American History Hit - Fur Trapping, Empire & the Hudson’s Bay Company

Episode Date: October 8, 2026

Did you know that almost 40% of the land that is now Canada was once owned by a single commercial company?The Hudson's Bay Company surrendered this area for the sum of £300,000 in 1869. But how did they come to control it? What was life like for fur traders in North America? And what was the Pemmican War?Don is joined today by Stephen R. Bown, author of ‘The Company: The Rise and Fall of the Hudson’s Bay Empire’.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Aliza Dams. Senior Producer was Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast.History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Bacon's Rebellion down in Virginia, and the Salem Witch Trials in Massachusetts. Over in the fashionable circles of London, Paris, and Amsterdam, anyone who's anyone is topping off their fit with a nicely appointed, broadly brimmed, beaver felt hat. They're warm, they're waterproof, they're fattishly posh. And in England, at least, they cost about 40 shillings, 20 days of work for the average laborer. What's more, they're made of beaver that comes from an exotic and mysterious new world.

They come from North America. Hi everyone, welcome to American History. I'm your host, Don Wildman. European exploration was primarily driven by capital pursuit, investors in England and on the continent, funding expeditions that led to settlements that led to colonies and so forth. And in the early days, if it was gold down south, up north, it was fur pelts, and especially beaver. Into the wilds ventured the European trappers,

who are so often vaguely referred to in historical accounts. Well, vague no more. Today, we look closely at the individuals stalking the wilderness on behalf of their European patrons. What organized company did they serve? How did they interact and intermix with native peoples? And very basically, why beaver? We'll find out with Stephen R. Bown,

an oft-awarded historian and author of a dozen works of historical non-fiction. Being a Canadian, he is proudly focused on Canadian history with works like Dominion, the Railway, and the Rise of Canada. And the book will draw from today, the rise and fall of the Hudson's Bay Empire, published only a few years back. Hi, Stephen, how are you? Welcome to American History, it.

Thank you. My pleasure to be here. So much of today's episode is geographically landing in the Great North, what is today Canada, but of course, in those days, a vast territory of various people native to those parts, like the Cree, the Inuit, and others. It was a serious and widespread indigenous population, wasn't it? Oh, yeah.

There were many, many dozens of indigenous nations that all had different languages, different cultures, different landscapes they lived in. You know, we have woodland hunters more in the east and around the lakes. We had prairies. People out on the prairies were hunting bison and buffalo on horseback. We had salmon fishers in the mountains in the west. And, of course, there was no international boundary between, well, what at the time was the British Empire and, you know, what I call the American Empire,

since at the time they were struggling to compete for who is going to extend their control over that land. Eventually, the border disbisected right through the cultural, traditional lands of a great number of people. You know, and of course, disease had its toll, basically eliminating 80% of the indigenous population, which is what more or less paved the way for Britain and the United States to be able to, you know, press territorial claims over this entire, uh, land of North America and eventually divided up between them. And we will be focusing on the lands around the Hudson Bay, a gigantic realm about the size of West Virginia, far greater than the Great Lakes combined.

Hudson Bay had been explored, of course, by Henry Hudson in 1610 as he searched for the Northwest Passage for the English East India Company. And around the same time, you've got Samuel de Chimplain, founding Quebec, claiming the St. Lawrence River for France, and voila. It's the defining duality of the European colonization of this part of the world. France and England, vying for power and for beaver. What is it with beaver in the 1600s Europe, Stephen? Why so popular?

Yeah, I mean, that's one of the most interesting things. I mean, we live in a world now. We have all sorts of synthetic fibers and materials. Back then, everything had to be natural because there was no access to any of that material. So everything had to be either made of wool, sometimes out of cotton, sometimes out of leather, and fur. And what was special about the beaver is that it's particularly, type of fur in the way that the hairs were lined to each other meant that with a process that involved mercury and eventually drove people into insanity, which is where the term Mattis a Hatter comes from,

you could manufacture a substance known as felt, like traditional felt, real felt. And that was hugely valuable because it could be manipulated into all sorts of different shapes. And I had military applications and warfare for keeping gunpowder dry. But its most valuable trait was that it could be turned into clothing and hats at the time was, you know, very fashionable. And every order of society had its own style of hat that would distinguish them within the hierarchy. And so, yeah, but it's an extremely valuable substance, not for its warmth value, but for its ability to be converted into felt. Interesting. I bet there's a whole sociocultural discussion about hats and why we wear them in there. But it had become quite a fashion trend in Europe, even 100 years before. And as a

result, the hunting and trapping of beavers had almost driven that population in Europe extinct, right? More or less, from a commercial point of view, there was not enough beavers to sustain any kind of economic function anymore. And, you know, by the time of the later 17th century, the 1600s, a lot of the beavers were being hunted out of the Hudson River Valley as well, with a lot of the Iroquois involved in that trade heading down towards Sino, the coast. But that was pretty much, as they termed it at the time beavered out. And the best beavers, of course, lived in the more northern areas where the winters were colder and the beavers put on much greater thickness of fur, which of course made them more valuable. And so the trade just kept moving north.

You know, New France along the St. Lawrence picked that up and they started trying to trade beavers from the north. But they had a funny way of regulating their economy. They did not want free enterprise. They were a state-controlled economy and that really bothered a bunch of people because they could foresee all sorts of business opportunities for themselves and with the indigenous populations that were closest to them, with whom they shared cultural and linguistic ties and genetic ties. So some of these people were attempting to forge their own business for Beaver, and the government always tried to crack down on that.

And there was two people in general, Groscelier and Radisson, and they set off on a multi-year expedition, way out beyond Lake Superior, where they encountered people that were in the sort of woodlands on the fringe of the plains in the upper Mississippi, Missouri River region. And they discovered enormous trade fairs there where people from all over the continent were coming and bringing their wares together. You know, they were bringing furs, they were bringing shells, they were bringing dried corn. They were bringing all sorts of imaginable, fashionable and practical applications, pottery, like clothing.

Everything was being trade in these mandan villages and they got to here and they realized, holy crap. If we could just find a way to tap into this pre-existing trade network, could make a fortune. And they started thinking, well, Henry Hudson, as you had just alluded to, was Harvard exploring Hudson's Bay. And that's got to be to the north of here. And on their return journey, they went up there and they discovered where Hudson was. And they realized, if we could get ships to coming here, we can get a river system that goes right down into that area, plug into a pre-existing trade network and make ourselves fabulously rich. And they had this great idea. And they rushed back to New France. And the governor essentially confiscated all their furs, stole all their property, and

shunned them. So they went down. to the U.S. We're going to talk a lot about these two men, but I want to underscore the fact that this was an enormous operation going on there. You know, we talk about these traders and these trappers in this kind of individualistic way, like, oh, there were these guys out there in the middle of nowhere doing these trapping. No, this was an enormous infrastructure of trade. These guys were already organized. The indigenous people were already organized, creating whole almost conferences of people getting together and trading. It was very organized, wasn't it? Oh, yeah. I mean, that's but surprising. A lot of people don't realize these days anymore. The extent of the commerce and trade that

existed at that time. Of course, they have been flow and different goods and services and different political considerations would shift everything. But yeah, it's an enormous trade networks existed in North America. And so Radisson and Groselye, as you mentioned, these two individuals, are already part of this in the middle of the continent, North Middle. And that's when they get the idea to start a company that can move up north and start hitting on these very rich lands that have lots and lots of beaver. And they're going to go to France without idea, right? Well, they first went to the, you know, certain British colonies on the Atlantic coast in the United States. They were spurned there. They tried to go to France. They were spurned in France. They eventually ended up in the English court.

Of course, right during the plague years and the great fire that burned quarter of London down. But nevertheless, they had this idea. And they, they peddled it as sort of like, hey, England, with our help, you can get around France. You can essentially screw your ancestral enemies in France and cut them off by getting into the heart of the trade and corner the entire thing and make a huge profit for yourself while damaging your enemy. And of course, that's the sound that certain people in English court love to hear. Ooh, I can get rich while screwing my enemy, patriotism and profit at the same time. You know, that doesn't happen too often. So that's where the Genesis of Hudson Bay Company came from. And very quickly, you know, by 1860,

18, 1669, they had sent ships through that treacherous ice-choked pathway to the frigid stony shores of Hudson's Bay and immediately began developing relationships with the people there and setting up forts and engaging in the trade. Right. And I mean, all of these ventures into North America were essentially commercial enterprises. And this is just another version of this. But they're being supported by an unusual person in this case, a man named Prince Rupert of the Rhine, which is surprised me. someone from the German world, or what we call Germany now, he was a nephew of King Charles II. Yeah, he was the patron of the entire thing, and he was very well connected into the English court and all the aristocrats there, and that's how they were able to get financing for this. The first several decades of its operation, it was up and down with French warships trying to attack them, and it was very dangerous to get to Hudson's Bay. It could take many, many months across the Atlantic Ocean and get into that frozen waterway. There's only a two-month

navigation season that you could safely cross it. And it needed a lot of financing to get it off the ground. It was a very closely held aristocratic enterprise. And this is about 1668 we're talking about. This is the first expedition with this royal charter supported by Prince Rupert and a group of English investors. Radisson and Groscelier helped to organize this expedition to Hudson Bay with two ships, the Nunstuch, which was commanded by Zachariah Gilliam and the Eagleet, which

unfortunately had to turn back because of storm damage. Take us through that first expedition a bit. Well, I mean, as you alluded, the storms in the North Atlantic, you know, were vicious. Some people weren't used to sailing there at the time very frequently, so they didn't really know what they were getting into. And these ships, what surprises me as a 21st century person looking back is when you see the small size of these vessels. And I've seen a replica of the non-such in a museum in Winnipeg. And I walked around it and they go across the Atlantic Ocean on that. You know, like it's tiny. It's smaller than most people's living rooms.

And you wonder, how do they get that many dozens of people living on there for months at a time? But of course, it was a miserable existence with the storms and the scurvy attacking them and all the other diseases that are on the ship. And they hardly know where they're going. I mean, wow. You know, I wouldn't sign on to that. But then again, I'm thinking maybe I would if the alternative was to starve to death or something.

And the idea of getting rich. in those days was, that was pretty rare idea. You know, you couldn't, you know, develop your own little entrepreneurial venture. This took a lot of work. And the payoff was worth it, I suppose. Yeah, well, it must have been. I mean, so much of the economy was locked up and controlled by aristocratic elites. They didn't accept challenge to their position of authority. So it was very hard to commercially break through. And so, yeah, a lot of people would just sign on. They would often sign on for many years at a time. I think it was seven-year contracts. So when they left to go over there, they did not intend to return for a long time. And that's one of the key aspects of

the Hudson's Bay Company is that, well, they genetically integrated, they culturally integrated, they linguistically integrated with the local societies. And many of them signed on for many terms and spent most of their lives there. Sometimes they sent their children because inevitably you have children. And that's where the whole Métis people have mixed cultural heritage come from. comes right from the fur trade, right from the very beginning. And that's essentially what drove the enterprise across the continent. One of the fascinating aspects of the early fur trade is that the Hudson's Bay Company did not venture inland. These people were not explorers for the first hundred years.

First century that they were there, they kind of ran like Costco wholesale distribution centers along the bay that were serviced by these ships that came once a year. And they lived there and they formed little communities with the local people who were primarily Cree at the time. But the entire inland trade was run by indigenous business captains or transportation businesses. It was such an irony, really, that the whole thing blew up in everybody's faces as far as the indigenous folks were concerned because those European cultures were pretty much on the coasts because they had to be serviced by these ships. And that was true certainly up here because to the north, the Hudson Bay is so full of ice all the time during the winter. And down south is the James Bay, which is, as I read, extremely different in its water. quality. Lots and lots of rivers

flow into it, so it's kind of a brackish water as opposed to the salt. And there was from there, that was the mouth of the Rupert River named for their sponsor, which became then the site of Charles Fort, named for King Charles. So they're creating their own little world, but it's a little world,

as you say. Yeah, there were seldom more than 500 people of direct European origin living there in those forts at that time. So the Hudson's Bay Company, well, on paper, it looked like this had this enormous empire because the king grandiosely signed that charter away. And there was like, you know, it's big chunks of what's Canada and the United States right now. And they just sort of signed it away.

But people often misconstrued that as suggesting that they had any kind of control over that. Where they did not. There were not even any accurate maps of any of that region anywhere at the time. And none of those people had ever traveled throughout it. So it's an imaginary empire. You know, a few hundred of them were from Europe. The rest were people of mixed heritage or indigenous heritage. That's where the cultures originated and that's how the business was driven because these people kept pushing e-commerce further inland to try and connect into those networks that they found. And that's how it furs, you know, from all around and other items too, found their way to Hodson's Bay and European items of metal manufacture, which was the one item, which I can't

explain why it is, but there were no metal items within that entire economic sphere. And so anything made of metal was extremely valuable. Imagine, you know, the cost of a needle, a sewing needle, a rather large sewing needle. I remember seeing in a fur trade fort, oh, that you could trade this sewing needle. You could cost, you know, three giant prepared beaver peltz and how much labor it would have been. And I think, wow, that seems like they're getting ripped off. And then I thought to imagine, no, no, a sewing needle comes from Britain, let's say. The mines in Cornwall are probably getting out the ore. People are smelting the ore. They're forming the needles. they have their manufacturing technique for making that needle.

Then it is loaded onto a creaking old sailing ship, you know, that's probably, you know, not more than 100 feet long. And somehow it spends months crossing in an ocean and a bunch of people dying of diseases as it gets there. It gets to the coast after pushing through the ice of Hudson's Bay, it gets to these little rudimentary stockade forts on the edge there. And it waits for the trading season. Some people traveling 500,000 miles in their birch bark canoes find their way up to the sub-arctic from all over the interior of the continent,

and they bring in all kinds of pelts, and they trade for this needle. Then the needle is loaded back on the canoes and spends another year working its way back into the interior of the continent, and then it presented to someone like, here's a needle. Instead of using a porcupine quill,

you can sew your clothing with this. You can imagine the pressure that the women responsible for the clothing would have to get one of those. Well, you just wonderfully summarize the entire notion of this kind of trade, which was so far flung and yet so remarkable. I mean, the payday for the Europeans is this ship full of pelts, right,

that's going to sail back to England laden with the stuff. And then the investors are convinced this is worth more. And so on and on we go from there. The charter that you mentioned was signed in May 2nd, 1670. And like all things royal, that's when it gets official. It is granted exclusive trading rights, ownership of land, as you say, authority to build more settlements, ability to appoint governors and make laws.

You know, these companies became the whole representation of empire, right? Yes, but it should be pointed out that that took many, many, many generations before any of the grandiose claims that were written in this charter had any power at all. You know, at the beginning, as we were just discussing, they were very small enterprises. So it was actually literally 150 years before the Hudson's Bay Company could really, well, it's not that they even wanted to extract concessions or have power over these people. It was a purely commercial enterprise for hundreds of years, maybe by the 1830s, 1820s. So, you know, 150 years after it was founded, that's when you start seeing the British government

putting pressure on the Hudson's Bay Company to perform activities on behalf of the British crown that were political in nature and sort of threatening to remove their monopoly status. Yeah, if they didn't sort of battle the American Empire on their behalf. I love that discussion of the 19th century, which is really the emergence of the nation state. Prior to that, you have so many of these patchworks of royal connections that are basically investing in expeditions. And that defines life, you know, as far as the explorations go throughout those years. But as far as the English and the French, it's really like that. until really France and England get their nations together along with the rest of Europe.

And suddenly it becomes a political and empire-driven thing for colonies. Anyway, can I ask you some very basic questions? What was it like to live and work in fur trapping? Fur trapping would have been pretty hard work. I mean, you have to, in order to get these beavers, I mean, we all know they live in beaver houses in the middle of lakes that they make by building dams. You have to be wading through swampy area in freezing cold weather a lot. It was probably not a very good quality of life.

The early years of these companies operating, there were so many beavers in that region that it would have been very easy for them to collect up, you know, dozens and dozens of beavers. A single person could over the course of a winter just by not putting too much effort into it. But of course, as the generations went on, and the beaver population diminished significantly closer to the fort,

And the trade had to be pushed further and further, you know, west and north and east and south and in all directions from Hudson's Bay. It would have been a lot more work to obtain that number of beavers. And the trade was always shifting and pushing further and further inland. And it was mostly indigenous trappers who were the hunters of the beaver. And, you know, of course, indigenous people and the mixed heritage people were involved in all aspects of the trade eventually. They could be canoe guides. they could be cooks, they could be carpenters. I mean, all these different jobs around the industrial activity were fulfilled by multiple people.

But in the 1820s, there was one group of Europeans origin people, which were actually Americans coming in the 1820s, pushing west across the Rock Mountains. And though in that era, they started doing their own trapping themselves. And that's a significant departure from 150 years of prior commercial behavior. They create two things, forts and factories, but are they the same thing, kind of the same places? They're sort of the same. I mean, obviously the fort has a little more defensive aspect to it. And the factories, well, back then, I mean, in an era sort of pre-industrial or very light industrial era, a lot of so-called manufacturing was done in these places, like on the, you know, York factory. But from our point of view, there's no industrial activity going on.

they're tall. It's people using handsaws and hammers and scraping furs or whatever, right? The word factory comes from factor, factor, which is a trading agent. So that's where you have the training agent. So that was the trading post. But there was the Charles Fort that was built in 1668. Moose Factory, 1673, Rupert House, 167. There's a whole chronology of these establishments that happen, which I'm sure have their own settlements around them, but not large places, just small, modest collections of people who are doing this business of basically trapping these animals, getting them back. I guess it's a very seasonal thing, I suppose, right? It has to be done in some kind of temperate climate. Yep. Everything would work by the seasons back then because

what can you do in, well, let's say early spring. You couldn't be traveling on those rivers in that time. There's too much ice in them. Yes, in the winter, they're frozen, but I mean, in the early spring, there's chunks of ice. It would rip your canoes to bits or rip your boats open. So, you know, navigation was a summer activity or a fall activity. In winter, you could go on snow shoes, but you can't go very far on snow shoes. I mean, everything was based on the seasons back then. It would have been a very precarious existence for larger numbers of people, I suspect, and the descriptions of life in some of those factories or forts. With freezing, freezing cold, cold that we can't even contemplate with no real way of keeping it away. You know, the frost and the ice would form

on the inside of their buildings. They would have to chip it off in the morning before they woke up and smash their drinking water so they could get a little bit to drink. And of course, there's always food shortages and nutritional shortages and dietary deficiencies. A lot of the people in the fort suffered from these unless they were adopting the diet of the indigenous people, which was very heavy on meats and birds and fishes, which of course, if you didn't prepare all that during the proper season, you would just literally starve to death. Which I'm sure happened a lot. Oh, it did. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm sure there was a lot of that. They had an annual supply ship. This ship would have to come in through the Hudson Bay, which was choked with ice for much of the year.

And when that arrives, they suddenly get their things. And that's when the outgoing furs would be packed into enormous bundles after the ships departed. Months of isolation resumed. And off we went again and through the whole routine that went on for a three to five year contract, right, basically. Yep. Many of them just renewed their contracts for their entire life, really. Maybe they went back when they were very old. I mean, very old back then could be in your 50s.

That was old age, right? and age quickly win those harsh conditions. When did they get in their payday? You know, one of these trappers who's gone off, presumably, to get wealthy, right? This is the idea. I didn't go off to suffer in the middle of woods for nothing. Yeah, I mean, they did get their pay. And they could use it to acquire some of the European goods.

A lot of it was money that was sent back to their families. A lot of it was kept by the company and reserved for them for when they retired. You know, some of them were alcoholics and drank a lot of it away. I mean, there's records attest to that very clearly. But a lot of them, because they had indigenous wives and then indigenous families, and they came over when they were young. And people would sign on when they were 16 years old, some of them, and work there. I mean, what life would they have been returning to?

Because they couldn't just return. It's too expensive, and the ship's too small. So, you know, you never return. Some would go decades, but never returning or seeing any of their families or seeing their home before. And some of them just kind of stayed. They formed a new life for themselves. Their relationships with these peoples, I mean, to be more specific, the Cree is predominantly around Hudson Bay Area.

The Anashinaabe, they maintained more downward southern towards the Great Lakes, the Dene communities traded across the sub-Arctic. Coastal peoples, the Inuit, I suppose, exchanged for copper, the shells, the obsidian, all that sort of thing. And this was an enormously diverse group of people that would have been coursing through this world from time to time, I suppose. Absolutely. You mean, your ability to learn multiple languages and adopt multiple cultures and customs was one of the key aspects of success in that business.

And people who were signing on for it would have known that. It would have been told that before they got there. And most of them did do that, especially after, I think it was around 1780, there was a vicious smallpox epidemic that came up from Mexico inland. And it had a devastating effect upon indigenous populations in the United States, what's currently the United States. and Canada. And then eventually it worked its way east. And it killed in some places 50, 60 percent of the local populations. And that completely changed the business model for the Hudson's Bay Company. And that's why you see on a historical map from, say, you know, 1800, you'll see all these different forts all over the place. And especially going down all the river systems into the northern

parts of the western U.S. and into that region called the Pacific Northwest, you know, along the Columbia River and out towards the British Columbia, you'll see all these different fur trade forts suddenly materialized because the company realized, actually, our population base of our customers had been so reduced by these diseases that we can

no longer sit here running our distribution centers and having the entire retail aspect of the trade controlled and dominated by societies which have been devastated. So that's when they began to move inland with the trade and set up all these other different outposts. And that's

was the beginning of the era when, you know, indigenous people were complaining that all of a sudden their lands were being, uh, I hate to use the word colonized because it was such a small scale enterprise at the time. But like, you know, a fort, even if the speakers in the fort are Cree or part Cree or part end, Scottish was always in their Scots, Cree and some French, it's still not the same as their local culture. And so, you know, the fur trade culture, although it was a blend of European and indigenous traditions, it was. It wasn't always the indigenous traditions in any given region. It had its own particular culture, and it spread throughout the continent all the way to the Pacific Ocean. I mean, this is most unusual thing. Cree became one of the predominant languages spoken along the Columbia River in Oregon territory right near, well, they called it Fort Vancouver, and that's not to be confused with the city of Vancouver.

Fort Vancouver was in Oregon on the Columbia River. But the Kree was the main language that was spoken there because it was the language of the trade. As you pointed out, those people were around the shores of southwestern Hudson's Bay, and yet their culture spread throughout the entire continent because it spread along with the fur trade. I want to talk about the fate of the two guys who started this, Radisson and Grosillier. They're doing this in the 1600s. Hudson's Bay, by the way, as your book tracks, goes into the 20th century. So what happened with Radisson and Grosillier?

They were charming rogues, let's just say. They're always trying to peddle their business ideas and spinning grandiose tales about what they had seen and what they could do and how great they were. I would say that after they set up the company and they were involved in establishing some of the diplomatic relationships between the peoples and getting the whole thing off the ground, but they couldn't be managed the way that the aristocrats wanted them to be managed.

And so eventually they were pushed out of the trade. Did they go back to Europe? Well, they did. They were in Europe. They were in London. They were in France. They were in New France. I mean, they traveled around. They were involved in various different schemes. They didn't always stay together as a group either. I wouldn't say that they had a disastrous end. They probably made a good deal of money out of it. But once they did their initial job setting up the company, they were kind of sidelined from that trade. Yeah. Eventually, I mean, it's interesting. We haven't even really talked about the fact that at the same time as this English-led. Expedition is going on up there or effort is going on. There's the French down south, you know, who are doing their own thing as well. There must be an enormous competition between these two entities, I suppose you'd call them. Yep.

It's incredible. English and the French are always added to their throats. An extension of their warfare was done commercially with the fur trade. The French had their St. Lawrence and then the Great Lakes, and they were pushing their trade along that way. Now, for them, that was very long supply lines. and they had difficulty maintaining that. I would say that the main trade competition to the Hudson's Bay Company that came from Montreal, it could easily be supplied by larger ships coming up to St. Lawrence Seaway.

They still had to paddle that many thousands of miles into the zones where the main furrists were being traded. So by the late 18th century, the supply line was enormous. The main conflict began after the defeat of New France by Britain. You know, there's wars throughout the 1750s and eventually you have the capitulation of Montreal and Quebec and British took it over. And that's when you have the influx of capital from capital markets in London. And that started a bunch of Scottish people who came there, oddly enough, with access to capital, refinanced and set off a company that eventually was calling itself,

the Northwest Company and had a very different business model than the Hudson's Bay Company. It was very entrepreneurial. Its payouts to its people were based not on a management system with maybe a small bonus. Like the Hudson's Bay Company was, you know, about cultural integration. It was about stability. It was about, you know, being the general hardware store for a nation and being dependable, being reliable. You can always count on the Hudson's Bay Company, being there, et cetera, et cetera.

The Northwest Company was rushing in with our canoes. were coming in fast, we're going to undercut our competitors. So they were coming in with financing from London. They developed enormous logistical lines of transportation that extended all the way out to the Rocky Mountains. And these two companies began fighting each other, like literally fighting each other, cut-throat competition where they'd be shooting at each other's ships,

building forts, which at that time were very much leaning more to the defense aspect than the manufacturing aspect. And they were firing guns at each other's traders going up and down, trying to force the indigenous people to pick alliances. And this was a very turbulent, a violent period of time in the early 19th century. And it resulted in a lot of chaos and a disruption and a lot of declining profitability for both companies as the conflict elevated. Yeah. And all this happens, by the way, in a backdrop of the American Revolution. You know, this is the late 1770s and onward from there.

this whole drama was acting out to the north that we had no real knowledge of at that point, I suppose. Yeah, I mean, the reason this gets overlooked a little bit is because, well, overlooked a lot, let's just say, is because there's so few people involved in it. And it didn't result in the founding of new nations. And it didn't result in tectonic battles and struggles. It was a, you know, as we mentioned, there was only several hundreds of people. So if you focus on the individual drama of those people, it's absolutely fascinating. I mean, these were, well, you can imagine what kind of rogues and adventurers would be attracted to that lifestyle in the first place.

And the turbulence and the chaos bred a lot of, let's just call it nefarious violence and underhandedness. Kind of like the stereotype of the American West and, you know, that kind of violence, except it was within a different cultural, you know, circle. But extremely fascinating, but it only involved a small number of people and nations didn't challenge on it. So it's interesting, but it didn't, the world didn't revolve around it. And eventually those two companies were forced together by the British government, who said, we can't have two companies battling each other and destroying ourselves up north there. Well, the American Empire is extending further to the West, and we need to force these two companies to be the same company and start controlling their activities to make sure that the United States doesn't end up claiming the entire continent.

And that's, you know, the idea of manifest destiny coming out in the early to mid-19th century in the British Empire, are not wanting that to happen. Yeah. What you mentioned there, the British government stepping in is 1820s at this point. So this whole rivalry and fighting and competition stretches over 50 years or so. It lands at some point in what's called the Pemmican War. The Northwest Company, they relied heavily on something called Pemmican. What was that substance?

It is a substance which I have thankfully never had to survive on. It was essentially rancid buffalo fat mixed with. Saskatoon berries and dried pounded buffalo meat and smashed up and stored in sacks and dried. It was not known for tasting very well, but they would throw it in water and make a stew out of it or, you know, or just grind your teeth onto it. It was not very delicious, but it was very nutrient and calorie dense and could be carried around in these huge sacks of food and you could just feed all your laborers with it. That's what enabled the fur trade to be driven to these further out areas because they had huge food supplies based on. on hunting bison and creating that food source. I sometimes think of it, food in quotation marks.

It's an edible food-like substance maybe. But anyway, that's how they were able to drive the trade even further because they could bring their own food with them finally instead of only being able to exist on what indigenous societies could supply locally in terms of hunting or whatnot. So at 1814, the governor of the Red River Colony, where is this, the Red River Colony? That's essentially the city of Winnipeg. right now. So just north. Okay. Yeah. Way out there. That governor named Miles McDonald

issues the Pemmican proclamation, banning for one year the export of Pemmican from the settlement, from the Red River colony, intended to secure food for the struggling colony. He doesn't want to let this go because they need the food. And this food was needed by the traders, as you're saying, and this lands them in a series of confrontations culminating with real battles, one called the Battle of Seven Oaks. That sounds very dramatic. I'm sure it's much smaller than I'm imagining. It's much smaller. If you saw a movie of it, you could probably make it into a very dramatic thing, focusing on the individual people.

Darring Kevin Costner. Yeah, yeah, why not? You know, the fate of the empires didn't change on these battles, which involved a few hundred people. But this idea that they could restrict food supply between the two different companies, because they started to move a bunch of settlers in from Scotland. And the settlers were right on the supply lines of the Northwest company that was trying to pressure its trade. this food. You can't have agriculturalists moving into a buffalo hunting fur trading region. They're just fundamentally incompatible activities to each other. That's why the conflict was so violent because it was existential. All the Scottish settlers that were moved in by the Hudson's

Bay Company were placed right on the supply lines of the Northwest Company. And it was either do or die. And that's, you know, the Battle of Seven Oaks. I mean, if you were in it, it would not be pleasant. I mean, there's muskopoles flying all over and a whole bunch of people are dying. and your lakes are being blown off. I mean, it's not a fun thing. It's just that it was very small scale. There was not thousands of people dying up. And to put it into context, it's really a larger version of what had been going on for a long time, as far as this competition between the Northwest Company and the Hudson's Bay Company, who are basically both working for the same bosses, in a sense, you know, in the general British sense. And that, of course, then Lanzas, as we've mentioned already,

in that moment, very dramatic moment, when the British government steps in 1821, and the Hudson's Bay Company absorbs the Northwest Company and we're done with that competition. At that moment, the other pressure that's happening is that which we've referred to already, that these countries are forming and one is a very big one is starting, which is the Canadian Confederation. This is a movement that goes over decades, of course, and lands in 1867 when three British colonies, Canada, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, all agree to confederate. Can you explain that to the naive American? Well, compared to the American states, the population of these British colonies at the time was very low. And they had restricted economies.

They had managed economy. It was not anywhere near the same free enterprise. And so they were not prosperous. A lot of the people who immigrated there who sailed across the land. It came there, took one look at it, looked at the opportunities and promptly fled south and became, you know, Americans. So they had a lot of problems developing a strong enough internal economy to be viable states. And that's what the genesis of the formation of Canada was. There was a lot of British people there.

And of course, the loyalists who came up after the American Revolution, of course, they all settled in areas like Nova Scotia and in Ontario. And so you have this very pro-British anti-American cultural aspect to the whole thing, right? And that's why they were kind of forced together because they realized, well, we're just going to be absorbed or we're going to go bankrupt. And then Canada's first prime minister, John A. McDonald's. That's when he started to begin to have his idea that wouldn't that be great if we could have a country that extended all the way out towards the Pacific Ocean like the Americans are forming. And of course, these are the very dying days of the fur trade, though.

I mean, the fur trade had been, I would say, mostly supplanted. You know, a felt was no longer as valuable it was because it was other fabrics and there was other ways of manufacturing things. And a lot of the good beavers had already been harvested by then. And the world had completely changed, you know. But this was after 200 years of that dominating the continent or the northern part of the continent. So it was a very turbulent time. So many of these times are very turbulent. It almost seems like a cliched to talk about it.

But eventually the company itself, the HBC, we might as well call it the Hudson Bay Company, 1869 it agrees to sell and surrender the land for an amount of 300,000 pounds. Who are they selling it to? Well, in a sense, they were selling it to a collaboration to this new country that was being called Canada and was brokered by the British government. But I always think it was kind of funny. Like it's a huge real estate transaction. The Hudson Bay Company selling its territories. It's always worth mention like in what sense was it even their territory?

I mean, they're just a business. They didn't own this land and they didn't have very many people there. And they actively restricted settlement for most of their life. So they were working against the interests of, well, in one sense, against the interests of the British government and against the interests of the Eastern people because they didn't want any settlers there at all. Well, never mind the indigenous folks. You know, same story as with the American situation as far as moving people off their lands and so forth, creating reservations. Yeah, they're never consulted at that in that. So all of this, basically what we've been saying is everything that happens in the first half of the 19th century creates such unrest.

that the British say, we're getting it together, and that's part of the whole movement towards creating a new nation called Canada. I mean, the end of this whole proud continental hundreds years story is that the Hudson's Bay Company opens a large urban department store in 1881. It becomes known for, in particular, the point blanket, which is a very famous design that then becomes very popular in mail order catalogs and in urban retail. you can buy it now through Pendleton blankets. You know, if you wrap yourself up in that blanket,

you are at the end chapter of what was an essentially one of the driving engines of European exploration in North America, which is incredible when you consider it and has not made a beaver. That is true. It's very thick wool, extremely high quality blankets that were mainstay of the trade for 100 years. I mean, those are fantastic blankets. I remember my parents had one and I was a kid growing up and it was heavy, heavy, heavy thing. But yeah, they switched to retail completely different than what it was before.

Their customer base shifted. Their customer base began to become the settlers who were moving on to the land and the farmers who were there. Everything changed. Fur trade was gone. But by 2025, the company was struggling to compete against everything that everybody else is struggling to compete against e-commerce. And it filed for creditor protection finally liquidates all of its remaining stores. That story does not end until 2025, until last year. The whole thing went on for, I don't know, what is that, 400 years.

It's amazing story. The book we've been talking about is written by this good man, The Company, The Rise and Fall of the Hudson's Bank Empire. And folks should also check out other books of his Dominion, the Railway, and the Rise of Canada. Stephen, where can people find out about your career and your current workings? Well, they can go on my website, www. Stephen R-bound.net. Stephen with P.H. Stephen R. Bown is B-O-W-N.

So I recommend you look into this. Thank you so much, Stephen. This is really great to talk to you. Really appreciate it. Hey, it was my pleasure. Nice conversation. Thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes,

two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays. From mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great. But you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, please share with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman.

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