Woven Together
WE DON’T ALWAYS SEE ALL OF THE STRANDS THAT MAKE UP THE HBC STORY.
We don’t always see all the strands that make up the Hudson’s Bay Company story.
Hudson’s Bay Company stands tall among the landmarks of Canadian history, but much remains to be explored in the way the Company’s history has entwined with those of Canada and of First Nations. Let’s look at some revealing moments across those years from 1670 to 2020 — glimpses into a long and remarkable past.
1670 Who were the founders of the Company of Adventurers?
The names on the Royal Charter granted on May 2, 1670, seem to confirm who founded Hudson’s Bay Company: English lords and gentlemen, mostly. But Olive Dickason, the great Métis historian of Canada, said we need to look farther afield, right to the heart of North America.
In the 1660s war raged around the Great Lakes — the French-backed Huron-Wendat and their Anishinabe allies versus the five Haudenosaunee nations supported by the Dutch and the English. Trade to the St. Lawrence River had grown too hazardous for the northern Cree. When the French traders Pierre-Esprit Radisson and Médard Chouart Des Groseilliers visited them, the Cree said, in effect, what we need is a trade route through Hudson Bay. Radisson and Des Groseilliers took that proposition to London. London’s traders got the message, and the Nonsuch sailed to James Bay. The fur trade through Hudson Bay was born.
To honour the Cree among the founders of the Company does not diminish the vision of the Londoners who seized their opportunity. Indeed, it makes what happened in 1670 all the more remarkable. Strategic leaders and traders in the heart of North America had connected with equally tough and strategic counterparts on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean. Together they opened one of the great world-spanning commercial exchanges that were developing in the seventeenth century. This one would have enormous consequences — sometimes heroic, sometimes tragic — for Canada throughout the next 350 years.
1691 Explorer Henry Kelsey, inspired to poetry on the Great Plains
In sixteen hundred & ninety’th year
I set forth as plainly may appear Through Gods assistance for to understand The Natives language and to see their land. Barely twenty years after the founding of the Company, Henry Kelsey stood in the Touchwood Hills, 120 kilometres north of the site of what we know as Regina, and was inspired to poetry. Guided by Cree traders who were themselves expanding their reach westward, Kelsey had travelled a thousand kilometres from York Factory on the west coast of Hudson Bay. He was not far from the geographical centre of North America.
The Company had no wish to build forts and trading posts deep inside the territory granted to it by Charles II. But it did want all the trading nations of the interior to know that its posts on Hudson Bay would pay well for furs brought there. In 1690, Kelsey, already noted as “an active lad delighting much in Indians’ company” and able to speak some Cree, was dispatched to carry that message inland and to report back on all he saw.
Kelsey became the first Bay man to see the great grasslands of the prairie west, with their numberless bison and roaming grizzly bears (“he is man’s food and he makes food of man,” Kelsey wrote in the couplets with which he started his report).
War was breaking out between England and France. For the next two decades the French would hold most of the Company’s posts on the Bay. Voyageurs out of Montreal, rather than Bay men from York Factory, succeeded Kelsey in venturing to the western rivers and plains.
Before that, however, Kelsey’s delegation to the Assiniboine and other inland nations became living proof that the globespanning ambitions of the founders were coming true.
“The inland country of good report hath been/ By Indians but by English yet not seen,” he wrote. But already the trade was reaching deep into the continent.
1730 The view from beyond the trading post
Indigenous North American nations had always traded widely with each other. And now the Europeans’ appetite for beaver pelts seemed limitless. “The beaver makes all things perfectly. It makes kettles, axes, swords, knives, bread; in brief, everything,” an Innu hunter once told the Jesuit missionary Paul Le Jeune. Indigenous nations were ready to take up a trade that let them add such goods and tools to their daily life.
The fur trade depended on Indigenous peoples continuing to live in their established ways on their own territories. Before the disruptions of disease, missionary pressure, alcohol, and the steady incursions of colonial powers and settler populations, First Nations controlled the hunting territories, handled the transportation of pelts across North America, and shaped the terms of trade. The stage was set for a long, roughly equal alliance that provided value to both sides.
But even when Indigenous and European partners traded equally, the trade could bring disaster. In the 1730s, when the Assiniboine on the North Saskatchewan were stricken with smallpox, a Company trader wrote, “They are very few if any left alive … their tents left standing and the wild beasts devouring them.” This was just one moment in a centuries-long cycle of tragedy assisted by the trade, in which diseases carried by the Europeans devastated Indigenous populations.
1807 Not to be kept out — women in Hudson’s Bay Company’s world
Just after Christmas of 1807, Alexander Henry, the North West Company’s factor at Pembina on the Red River south of Fort Garry, was called to the sickbed of an HBC employee visiting his post — and got the shock of his life. “He stretched out his hands to me, and in piteous tones begged me to be kind to a poor, helpless, abandoned wretch who was not of the sex I had supposed but an unfortunate Orkney girl, pregnant, and actually in childbirth.” Henry had just met Isobel Gunn, one of the extraordinary women in the annals of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
The Company banned women from its trading posts, but the ban never held. From the start the fur trade depended in a thousand ways on women. Thanadelthur, a Chipewyan held prisoner among the Cree, escaped to York Factory and enabled the Company to open trade with her Chipewyan people. Bay traders were helpless without strong alliances with their Indigenous hosts and suppliers, and those alliances were usually sealed by marriage.
Women’s work helped to feed and to clothe the Bay men, and “country marriages,” as they were known, made the fur trade possible. Some of these unions were brief, and many traders felt no obligation when they left Rupert’s Land. But, as the title of Sylvia Van Kirk’s renowned book on the subject says, “many tender ties” were established, and they integrated some Bay men, at least a little, into Indigenous society and culture.
And Isobel Gunn? She had signed on as a man and did a man’s work for more than a year. But once discovered she was shipped back to Orkney with her son and from there was lost to history. She lives on in the novel Isobel Gunn by West Coast writer Audrey Thomas.
1821 From partnership to dependence
During its first century Hudson’s Bay Company found itself surrounded and often outcompeted by voyageurs out of Montreal and their British successors of the North West Company. In 1774 HBC opened Cumberland House on the Saskatchewan River and began to compete for the inland trade across the West. The decades of competition that ensued, sometimes heroic, often vicious, were costly to both sides, as rival trading posts opened on every river and lake across the Northwest.
If Indigenous trappers and traders did not get all they wanted from one company, they went to the other. HBC and NorthWest Company records are full of instances of Cree and other traders comparing each company’s wares and rates unfavourably to those of its rival company. The fight weakened both companies until 1821, when the Company’s deeper pockets let it buy out the Montreal traders and create a fur-trading monopoly.
After 1821, the Company held a real monopoly in the fur trade. Its hard-driving new North American chief, George Simpson, quickly closed posts, laid off staff, and demanded more pelts on harsher terms from Indigenous traders. The fur trade, once a roughly equal exchange between equals, continued its long slide toward dependence and domination.
1870 Who owned Rupert’s Land, anyway?
In 1670 King Charles II of England had granted the Company trading rights in the territory drained by all the rivers flowing into Hudson Bay — Rupert’s Land, seven per cent of the land surface of the earth. Two hundred years later, the newly founded nation of Canada sought to take over these territories. Canada paid HBC £300,000 (about $1.5 million at the time), and Britain transferred the Company’s Rupert’s Land rights to Canada.
But what had Canada “bought” when it “acquired” Rupert’s Land in 1870?
As the Company’s 1670 charter states, it “traded into Hudson’s Bay.” It did very little to govern or to control the land or the people there. The First Nations of Rupert’s Land — unmentioned in the Company’s charter — had never conceded their land or their independence to the Company, or to anyone else. The new Dominion of Canada had no legal basis on which to annex them or their lands.
In 1869 the Métis relied on this reality when they established a provisional government at Red River and prevented Canada’s appointed governor from entering what Canada called its Northwest Territories. The Métis were, however, willing to negotiate joining Canada as the new province of Manitoba — and they did so in 1870.
In the rest of the region, and west to the Pacific, Canada began to negotiate with the First Nations who owned and governed the land.
Between 1871 and 1877, the first seven numbered treaties laid out the relationships between Canada and First Nations in what are now Canada’s three prairie provinces. Treaties remain the basis of the relationships between First Nations and Canada.
1885 Could HBC have built the CPR?
Historian Michael Bliss posed a provocative question in his history of Canadian business. Why didn’t Hudson’s Bay Company build the Canadian Pacific Railway?
In the 1860s, the Company’s fur trade was in rapid decline, but it had been organizing transportation in western Canada for two centuries. Why did it not shift from York boats to locomotives, build Canada’s railway to the Pacific, and secure its dominance for another century or so? Bliss argued that the Company missed a great opportunity.
Yet businessmen involved in the western trade did play key roles in building the CPR. George Stephen, its president, made his first fortune building transportation links between Minnesota and the Red River Settlement. Donald Smith, Stephen’s cousin who had been an HBC trader for decades, was the man who drove the last spike in 1885.
1990 Rolph Huband and the Hudson’s Bay Company History Foundation
By the 1970s Hudson’s Bay Company was an empire of department stores. George Richardson became the Company’s first Canadian-born governor in 1970, and its headquarters moved from London, England, to Canada the same year. In 1974 the Company’s immense historical records came to Winnipeg, where its collection of Canadian artifacts was already housed.
By the 1990s, it was time to consolidate the Company’s historical resources and to separate them from its commercial operations. Rolph Huband, a Winnipeg-trained lawyer who had become vice-president and corporate secretary of the Company, had the required vision. At his suggestion, the Company donated its archives and its artifacts to the province of Manitoba, and it devoted the tax breaks it received for this donation to a new Hudson’s Bay Company History Foundation that would ensure the preservation of the treasures it had donated.
Huband also laid the design for what became Canada’s National History Society. The society took over publication of the Company’s magazine, The Beaver, which had begun transforming into the general-interest Canadian-history magazine we know today as Canada’s History. Huband served as the society’s chair and the magazine’s publisher until 1997.
For his contributions to the history of Canada and to the history of the Company, Huband received the Order of Canada.
2020 HBC at 350
In 2020, on its 350th anniversary, Hudson’s Bay Company continues to feature heritage items such as the famous Bay blanket in its retail stores. But today the Company is essentially foreign-owned and out of the fur trade. Its fortunes are tied to the international retailing marketplace and the fluctuation of the investment market.
Today’s Canadians mostly know The Bay as a fashion and home-goods department store in our downtowns and shopping malls. Its history and Canada’s remain permanently entwined, however. Canada and Hudson’s Bay Company have both come a long way in 350 years.