishment, but that didn't matter because whatever they reported would not be put in motion for another six years.
Thompson stayed at Rocky Mountain House during Outfit 1801/02, cautiously trading with Piikani, Bloods and Cree, and perhaps learning from visiting Indians that what the Piikani were willing to accept concerning imported Iroquois trappers failed to take into account the attitude of their surly Atsiina (Gros Ventre or Falls Indians) neighbors. Already in retreat up the South Branch of the Saskatchewan for a previous attack on trade houses, at the end of February 1802 Atsiina slaughtered fourteen Iroquois trappers and two Canadians. If that gruesome news reached Thompson before he left Rocky Mountain House in 1802, it may have chilled his illusion that northern plainsmen would welcome imported trappers.27
At the end of the 1802 trading season, both upper Saskatchewan trading houses were abandoned. The North West Company put the idea of extending operations across the mountains on hold so they could address the problems created by the visionary Alexander Mackenzie, who had joined their competitors.28 When Alexander Mackenzie published Voyages from Montreal in 1801, he believed the large river he had come upon west of the Rocky Mountains, locally called the Tacoutche Tesse (now the Fraser River), to be the upper portion of the Columbia River.29 Although he had not followed the Tacoutche Tesse to its mouth, Mackenzie was convinced, and convinced others, that it was a feasible route to the western sea.30 Mackenzie proposed that the British government assist the merchants from Canada in extending fur trade routes to the shores of the Pacific Ocean and establishing depots at the mouth of the Columbia River or at Cook's Inlet for the transshipment of peltry to the markets of China. It would be to the advantage of British hegemony in North America, he asserted, if Canadian merchants were to unite with the Hudson's Bay Company but, short of that, some way had to be found to allow Canadians the right of passage from the west shore of Hudson Bay to the Columbia River and its tributary waters.
Initially led by the Montreal firms of Forsyth, Richardson & Company and Leith, Jamieson & Company, the upstarts were joined in 1802 by the newly knighted Sir Alexander Mackenzie, who brought influence, capital, and a new identity. The New North West Company would be known by the brand “XYC” stamped on their bales of goods, and later as Sir Alexander Mackenzie and Company.31 From his previous experience in McTavish, Frobisher & Company, Mackenzie knew that it would be necessary to convince the East India Company to accommodate Canadian merchants by relaxing their strictures on British trade in Canton. Those “ideas” constituted “Mackenzie's Plan on Extending the Trade.”32
It should not be assumed that Mackenzie's plan and the North West Company's “Columbian Enterprise” were synonymous. The NWC agents in McTavish, Frobisher and Company were in agreement about establishing an Asian market for North American furs--which Simon McTavish had been trying to do since 1792. During the previous decade he made expensive attempts to profitably market beaver pelts in Canton. During his brief association with McTavish, Frobisher & Company, Mackenzie gained enough understanding of the difficulties to propose bypassing New York and London (and thereby Montreal) as transshipment points in favor of Hudson Bay and depots on the Pacific coast.
Not surprisingly, Simon McTavish and William McGillivray considered it undesirable to remove the center for doing business from Montreal.33 McTavish felt expansion and solidification of the business could best be orchestrated from Montreal, where he enjoyed good connections with the London market. Expansion beyond the upper Saskatchewan and across the Rocky Mountains should be a slow, deliberate process, he believed, with care taken to establish a profitable business before attempting further exploration.34
Soon after old McTavish's death, the bitter competition between the rival North West Companies ended in a November 1804 merger. This significant agreement meant that capital and energy previously expended on competition could now be devoted to expanding the trade west of the Rockies. Those plans rested with William McGillivray, because Alexander Mackenzie had been excluded from the new organization. It was up to the McGillivray brothers team to renew efforts to open the exploitation of the Peace River Country.35
Each summer as many as possible of the wintering partners assembled at the new Kaministikwia depot on the north shore of Lake Superior, where the decision was made to push west from Athabaska. Although Archibald Norman McLeod represented the upper Peace River department at the 1805 summer meeting, he chose not to lead an exploration. Because the other partner on the upper Peace, John Finlay, had retired, the task fell to Simon Fraser who had been advanced to partnership status in 1801. Fraser was given the responsibility of extending trade up the Peace River through the tangle of northern waters and of exploring the Tacoutche Tesse to its mouth.36 Like Mackenzie, Fraser was under the impression that this river was the Columbia.
In the summer or fall of 1804, even before the proprietors of the North West Company decided to extend trade beyond the Rocky Mountains, senior clerk John Stuart established a new post on the Peace River. Also known as Rocky Mountain House, it would be a staging place for pushing into New Caledonia.37 The southern or Parsnip fork of the Peace, and a small tributary flowing from Trout Lake were explored. The results led Fraser to decide on Trout Lake as the site for his first trading post beyond the portage.38 Nor did he stop at Trout Lake, and during those busy months of 1805, Fraser explored across the height of land and into the Pacific Ocean watershed.39
Assisted by three clerks — John Stuart, James MacDougall, and Archibald McGillivray, and about twenty men, Fraser's first object was to open the trade in the new territory and then go on to explore the Tacoutche Tesse downstream, with the aim of linking it to the Columbia and an outlet to the Pacific Ocean.40
Between the fall of 1805 and the summer of 1807, Fraser directed the building of trading posts at Trout Lake (later called Fort McLeod), Stuart Lake (later Fort St. James), Fraser Lake (Fort Fraser), and a freight-forwarding station, Fort George, at the confluence of the Nechako and Tacoutche Tesse Rivers. The time and effort devoted to establishing these posts underscore the priority given to business over exploration. The first three establishments were intended as bread-and-butter fur trading posts, while Fraser desired that Fort George serve as a provisioning post because of its strategic location as a jumping-off point for the journey down river.
That was not going to be easy because Indians the Nor'westers encountered were salmon-dependent people whose concept of fur trading may have been colored by what they heard from coastal neighbors about ships that called into those fiords in search of sea otter pelts. They knew no more about guns, animal traps, or trading than what they had heard second or third hand. If Indians were going to be useful participants in the fur trade, they needed to be converted to the hunting and exchange system. The Nor'westers, then, had to create their business from the ground up, communicating all the essential knowledge to the Indians with only a basic grasp of their unfamiliar languages.
Initially Fraser hoped to explore farther down the Tacoutche Tesse than Mackenzie had descended in 1793, if not to its mouth. Lack of provisions and sufficient boatmen thwarted his plans, and he had to delay the projected voyage down what they thought was the Columbia River. It was May 28, 1808, when Fraser, accompanied by John Stuart, Jules Quesnel, two Natives, and nineteen men in four canoes embarked from Fort George to descend the mighty river. This seasoned troupe of forward-looking explorers and traders knew little of the course of the river they were about to follow or the dangers it might pose, and were uncertain how the inhabitants along the way would receive them.
The river in the spring freshet proved extremely dangerous. Nevertheless, they managed to race in the canoes until June 10, 1808, when further water travel was deemed impracticable. The party continued on, mostly by foot, each man weighed down by an eighty-pound pack, until they passed the dangerous Fraser River canyon and on June 30 emerged in calmer waters where they acquired canoes from friendly Indians.41 Although they managed to surmount the physical dangers presented, and reached the river's mouth in some thirty-six days, they were discouraged by the hostile reception they received from the local Cowichan Indians.
The explorers did not dally along the salt water Strait of Georgia. Their return voyage was accomplished on August 6, a day less than the downstream leg of their journey had taken.42 But this was no victorious homecoming. Fraser had failed to find a practicable or useful route for bringing trade goods into the interior or transporting returns to the sea. Nor had he found a connection to the Columbia River.
END NOTES
1 Caledonia in the chapter title refers not to the French Pacific Island, but the upper Fraser River Country of present British Columbia.
2 Lamb, ed., Journals and Letters Mackenzie, 23.
3 Mackenzie, Voyages from Montreal. Eight years after his explorations, Mackenzie's field journals were edited for publication by a London hack named William Combe who did not hesitate to incorporate visionary material from other published sources.
4 Lamb, Journals and Letters of Mackenzie, 504.
5 Ouellet, “William McGillivray,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography (hereafter DCB 6), www.biographi.ca/en/bio/mcgillivray_william_6E.html, accessed June 10, 2014.
6 Kirk and Brown, “Duncan McGillivray,” DCB 5, www.biographi.ca/en/bio/mcgillivray_duncan_5E.html, accessed June 10, 2014.
7 Simon McGillivray was lame and better suited to work in the McTavish, Frobisher and Company London office. He became a partner of the NWC in 1805. Ouellet, “Simon McGillivray,” DCB 7, www.biographi.ca/en/bio/mcgillivray_simon_7E.html, accessed June 10, 2014.
8 Innis, Peter Pond, 112.
9 Ouellet, “William McGillivray.
10 Morton, ed., Journal of Duncan McGillivray, viii-ix.
11 Morton, ed., Journal of Duncan McGillivray, 31, 43, 45, 56, 57, 62; Johnson, ed., Saskatchewan Journals, xxxi, xlx-xlvi.
12 Livermore and Anick, “John McDonald.”
13 Edmonton House Journal by James Bird, 1799-1800, Hudson's Bay Company Archives (hereafter HBCA), B60/a/5. extracted from Johnson, ed., Saskatchewan Journals, xxxi, xlx-xlvi.
14 1800-1801 Edmonton Events, reconstructed from Johnson, Edmonton Journals, in Coues, ed. New Light, 2:567, 640, 703-04.
15 Johnson, ed., Saskatchewan Journals, lxxviii, 194, 208-10, 212, 214.
16 Belyea, ed., Columbia Journals, 12-20.
17 Johnson, ed., Saskatchewan Journals, 208-10, 212, 214.
18 Bird to Tomison, Nelson House, 19 February 1801, B.49/c/1, fos.1-4, in Johnson, ed., Saskatchewan Journals, lxxviii to lxxxi. This interest preceded the publication of Mackenzie's book.
19 Thompson wrote that McGillivray suffered frostbite and rheumatism due to his failure to look after himself, but failed to say anything about what Pruden also endured.
20 Proof is lacking but McGillivray may have had a hand in convincing a party of Iroquois contract hunters accompanied by four Canadians who left the mouth of the South Branch of the Saskatchewan on January 23, 1802, to try hunting near the mouth of the Red Deer River or in the Cypress Hills near present Medicine Hat, Alberta. Johnson, ed., Saskatchewan Journals, 311.
21“Account of an attempt to cross the Rocky Mountains by Mr. James Hughes, nine Men & Myself, on the part of the N.Wt Company; in order to penetrate to the Pacific Ocean. 1801,” Vancouver Public Library manuscript.
22 Kootenay is considered a language isolate, different from Interior Salish. Frederick E. Hoxie, ed., Encyclopedia of North American Indians (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996), 56; See Peter Fidler's Journal…1792-93, Bruce Haig, ed., (Lethbridge, Alberta: Historical Research Centre, 1991), 16, 47-49, 50-52.
23 Charles La Gassé was listed in the Fort des Prairies compliment as a voyageur contre-maitre (a foreman) in 1804 and 1805. Pierre Le Blanc may have been the country son of Francois Le Blanc [Franceways or Sasswe as he was known in the early trade] and a Cree mother.
24 En derouine was a technical term meaning to go about drumming up trade. The practice initially developed in the greater northwest to reduce the subsistence demands on a trading post by sending extra hands to live with Indian bands during the winter.
25 The need for supposition arises when faced with an obvious event lacking documentary proof. Absence of a paper trail does not mean that nothing happened. A matrix of peripheral evidence may suggest it but that also requires a degree of deductive supposition.
26 Nisbet, Sources of the River, 68, 72; and Nisbet, The Mapmaker's Eye, 31-32. Thompson passed over their return lightly in the various versions of his travels.
27 Peter Fidler Chesterfield House Journal 1801-02, HBCA, B.34/a/3 in Johnson, ed., Saskatchewan Journals, 311-14.
28 The “General Return of the Departments and Posts of the North West Company for 1802” listed nine posts on the Saskatchewan River operated by two partners, sixteen clerks and 80 men. “Exclusive of the above…there are 80 to 100 Canadians and Iroquois Hunters with whom the North West Company had Contracts, but who are not considered Servants of the Company, ranging free over the Country wherever they find it convenient to hunt.”
29 Lamb, Journals and Letters of Mackenzie, 412 and map following 238.
30 Mackenzie, Voyages from Montreal, 410.
31 A reliable and thorough source on the XY Company is the 1957 thesis by Pendergast, “The XY Company.” See also, Fleming, “The Origin of 'Sir Alexander Mackenzie and Company'.”
32 For a summary of Mackenzie's plan, see Lamb, Letters and Journals of Mackenzie, 415-18 and 516-19. Arthur S. Morton's reference to the “Columbian Enterprise” can be found in A History of the Canadian West to 1870—71, 463ff. A critical exception to Morton's analysis can be found in Belyea, “The 'Columbian Enterprise,' 3-27; and Morton's response, “A Historical Exemplum.”
33 For an understanding of Simon McTavish's character, see Ouellet, ”Simon McGillivray”; for the organization of the NWC in 1795 see Elaina Allen Mitchell, “The North West Company Agreement of 1795,” Canadian Historical Review, 36:2 (1958).
34 Chapter Six below has a fuller examination of the maritime experiments.
35 After closing Rocky Mountain House in 1802, David Thompson spent two years in the Peace River country.
36 Or so J. N. Wallace suggests. See Wallace, The Wintering Partners, 69.
37 Wallace, Wintering Partners, 70. Lamb states that “in the autumn of 1805 Fraser led a party of about twenty men up the Peace River and established a post at Rocky Mountain Portage,” but John Stuart's journal states clearly that he sent James MacDougall up the Peace in 1804 to accomplish that task. See Lamb, Simon Fraser, 15-16; Burley, Prophecy of the Swan, 32-33, 65. The new post was located near the modern community of Hudson's Hope, British Columbia.
38 Lamb, Simon Fraser, 16; Burley, Prophecy of the Swan, 75.
39 Library and Archives of Canada (hereafter LAC), Selkirk Papers, MG 19, E1, 9326. Rocky Mountain Portage House was not the same as Rocky Mountain House on the upper Saskatchewan.
40 Lamb, Simon Fraser, 16, and LAC, Selkirk Papers, MG 19, E1, 9309-11, 9316.
41 Burley, Prophecy of the Swan, 76-101.
42 Burley, Prophecy of the Swan, 104-28.
Table of Contents
Table of ContentsDramatis Personae
Introduction: Bon Voyageur
Chapter One: "Oh Caledonia, Stern and Wild": Duncan McGillivray, Simon Fraser, 1793-1808
Chapter Two: Into a Heart of Darkness: David Thompson
Chapter Three: Competing for the Columbia: North West Company on a Slippery Pacific Slope
Chapter Four: "Doing Indian Business": Spokane House and Okanogan
Chapter Five: War and Robbery at Astoria
Chapter Six: "a dull sailer": The Tardy Voyage of the Isaac Todd, 1812
Chapter Seven: The Early "Adventures to China"
Chapter Eight: Canton and Return, 1814-1815
Chapter Nine: Maritime and Marital Activities of the "other" Columbia
Chapter Ten: Final Attempts at Shipping: The Voyage of the Colonel Allan, 1815-1817
Chapter Eleven: "A Place so Dull and Dreary": The Interior Fur Trade
Chapter Twelve: Reforms and Unconvinced Reformers
Chapter Thirteen: Genesis of McKenzie's Snake Brigades
Chapter Fourteen: The Restoration of Astoria
Chapter Fifteen: Fort Nez Perces and the Snake Country Hunting Brigades
Chapter Sixteen: "We cannot blame ourselves therefore": A Financial Failure
Chapter Seventeen: Revelations of Character
Chapter Eighteen: Freemen
Chapter Nineteen: The Human Legacy
Appendix A: Columbia People
Appendix B: Business Records
Bibliography
Index
About the Authors