The Fur Trade Competition Intensifies (1682-1774)

 

The Indian wars also served as a backdrop for the ongoing economic war between French and English fur trading interests in North America. By 1682 Radisson and Groseilliers had fallen out with HBC and helped Charles Aubert de la Chesnaye form the Companie du Nord to compete against it. In 1682 the company seized York Factory. But, after losing almost all their profits in taxes, Radisson returned to HBC and helped them recover the Factory and the furs that had been taken.  

In 1686 the Companie du Nord then organized a military expedition against the HBC posts on Hudson Bay and sent a raiding party from Montreal, under the Chevalier des Troyes, more than 1,300 km, to capture the HBC posts along James Bay (Moose, Rupert, Albany) but they were unable to capture York. Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville was left in charge of the captured posts and in 1690 he raided Fort Severn but in 1693 lost Albany to the HBC.

In 1694 d’Iberville captured York but the HBC recovered it in 1695. After two years of delays d’Iberville was again in command of a navy and in 1697 he led a successful naval raid on York Factory. On the way to the fort, he defeated three ships of the Royal Navy in the Battle of Hudson's Bay, the largest naval battle in the history of the North American arctic. With the exception of Albany, Companie du Nord now had all the HBC factories which they kept until 1713.

In 1697 a peace treaty was signed restoring all colonial borders to the status quo before hostilities but, because most of the HBC forts had been taken by the French before the war started, the French got to keep them, at least temporarily.

Henry Kelsey's exploration route

In 1690 the HBC Governor at York Factory sent the 23 year old Henry Kelsey on a journey up the Nelson River to see if he could promote trade amongst the First Nations people he would encounter. Travelling with some Indigenous traders he first made it to what is now The Pas, an established gathering place for people heading to York to trade. Accompanied by Cree guides he then travelled for the next two years by canoe and on foot through aspen parkland and prairies until he reached the Touchwood Hills in modern day Saskatchewan. Along the way he met up with Assiniboine and Natywatame people and became the first European to see both buffalo and grizzly bears on the northern Great Plains. Kelsey would later go on to be the Governor of York Factory and Governor of all Hudson’s Bay settlements from 1717-1722.

In spite of the wars with the Fox Nation the French pressed on westward with expanding trading and exploration opportunities. In the 1730’s Pierre Gaultier de Varennes et de La Verendrye, a French Canadian military officer, fur trader, and explorer, explored the area west of Lake Superior, along with his four sons, and established a series of trading posts from Rainy Lake and Lake of the Woods to Lake Manitoba. They were part of a process that added Western Canada to the original New France territory that had been centred along the Saint Lawrence basin, and helped develop the encircling strategy for diverting furs from the HBC factories on Hudson Bay.

Involved in the quest to find a route to the Pacific, La Verendrye also identified two possible rivers, the Missouri and the Saskatchewan but, after establishing a fort at Portage la Prairie, he concentrated on securing trade around the lakes connected to Lake Winnipeg. He was the first known European to reach present-day North Dakota and the upper Missouri River. In the 1740s, two of his sons crossed the prairie as far as present-day Wyoming, and were the first Europeans to see the Rocky Mountains north of New Mexico.

But it was in 1738 that La Verendrye encountered the Mandan, a tribe living in the upper Missouri River and its tributaries. As a result of their settled agrarian culture, the Mandan had developed into a great trading nation trading their large corn surpluses with other tribes for bison meat, guns, horses and other items. The permanent Mandan settlements of large round earth lodges surrounding a central plaza were referred to as the "marketplace of the central plains" and their trading network extended as far as the Pacific Northwest, Gulf Coast and Atlantic Seaboard.

Mandan Village

La Verendrye’s successful efforts to divert furs from the HBC prompted them to fund an exploration of their own to the west which was led by Anthony Henday in 1754 and based out of York Factory. Winning the respect of the Blackfoot, Henday, on his first exploration, was able to make it, with the aid of his Cree guides, all the way to see the Rocky Mountains (the first European to see them) before travelling back via the Saskatchewan River.

The waterways of Canada made for a natural transportation route on both North-South and East-West directions. Rivers were the highways for many Indigenous people and boats were often the most efficient way to travel. The birch bark canoe was an original Indigenous technology and an easy way to move goods and materials to and from trading posts and communities. Along both HBC and French trade routes, Indigenous people sold materials like birch bark, cedar root, birch rind, and tar to build and repair these canoes.

The original fur trade route was the St. Lawrence River with its direct connection to the Great Lakes or via the Ottawa/Mattawa River system to Lake Nipissing and down the French River to Georgian Bay and Lake Huron. From Lake Superior explorers like Pierre La Verendrye then made their way West to the South of Lake Winnipeg via the Pidgeon, Rainy, and Winnipeg Rivers. Further South from where the Winnipeg River flows into Lake Winnipeg, the Red River flows out of Lake Winnipeg and connects along the way with the Assiniboine River. Also connecting with the Assiniboine River is the tributary Qu'Appelle River which itself flows East out of the South Saskatchewan River. 

The South and North Saskatchewan Rivers merge together and flow into the North end of Lake Winnipeg thus connecting the prairie plains all the way to the Rocky Mountains. Flowing North out of Lake Winnipeg and draining into Hudson Bay is the Nelson River. Also draining into Hudson Bay is the Churchill River which, in turn, is connected to the Mackenzie River in the North via the Athabasca River, Athabasca Lake, Peace River, Slave River and Slave Lake waterways.

As convenient as these rivers are they still required prodigious endurance to paddle the incredible distances from one place to the next. On top of that were numerous portages where the canoes and all the goods they were carrying had to be unloaded and transported on foot to connecting waterways or past dangerous rapids. With the rivers typically only flowing in one direction it was extra hard work to paddle against the current to go the opposite way.

With no time to stop and hunt for food along the way, the fur traders were dependant on the pemmican they carried to provide them with the calories required to sustain them. The pemmican was typically supplied by Metis and Cree bison hunters who lived near key posts along the routes being travelled.

Metis Flag

As the trading networks grew, both the HBC men and French voyageurs adopted the trading practices of the Indigenous population. Indigenous women and their kin would secure trading privileges, economic bonds, and loyalty through marriages and long-term relationships with the newcomers. These common law marriages while mutually beneficial, were not always permanent. 

The offspring of these relationships became known to HBC as “half-breeds” or “mixed bloods” while the French called their children “bois-brûlés” (burnt wood) or Métis. Little could anyone have predicted that through a series of unforeseen circumstances, time, and human nature, these relationships would create a new nation, the Métis people.

French traders, by adapting to Indigenous cultures, conducted their trade somewhat differently than the British. The French went further inland and often pushed the canoe routes to the edge of the expanding commercial frontier. As a means to facilitate trade, First Nations hosted the French in their villages and camps during the winter whereas the British for the most part stayed by themselves in their factories. 

The St. Lawrence-Great Lakes trading system, developed by the French, had come to be served by an itinerant pedlar pattern style of trade. This type of trade was dominated by many small partnerships. It was conducted by parties of a few men sent out to do business with the First Nations in their own territory.

The Rupert’s Land trading system, by contrast, had not evolved in the same manner and the HBC's employees remained in their coastal “factories” at the mouths of various rivers emptying into Hudson Bay, awaiting the arrival of Indigenous people to trade.

There was keen competition between the French-Canadian traders and the HBC and the First Nations were astute enough to play the English and French against each other by trading with both.

But the French Canadians took the lion’s share of the trade as they had many advantages. They controlled the main waterways throughout the west, they had a sure supply of the birch bark needed for canoes (something the HBC men lacked), many of their trade goods were preferred by the Indigenous people, and they had good relations with the First Nations, with whom they had developed extensive kinship ties.

They did so even in spite of the high costs of the necessarily labour-intensive transportation system known as the canoe brigade. The annual dash of brigades, from Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca to Fort William on Lake Superior, created much of the romantic image of the fur trade. 

Samuel Hearne's route to the Arctic Ocean

In 1770 HBC authorized another exploration, this time to the north, in search of copper which had been shown to the governor at Churchill. Over a series of three overland expeditions through barren lands and muskeg, accompanied by Chipewyan guides, and most importantly women, Samuel Hearne eventually made it to the Arctic Ocean (becoming the first European to do so) by way of the Coppermine River but he couldn’t find a suitable source worth mining. He then came back by crossing over the Great Slave Lake, which he was the first European to see.

By 1774, HBC trade had been undercut enough that the company was forced to alter its coast-factory trading policy. The HBC embarked on an aggressive policy of inland expansion starting with Samuel Hearne establishing Cumberland House on the Saskatchewan River.