Destinations
British Columbia’s fur brigade trails abound with history.
Following B.C.’s frontier fur brigades.
“HISTORY SHOULD BE LEARNED THROUGH the soles of our feet.” These words are found at the head of the newly opened Hudson’s Bay Company heritage trail, a seventy-fivekilometre route that allows hikers to follow the path fur traders took between the interior and the coast in the mid-1800s, in what is now British Columbia.
I crunch up a steep incline past the textured trunks of conifers and wonder how two hundred horses, carrying nearly eighty-two kilograms of trade goods — tobacco, guns, tools, and food — made it up this trail. I trip on a rock and imagine the brigades stumbling down these slopes with a winter’s worth of valuable lynx, marten, and beaver furs.
This five-day destination trail, with all the backcountry modern conveniences — tent pads, outhouses, and benches — leads hikers between two little-known B.C. historical hotspots, Hope and Tulameen. Hope Mountain Centre director Kelly Pearce, who along with Kelley Cook of Princeton, B.C., spearheaded the six-year project, hopes the trek will end up on the bucket lists of hikers who seek out experiences like the province’s West Coast Trail. Finding and rehabilitating the mid-nineteenth-century route began with the work of Harley Hatfield, an Okanagan Similkameen Parks Society member, who pored over old maps and documents in the 1960s and 1970s. He lived by his words, now immortalized on the trailhead sign, and learned from direct observation, too.
The trail offers an alpine adventure and helps to reveal important truths about the fur trade. Some people think First Nations were exploited during this early history, Pearce says. But she believes Aboriginal peoples “still had real power and sovereignty over their traditional territories prior to the [1858] gold rush, when thousands of outsiders suddenly arrived. The fur trade required close co-operation, intermarriage, and economic trade that benefited both groups.”
First Nations were experienced traders and were invaluable in assisting the Xwelitem (hungry ones, in Halq’eméylem, the language of the Stó:lō) get settled in the area. At Fort Langley, which opened on the banks of the Fraser River in 1827, local high-ranking daughters ended up marrying fur traders and solidifying relationships that were beneficial to both parties. The fur-focused HBC even