Special History:
The Environment and the Fur Trade Experience in
Voyageurs National Park, 1730-1870

Chapter One
The Rainy Lake Region in the Fur Trade (continued)

Historical Overview of the fur trade in the Rainy Lake Region

The North West Company and the Hudson's Bay Company, 1793-1821

Thomas Douglas, the Fifth Earl of Selkirk

From 1793 to 1821, the North West Company and the Hudson's Bay Company were locked in a bitter struggle for supremacy. In the course of this struggle, the Rainy Lake Region acquired strategic importance beyond its value for furs. The Hudson's Bay Company sought to replace its rival as the main trading partner with the Indians around Rainy Lake, and thereby render this key post on the voyageur route from Grand Portage to Fort Chipewyan untenable for the North West Company. Sharp competition for the Indian trade affected the fur companies' relations with the Indians, generally making conditions worse for the Indians. It also exacerbated differences between Hudson's Bay Company men and North West Company men, who were already separated by ethnicity and contrasting company cultures. The struggle came to a head after Thomas Douglas, the Fifth Earl of Selkirk, who was a large investor in the Hudson's Bay Company, established a settler colony on the Red River. Lord Selkirk's enterprise was closely identified with the Hudson's Bay Company. During the ensuing strife, known to history as the "Red River Troubles," the Rainy Lake Region continued to play a strategic role even as the main drama unfolded 150 miles to the west.

If the Hudson's Bay Company had the advantage of being able to supply its forts on Hudson Bay by sea, the upstart North West Company made the most of its long, tenuous, river-born transportation network. By 1795, the North West Company controlled an estimated 11/14 of the fur trade in Canada. Independent traders held another 1/14, and the Hudson's Bay Company was reduced to a modest 2/14. [32] As early as 1774, Hudson's Bay Company men realized the need to push inland with their own trading posts, and built Cumberland House on the lower Saskatchewan River. They built other posts, including Osnaburg House on Lake St. Joseph in 1786. This latter post opened the route from Hudson Bay to Lake of the Woods via the Albany and English rivers. It also gave them a purchase on the Indian trade around Lake Nipigon, north of Lake Superior. [33] This was as far south as the Hudson's Bay Company advanced until 1793, when it dispatched John McKay to the Rainy Lake Region.

During his four years in the Rainy Lake Region, McKay recorded day-to-day events in the post journal. [34] His narrative has been summarized both by Grace Lee Nute in Rainy River Country and by A. M. Johnson in "Hudson's Bay Company on Rainy River, 1793-95." [35] McKay and his men struggled through two winters as they learned where to fish, traded with the Indians for moose and deer meat, and made a modest start in cultivating a garden. A friendly but insistent rivalry developed between McKay and the North West Company trader, Charles Boyer, whose own fort was located only a short distance away. Their men played football, celebrated Christmas and New Years, and occasionally extended a helping hand to each other. Meanwhile, Boyer tried to deceive McKay about where to find Indians, and McKay attempted a ruse to get Boyer to build his new post behind his own on the path most often used by trading Indians, but neither man was able to fool the other. This quaint interaction by two unusually civilized traders belied the vicious competition that would develop over the next two decades.

Historian Daniel Francis has remarked that the Hudson's Bay Company and the North West Company were as different "as two trading companies possibly could be." [36] They were organized differently, their employees were of different ethnic and religious backgrounds, and they took different approaches toward trade with the Indians. The Hudson's Bay Company was organized "in the traditional mould of the imperial trading company, chartered by the British monarch and given a monopoly to exploit the resources of its far-flung possessions." With its headquarters in London, most of the company's directors had never been to North America. They were cautious and inflexible in the face of competition. The Hudson's Bay Company was divided into "officers" and "servants." The officers expected advancement based on patronage more than merit. The servants, who came from the English working class or the Scottish islands, had little incentive to try for promotion into the officer ranks. Yet despite a rigid, class-based organization and conservative leadership, the company possessed the advantages of long experience and internal discipline.

The North West Company, by contrast, was "a restive partnership of aggressive colonial merchants." [37] The upper ranks of the company, known as clerks or bourgeois, came from Scotland and England primarily. After several years of experience in "Indian country," it was possible for a clerk to become a partner in the company. Indeed, many of the company's leaders continued to serve in the interior and were called "wintering partners," while other men in the top ranks of the company took care of affairs in Montreal, purchasing goods and marketing furs. The company recruited its laborers from among the Canadian voyageurs. The French-speaking voyageurs paddled the canoes, built the posts, and performed the grunt work. They seldom rose to the rank of bourgeois, let alone partner. Separated from the bourgeois by language, religion, class, and culture, the voyageurs were possessed of an independent spirit. "If a Hudson's Bay Company trading house resembled a military barracks," writes Francis, "a Nor'Wester establishment had more in common with a rowdy tavern." [38]

Social historians have delved into the contrasting organizational structures of these two great fur companies to understand "fur trade society"–a broad concept embracing all Europeans and Indians who participated in the economic system. Fur traders frequently married native women, and these unions produced a growing (and aging) population of mixed-blood offspring. The social historians have discovered profound differences in the way the two companies discouraged, sanctioned, or supported interracial marriages and in the way they treated mixed-blood offspring. In general, the North West Company took a more positive approach to interracial unions, which in turn enhanced trade relations between the company and native groups. Mixed-blood offspring of Hudson's Bay Company men were known as "Country-Born," and were expected–with limited support and little hope of success–to be assimilated into British society. Mixed-blood offspring of North West Company men were known as métis and maintained stronger ties to their native kin. The métis, writes Sylvia Van Kirk, "developed a strong sense of their place in the West and were able to produce articulate leaders to defend it." [39]

These differences in social patterns appeared in microcosm in the Rainy Lake Region, as will be shown in the next chapter. What is significant here is that the differences in social patterns played an important role in the conflict between the two companies over the Hudson's Bay Company's Red River colony. As early as the 1800s, the North West Company recognized the growing need to provide some form of support for retired employees and their native dependents. A plan to develop a settlement for retired employees and their native dependents at Rainy Lake failed to materialize because of the bitter trade rivalry there, and instead a métis settlement appeared in the Red River country. [40] When the Hudson's Bay Company supported a colony in the Red River country, bringing emigrants from the Orkney Islands by way of Hudson Bay, friction soon developed between the métis and the new colonists.

The Red River colony was the brainchild of Thomas Douglas, Earl of Selkirk, who came to dominate the Hudson's Bay Company in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Lord Selkirk, like the Nor'Westers, saw a vital need for a colony to take care of retired servants who had married á la façon du pays, or according to the custom of the country. The colonial scheme had more than the former employees' welfare in view. Selkirk anticipated that the company would provide logistical support to the colony and the colony would provide a steady source of new recruits for the company. More importantly, as the Hudson's Bay Company moved inland in the 1790s and early 1800s, it needed more provisions for its many new posts. The area south of Lake Winnipeg was the most important district in the provisioning trade, yielding pemmican and wild rice. The colony would capture this trade and augment it with agricultural produce. For this reason alone, the North West Company bitterly opposed the Hudson's Bay Company's scheme. [41]

Lord Selkirk's motivation was not entirely mischievous, for in the early 1800s there seemed to be a strong likelihood that the two great fur companies would soon amalgamate and that the colony would serve the needs of the whole combined enterprise. Once the two companies were joined, Selkirk reasoned, the competition over the provisioning trade would recede. There would be fewer posts overall, and lines of supply would be shortened as northwest posts would communicate directly with Hudson Bay. [42] Selkirk was well aware of internal divisions within the North West Company that could lead to its demise despite its position of dominance.

Duncan McGillivray explains the effect of competition on the fur trade While the struggle between the two companies existed there was nearly double the usual quantity of spiritous liquors consumed in the Indian Country. In examining the moral effects of the intercourse between the traders and the savage tribes, it is not easy to avoid the political consequences which present themselves; since the control of the Indians will be always in the hands of those who supply them with arms and clothing. While the trade is confined to a single company that Company is bound by every motive which self interest can supply to preserve the savages from wars, drunkeness [sic], idleness, or whatever else would divert them from the chase and lessen the quantity of skins annually received at the different posts. And whenever their services might be required in War, their obedience and alacrity would be in a direct ratio of the influence which the traders might possess over them. —Duncan McGillivray, "Some Account of the Trade Carried on by the North West Company," pp. 62-63.

The most serious internal division among the Nor'Westers involved Sir Alexander Mackenzie, the partner who explored the Mackenzie and Peace rivers in 1789 and 1793. As early as 1797, Mackenzie began positioning himself to start a rival concern, or to "oppose" as it was termed then. In 1799, he departed the company acrimoniously. After a sojourn in Britain, during which time he received a knighthood and published his Voyages from Montreal, Mackenzie returned to Canada in 1802. The following year he took charge of the New North West Company, also known as Sir Alexander Mackenzie and Company or the XY Company after the "XY" brand used on its packs of furs. The precise origins of this company are obscure, but it seems to have been in existence by at least 1800. Selkirk stated that it formed in 1798. In any case, after Mackenzie assumed leadership the XY definitely menaced the North West Company. [43]

The growing competition was demonstrated through the rapid proliferation of trading posts all over the Canadian Northwest in the 1790s and 1800s. Several posts appeared along the eastern end of the Grand Portage-Rainy Lake route, including an XY fort. [44] Although the Hudson's Bay Company abandoned its trading house below the outlet of Rainy Lake about 1797, there were again two rival posts here in 1804, when trader Hugh Faries visited a post owned by the XY Company. [45] That year the North West Company relocated its great wilderness depot at Grand Portage to Kaministiquia and named it Fort William, and about the same time it established a subpost at Little Vermilion Lake (Crane Lake). John McLoughlin occupied the latter post in 1807-08. [46]

Lord Selkirk finally obtained his land grant for the Red River colony in 1811. Named Assiniboia, the grant covered 116,000 square miles and stretched from Lake Winnipeg into present-day North Dakota. Never had the North West Company's long supply line through the Rainy Lake Region been so vulnerable. Indeed, so close was the Rainy Lake Region to the colony that people traversed the intervening country by two main routes: the canoe route down Rainy River to Lake of the Woods and thence up the Winnipeg River, and an overland route by way of the Warroad River, a portage, and the Roseau River to the Red River. [47]

Tensions between colonists and métis mounted following the so-called "Pemmican Proclamation" in 1814. Faced with wintertime food shortages, the Hudson's Bay Company officer in charge, Miles Macdonell, issued a written proclamation that no food–meat, grain, or vegetables–could be exported from Assiniboia. Stores of pemmican belonging to the North West Company were impounded. The métis objected that the Hudson's Bay Company had no right to regulate their trade in pemmican, and the North West Company was equally determined that the pemmican trade should not be interrupted. [48] This ignited a period of strife. There was a massacre of the governor and several followers (the Massacre of Seven Oaks), numerous illegal seizures of property, and various sham arrests in which clerks of both companies were taken prisoner or forcibly extracted from the country to stand trial in Montreal. [49]

In 1816, Lord Selkirk employed a force of Meurons, Swiss mercenaries from the Napoleonic Wars, to reassert control in the Red River colony. Approaching by way of the Great Lakes, the Meurons captured the North West Company's Fort William at Kaministikwia. Next, the force moved on the North West Company's post at Rainy Lake. Historian Grace Lee Nute has described what followed:

Peter Fidler was in charge of the attacking party at Rainy Lake late in 1816. The first attempt was unsuccessful, for when Fidler called upon the clerk in charge, J. W. Dease, to surrender, the latter refused. Fidler, lacking men to enforce his demand, returned to Fort William, secured more soldiers, two fieldpieces, and Captain D'Orsonnens, and returned to invest and blockade the fort. As Dease had only seven men with him, all depending on fishing and gathering wild rice for subsistence, he was forced to yield. [50]

This opened the way to the Red River settlements, and the rebellion fell apart. The North West Company regained its post at Rainy Lake, but the Hudson's Bay Company established its own in the region which it had abandoned nearly twenty years earlier. [51]

In an effort to restore harmony, Selkirk negotiated with the Catholic Church to send a mission to the Red River settlements by way of Rainy Lake. Although the colonists were predominantly Protestant, Selkirk shrewdly calculated that the Catholic priests would reduce friction between the colonists and the métis by appealing to the Catholic voyageurs in their midst. [52] This initiative resulted in a brief Catholic mission to Rainy Lake itself in 1816-18.

By 1818, peace was restored in the Red River settlements and throughout the country from Rainy Lake to Fort William. The points of conflict between the two great fur companies moved from the center to the ends of the North West Company's supply line–to the courts in Montreal and the remote posts of the Athabaska country. The Hudson's Bay Company mounted an expedition to Lake Athabaska in 1818 that met with the arrest of its leader by the Nor'Westers and starvation during the winter. A second expedition was more successful in establishing the company's presence there. Meanwhile, numerous lawsuits involving charges of murder, kidnapping, and seizures of property, brought by both companies against each other, demonstrated the paralysis of the Canadian courts and ended in a rash of case dismissals and acquittals. Charges against Lord Selkirk himself were still pending when Selkirk died of illness in 1820. The Nor'Westers, alarmed and disgusted by all the strife, finally negotiated a merger with the Hudson's Bay Company in 1821. [53]

Table of Contents | Introduction | Rainy Lake Region | Fur Trade Experience | Material Culture | Natural Environment | Bibliography