III.

The Fur Trade

Long before the British arrived, the Cree people occupied the area around Hudson Bay known as the Hudson Bay Lowlands. They caught fish and harvested water birds at the bay in the summer and hunted and trapped along inland waterways in winter. Farther south, along the Great Lakes, lived the Ojibwa people, whose homeland expanded westward as they became more involved in the fur trade and moved farther west to find fur-bearing animals. The Assiniboine and Sioux communities to the southwest also moved westward onto the plains as British and French fur traders reached their lands.

During its first century, the HBC built trading forts at the mouths of the major rivers on Hudson and James bays and relied on indigenous people to transport furs from the interior. Henry Kelsey in the 1690s and Anthony Henday in the 1750s, both agents of the company, were among the first British to travel far inland in the territory. During the same period, French explorers, most notably French Canadian Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, sieur de la Vérendrye, in the 1730s, crossed the southern reaches of Rupert’s Land to establish a French trading and military presence along the northern border of the Louisiana territory (then defined as the area that drained into the Mississippi and Missouri rivers). It was not until 1774 that the HBC built its first permanent post in the interior, Cumberland House on the Saskatchewan River.

Rupert’s Land was the site of much competition over the fur trade. From the 1780s to 1821 the North West Company, a company of merchants based in Montréal, rivaled the HBC in fur trading throughout Rupert’s Land. As a result, fur-bearing animals started to decline, and violence occasionally broke out between the two companies. They merged in 1821 under the name of Hudson’s Bay Company.