Hudson S Bay Company 1670 1870 1821 1870

Includes Albany Fort Journal, 1705-06 ; 'Remarks' on the French raids on Churchill and York, 1782 ; James Tate's Journal, 1809-12 ; and the 'character book' of George Simpson, 1832.

Initially highly secretive about all of its activities, the HBC was by 1870 an exceptionally generous patron of science. Aware of the ways that a commitment to scientific research could burnish its corporate reputation, the company participated in intricate symbiotic networks that linked the HBC as a corporation with individuals and scientific organizations in England, Scotland, and the United States. The pursuit of scientific knowledge could bring wealth and influence, along with tribute, fame, and renown, but science also brought less tangible benefits: adventure, health, happiness, male companionship, self-improvement, or a sense of meaning.

For two centuries (1670-1870), English, Scottish, and Canadian fur traders voyaged the myriad waterways of Rupert's Land, the vast territory charted to the Hudson's Bay Company and later splintered among five Canadian provinces and four American states. The knowledge and support of northern Native peoples were critical to the newcomer's survival and success. With acquaintance and alliance came intermarriage, and the unions of European traders and Native women generated thousands of descendants. Jennifer Brown's Strangers in Blood is the first work to look systematically at these parents and their children. Brown focuses on Hudson's Bay Company officers and North West Company wintering partners and clerks-those whose relationships are best known from post journals, correspondence, accounts, and wills. The durability of such families varied greatly. Settlers, missionaries, European women, and sometimes the courts challenged fur trade marriages. Some officers' Scottish and Canadian relatives dismissed Native wives and "Indian" progeny as illegitimate. Traders who took these ties seriously were obliged to defend them, to leave wills recognizing their wives and children, and to secure their legal and social status-to prove that they were kin, not "strangers in blood." Brown illustrates that the lives and identities of these children were shaped by factors far more complex than "blood." Sons and daughters diverged along paths affected by gender. Some descendants became Métis and espoused Métis nationhood under Louis Riel. Others rejected or were never offered that course-they passed into white or Indian communities or, in some instances, identified themselves (without prejudice) as "half breeds." The fur trade did not coalesce into a single society. Rather, like Rupert's Land, it splintered, and the historical consequences have been with us ever since.

The development of the fur trade in the Timiskaming district of northern Ontario has been largely overlooked until now, mainly because of the lack of records for the period before 1821. This gap has been partially filled by the discovery of private papers in the possession of the late Colonel Angus Cameron of Nairn, Scotland. His great granduncle and grandfather, as well as other memebrs of his family, were involved in the Timiskaming district for almost a century. These papers, plus the voluminous records of the Hudson's Bay Company, have provided the basis for the present study. Mrs Mitchell traces the history of Fort Timiskaming and its subsidiary posts from the first French establishments in the 1670s and 80s until 1870, when the Hudson's Bay territories became part of the new Dominion of Canada. She describes the exploitation of the posts by freetraders from Montreal after 1763, their purchase by the North West Company in 1795, the struggle between rival Canadian and English traders before 1821, and the events following the amalgamation in 1821 of the North West and Hudson's Bay companies. She also discusses the effect of the district's fortunes of petty traders, lumbermen, missionaries, and settlers, and offers a general picture of the country and of life at the posts. This is a work that will appeal not only to historians, but to all Canadians interested in Canada's early history.