Fur Trade and the North West Company
North West Company in Context
A list of detailed histories and analyses of the North West Company is included in the last page. A selective history is provided here in order to contextualize the papers now searchable via Quartex.
The North West Company (NWC) was one of two largescale commercial fur-trading enterprises in 18th century North America, established through a series of partnership agreements made between smaller trading firms based in Montreal during the 1770s and 1780s. As a joint-stock trading company, its primary objectives were to expand trade networks and deliver a profit to its shareholders. It was also empowered by the British Army to raise regimental forces, including the Corps of Canadian Voyageurs, raised during the War of 1812 and also active later during the Pemmican Wars, a series of violent conflicts between the NWC and Hudson’s Bay Company, its main rival up until 1821, at which point the NWC and its 4000-mile network of trading posts were amalgamated into the Hudson’s Bay Company.
Through the introduction of credit and standard mediums of exchange, the fur trade of this era was a major mechanism through which capitalism was implemented in the landmass that would become known as Canada. In the words of Dr. Dan Roronhiakewen Longboat, speaking from an Haudenosaunee perspective, the fur trade was “the beginning of an economic transformation which would fundamentally affect an Indigenous people and their relationship with the natural world.”1
1. Haudenosaunee Meet the World Eaters in the Fur Trade. In, Aboriginal People and the Fur Trade : Proceedings of the 8th North American Fur Trade Conference, Akwesasne.
North West Company in Context : Bourgeois
The papers in this collection largely relate to the NWC bourgeois, a term used to refer to its senior management and major shareholders, a group including James McGill, Simon McTavish, and other Montreal-based merchants who managed the importing and exporting of furs and the goods for which they were traded. Also comprising the bourgeois were “wintering partners” such as Roderick Mackenzie and John McDonald of Garth, who acted as field managers in setting up and supervising trading posts, activities involving the extensive exploration, mapping, and gathering of other information about the traditional territories and people of different Indigenous nations and communities, including those of Algonquin, Niitsitapi, Dene, and Dakota peoples.
Most of the bourgeois came to North America from Britain, particularly Scotland. The fur trade was not the only mercantile concern of the Montreal-based merchants, who were also active in trading rum, sugar, and other plantation crops. Bourgeois including James McGill and Joseph Frobisher also participated more directly in chattel slavery by proctoring the sales of enslaved Black and Indigenous people.
Members of the bourgeois were also active in land speculation and acted as seigneurs as well as lawmakers within the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada, drafting legislation that had a direct bearing on the fur trade, such as An Act for regulating persons who hire or engage to perform voyages to the Indian Country or to Winter there, passed into law in 1796. They held other positions within the colonial government, such as Justice of the Peace and militia officer. Of all the people involved in the fur trade, these merchants, sometimes referred to as “the fur barons”, amassed the greatest monetary wealth.
The map above shows the current day location of Joseph Frobisher’s lands and the neighbouring properties which are shown in the 1817 fire plan pictured on the left. Today, Saint Patrick’s Basilica and sections of McGill's downtown campus stand on lands formerly held by the Frobisher company. Like Frobisher and Co, most of the companies and merchants represented here had their headquarters in and around Montreal’s Golden Square mile, with warehouses and offices near the port. Jame McGill held prime real estate in the old port for McGill house and warehouses on either side of St. Lawrence Street, see the map pictured on the right. All of these holdings stand on land which has long served as a site of meeting and exchange amongst Indigenous peoples, including the Haudenosaunee and Anishinabeg nations.
North West Company in Context : Voyageurs
The collection also contains material relating to voyageurs, also referred to as engagés. Voyageurs were largely French-Canadian men from farming communities and other smaller settlements near Montreal. Hired by the bourgeois, voyageurs were labourers whose contracts of employment entered them into a form of indentured servitude similar to the kind practised in New France. The voyageurs performed physical labour, especially in the transportation of furs, trade goods, and trading post provisions by canoe. Their wage and status depended on factors including their physical position within a canoe team and the particular trade route that they were assigned to travel, with the highest-ranking voyageurs travelling to the Great Slave Lake region, and the lowest travelling the route between Montreal and Lake Superior. Some voyageurs also acted as translators, messengers, in addition to acquiring food for post employees and trading on behalf of the NWC en derouine, or away from a post and within the established hunting grounds of a specific community.
Marriages à la façon du pays were unions between European fur traders, including voyageurs and some bourgeois, and Indigenous women. Many ended with a wife’s family moving to a new hunting ground or with a husband’s departure from the pays d'en haut, as in the case of wintering partners John McDonald of Garth and Roderick Mackenzie, who both re-married upon their return to the Canadas. Many voyageurs remained with their wives in the pays d'en haut, however. These intercultural relations were a main driver of métissage, the dynamic process that gave rise to Métis people and a distinctive Métis culture, including the Michif language.
Accounting records are artefacts of a core activity within the infrastructure of capitalism. Within the collection, there are ledgers used to record amounts owed and amounts due in exchange for goods or services, as well as profit calculations. There are also cash books containing similar, and in places more detailed, information about the exchange of goods and services, but limited to transactions made using cash, maintained in order to keep a running record of available funds.
Ledgers and cash books include data such as the monetary value assigned to different types of furs and the interest rates applied to different credits and loans, while the variations in these figures are also revealing as they relate to the perceived risk or reputation of a particular borrower, or changes to animal populations.
Within accounting records, columns labelled creditor (often abbreviated to cr) indicate what is owed to others. Columns labelled debtor (often abbreviated to dr) indicate what is owed back to the individual or business maintaining the ledger.
The word ditto is used to indicate that the text above should be repeated. It is often abbreviated to to do or represented with a double apostrophe symbol, ‘’.
Within cash books, information is arranged by date, whereas ledgers contain information arranged by account, or the person/organisation involved in an exchange.
Legal Records : Personal Property and Inheritance
Legal records reflect European patriarchal conceptions of personal property and land ownership, and demonstrate some of the processes by which the bourgeois’ material wealth was transmitted between families and across generations. Records relating to land include references to land on which McGill University now stands and consists of various types of deeds including deeds of conveyance, land indentures and deeds of concession, and deeds of assignment.
There are also records associated with specific life events, such as a marriage settlement drawn up between Roderick Mackenzie and male guardians appointed to act on behalf of Rachel Chaboillez, the bride-to-be. There are wills and other records relating to the estate, or combined properties and possessions, of individuals such as Charlotte Frobisher and Peter Pangman. These records include inventories of personal belongings along with instructions on their distribution to heirs by executors also responsible for managing assets prior to their distribution, including the maintenance of real estate.
Legal Records : Contracts and Agreements
Other legal records include commercial agreements and contracts. This includes partnership agreements between the smaller fur trading firms that made up the NWC, which detail some of the roles and responsibilities undertaken by different partners as well as the specific terms and conditions of the partnership. There are also contractual agreements between merchant firms and individual wintering partners.
Seal from legal documents regarding the McTavish Estate. Samuel Mathewson Baylis Fonds, MSG 399-10. McGill University Rare Books and Special Collections.
Contracts and Agreements : Voyageur Contracts
Contracts of employment signed by voyageurs (or marked with an “X”, in cases where a voyageur was not literate) are standardized forms that contain a limited amount of information about individual voyageurs. Most contracts include the voyageur’s name and their assigned destination, while some include other details such as amounts and modes of payment, as well as specific jobs assignments outside the primary work of transporting goods along the NWC’s extensive network of trading posts and depots.
Found in a number of voyageur contracts, the word dit is used to indicate a name by which a person is commonly known, rather than the name as recorded elsewhere, especially in birth records.
Pictured above: Voyageur contract for Joseph La Treille dit La Lande of Cote St. Vincent St. Benoit. Coppenrath Collection, MSG 108-27, McGill University Rare Cooks and Special Collections.
Correspondence : Business and Politics
Correspondence comprises a large part of the collection, including letters that are personal as well as ones relating more to business, although there are many letters combining both, again illuminating kinship networks that consolidated power amongst the bourgeois.
Amongst the business correspondence, there are bound letterbooks that served as important administrative tools. Containing transcriptions of primarily outgoing letters, letterbooks provide a record of commercial decision-making and other details of the NWC’s administration, as well as opinions regarding the state of business and factors influencing it. Land speculation also features prominently, including descriptions of specific plots of land and the monetary value assigned to them.
Correspondents including judges, lawmakers, and other people in relative positions of power also demonstrate the bourgeois’ sphere of political influence, as in John McDonald of Garth’s correspondence with William Henry Draper and John Sandfield Macdonald, relating to the planned settlement of Rupert’s Land, the enormous commercial territory of the Hudson’s Bay Company sold to the Canadian government in 1869.
Correspondence : Family Letters
Members of the bourgeois were able to keep in touch with family members in Britain, and Montreal in the case of the wintering partners, through letters, some delivered via canoe by voyageurs. Family news such as recent deaths are described in letters including Catherine Mackenzie’s letter to her son Roderick Mackenzie. Other letters offer personal perspectives on current events, including cholera outbreaks and war, often connecting back to business matters.
The following is a list of sources such as guides and glossaries relating to specific types of records, and examples of research utilizing similar record types as a primary source.
Subject Guide : Financial Records Guide and Glossary. Historical Society of Pennsylvania. https://www.portal.hsp.org/subject-guides/subject-guide-13
Research Guidance : Business Accounting. University of Nottingham. https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/manuscriptsandspecialcollections/researchguidance/accounting/introduction.aspx
Understanding and Using Early Nineteenth Century Account Books. In The South Carolina Historical Magazine, Vol. 91, No. 1. Peter A. Coclanis.
Credit in the Colonial American Economy. Economic History Association. https://eh.net/encyclopedia/credit-in-the-colonial-american-economy/
Bookkeeping in the Eighteenth Century : The Grand Journal and Grand Ledger of the Hudson's Bay Company. In Archivaria, No. 43. Hugh Grant.
The Early Hudson's Bay Company Account Books as Sources for Historical Research: An Analysis and Assessment. In Archivaria, No. 1. Arthur J. Ray.
History of Accounting : A Resource Guide. Library of Congress. https://guides.loc.gov/history-of-accounting/practice
Elucidating Needs, Lifestyles, and Community: Researching a Late Eighteenth-century Account Book from Lexington, Virginia. In Accounting History, Vol. 13, Issue 3. Robert Bloom and John Solotko.
Encoding Financial Records for Historical Research. In Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative, Issue 6. Kathryn Tomasek and Syd Bauman.
Numbering Nature: HBC Accounting Records and Historical Ecology. In HBC at 350, a series of blog posts published by NiCHE (Network in Canadian History & Environment). George Colpitts.
Discovering Indigenous Peoples: Accounting and the machinery of empire. In The Accounting Historians Journal, Vol. 26, Issue 1. Dean Neu.
Research Guidance : Deeds. University of Nottingham. https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/manuscriptsandspecialcollections/researchguidance/deeds/introduction.aspx
Canada Land and Property : Definitions. National Institute for Genealogical Studies.
Researching Your Métis Ancestors in Ontario: Standards and Sources. Métis Nation of Ontario. https://www.metisnation.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/genealogy_guide_PRINT_2014-02-14-up2021.pdf
A Critical Research Agenda for Wills, Trusts and Estates. In Trust and Estate Law Journal, Vol. 49, Issue 2. Bridget J. Crawford and Anthony C. Infanti.
Probate Records as a Source for Early American History. In The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 1. Gloria L. Main.
Ethnicity, Masculinity, and Lineage: The Cultural Biography of a Colonial Massachusetts Parcel of Land. In Historical Archaeology, Vol. 46, No. 2. Christa M. Beranek.
How to Read an Eighteenth-century Manuscript Letter. In Circulating Enlightenment. University of Edinburgh. https://www.millar-project.ed.ac.uk/node/17
Heaving this Importunity: The survival of opening fomulas in letters in the 18th and 19th centuries. In Historical Sociolinguistics and Sociohistorical Linguistics, 4. Frances Austin.
Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century. Sarah Pearsall.
Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-Writers, 1600 – 1945. Rebecca Earle (editor).
North West Company and Fur Trade Histories
Gathering Places: Aboriginal and Fur Trade Histories. Carolyn Podruchny and Laura Peers (editors).
Selected papers of the North American Fur Trade Conference. Various years.
Rethinking the Fur Trade : Cultures of Exchange in an Atlantic World. Susan Sleeper-Smith (editor).
An Ethnohistorian in Rupert's Land : unfinished conversations. Jennifer S.H. Brown.
French Canadians, Furs, and Indigenous Women in the Making of the Pacific Northwest. Jean Barman.
The Laird of Fort William : William McGillivray and the North West Company. Irene Gordon.
Making the Voyageur World: Travelers and Traders in the North American Fur Trade. Carolyn Podruchny.
One of the Family : Metis culture in nineteenth-century northwestern Saskatchewan. Brenda Macdougall.
The Subarctic Fur Trade : Native Social and Economic Adaptations. Shepard Krech III (editor).
Many Tender Ties. Sylvia Van Kirk.
Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country. Jennifer S.H. Brown.
The Laird of Fort William : William McGillivray and the North West Company. Irene Gordon.
The Development of the Voyageur Contract, 1686-1821. Lawrence Lande.
The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History. Harold Innis.
Norman McLeod interview. Canadian Plains Research Center, University of Regina. https://ourspace.uregina.ca/handle/10294/950
Augustine Yellow Sun and Joe Poor Eagle interview 2. Canadian Plains Research Center, University of Regina. https://ourspace.uregina.ca/handle/10294/591
Articles and chapters
Nimble Fingers, Strong Backs: First Nations and Métis Women in Fur Trade and Rural Economies. In The Promise of Women’s History. 7th edition. Lara Campbell, Tamara Myers, and Adele Perry (editors).
‘The Comforts of Married Life' : Metis Family Life, Labour, and the Hudson's Bay Company. In Labour / Le Travail, Vol. 61. Brenda Macdougall.
Relationships and the Creation of Colonial Landscapes in the Eighteenth-Century Fur Trade. In The American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 2. Amélie Allard.
Unfair Masters and Rascally Servants? Labour Relations among Bourgeois, Clerks and Voyageurs in the Montréal Fur Trade, 1780-1821. Carolyn Podruchny.
Jack of All Trades, in Done with Slavery : the Black fact in Montreal, 1760 - 1840. Frank Mackay.
Module 2, Indigenous Canada. Massive Open Online Course offered by the University of Alberta. https://www.coursera.org/learn/indigenous-canada
Fur trade bibliography. Carolyn Podruchny. http://carolynpodruchny.ca/pages/furtradebib.html