In 1779 a group of independent fur traders from Montreal banded together to form the North West Company; this was a trading expedient and no one could have foreseen its brilliant and far-reaching results. Before the North West Company name disappeared in a merger with the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1821 it had spanned the continent, reached the Arctic, and traded round the Horn to China. Many of the great rivers and lakes of the North and West carry the names of the company’s servants as the only memorial so far accorded them: Pond, Frobisher, Mackenzie, Thompson and Fraser are merely the best remembered of perhaps the most remarkable group of associates that Canada has seen. “...accurate, magnificently organized, sparely written...one of the finest works of Canadian history I have ever read...These men have the most marvellous characters who ever founded and operated a business enterprise in North America.”—Hugh MacLennan, award-winning Canadian author and professor of English at McGill University

However, this is no romanticized saga. Town shows that the fur trade produced a peculiar cocktail of corporate manipulation, family ties, personal willfulness, political ineptitude, and frontier violence that led to one of the darkest periods of Canadian history. From 1811 when Lord Selkirk first brought his proposal to settle displaced Scots crofters in Rupert’s Land, to the merger of the North West and Hudson’s Bay companies in 1821, the fur trade was in the grip of turmoil. Although well-intentioned, Selkirk had already failed at several resettlement projects before he introduced the idea to the Hudson’s Bay Company ...

The manufacturing of a chronic food crisis Food insecurity in the North is one of Canada’s most shameful public health and human rights crises. In Plundering the North, Kristin Burnett and Travis Hay examine the disturbing mechanics behind the origins of this crisis: state and corporate intervention in northern Indigenous foodways. Despite claims to the contrary by governments, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), and the contemporary North West Company (NWC), the exorbitant cost of food in the North is neither a naturally occurring phenomenon nor the result of free-market forces. Rather, inflated food prices are the direct result of government policies and corporate monopolies. Using food as a lens to track the institutional presence of the Canadian state in the North, Burnett and Hay chart the social, economic, and political changes that have taken place in northern Ontario since the 1950s. They explore the roles of state food policy and the HBC and NWC in setting up, perpetuating, and profiting from food insecurity while undermining Indigenous food sovereignties and self-determination. Plundering the North provides fresh insight into Canada’s settler colonial project by re-evaluating northern food policy and laying bare the governmental and corporate processes behind the chronic food insecurity experienced by northern Indigenous communities.

Describes duties, wages, stations, and many other details concerning the approximately one hundred voyageurs in the English River district during 1785 and 1786.

In the early nineteenth century, when the Hudson’s Bay Company sent men to its furthest posts along the coast of North America’s Pacific Northwest, the letters of those who cared for those men followed them in the Company’s supply ships. Sometimes, these letters missed their objects – the men had returned to Britain, or deserted their ships, or died. The Company returned the correspondence to its London office and over the years amassed a file of “undelivered letters.” Many of these remained sealed for 150 years and until they were opened by archivist Judith Hudson Beattie, when the Company archives were moved to Canada. These letters tell the fascinating stories of ordinary people whose lives are rarely recounted in traditional histories. Beattie and Helen M. Buss skilfully introduce us to both the lives of the letter writers and their would-be recipients. Their commentaries frame, for contemporary readers, the words of early nineteenth century working and middle class British folk as well as letters to “voyageurs” from Quebec. The stories of their lives – fathers struggling to support a family, widowed mothers yearning to see their sons, bereft sweethearts left behind, and wives raising their children alone – reach out over two centuries to offer rare insight into the varied worlds of men and women in the early nineteenth century, many of whom became settlers in Washington, Oregon, and the new British colony of Vancouver Island.

The Northwest Coast documents Britain's rise topre-eminence in this far-flung corner of the empire. It shows how therelentless activities of its commercial interests, the adroit use ofits naval power, and the steely resolve of its diplomats securedBritish claims to dominion and rights to trade along the NorthwestCoast. Written by a leading maritime scholar and based on freshresearch into known manuscripts and printed works on Pacific trade andexploration, this book incorporates new interpretations on explorationand commercial activity in this area.

In an era of grand risk, fur moguls vied to command Northwest and China markets, gambling lives and capital on the price of beaver pelts, purchases of ships and trade goods, international commerce laws, and the effects of war.