The Fur Trade

As fur traders were driven across northern North America by economic motivations, the landscape over which they plied their trade was punctuated by sound: shouting, singing, dancing, gunpowder, rattles, jingles, drums, fiddles, and – very occasionally – bagpipes. Fur trade interactions were, in a word, noisy. Daniel Laxer unearths traces of music, performance, and other intangible cultural phenomena long since silenced, allowing us to hear the fur trade for the first time. Listening to the Fur Trade uses the written record, oral history, and material culture to reveal histories of sound and music in an era before sound recording. The trading post was a noisy nexus, populated by a polyglot crowd of highly mobile people from different national, linguistic, religious, cultural, and class backgrounds. They found ways to interact every time they met, and facilitating material interests and survival went beyond the simple exchange of goods. Trust and good relations often entailed gift-giving: reciprocity was performed with dances, songs, and firearm salutes. Indigenous protocols of ceremony and treaty-making were widely adopted by fur traders, who supplied materials and technologies that sometimes changed how these ceremonies sounded. Within trading companies, masters and servants were on opposite ends of the social ladder but shared songs in the canoes and lively dances during the long winters at the trading posts. While the fur trade was propelled by economic and political interests, Listening to the Fur Trade uncovers the songs and ceremonies of First Nations people, the paddling songs of the voyageurs, and the fiddle music and step-dancing at the trading posts that provided its pulse.

A classic work of Canadian historical scholarship, first published in 1930. In his new introduction, A.J. Ray states that this book is argueably the most definitive economic history and geography of Canada ever produced.

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.

Written when Nelson was between the ages of 15 and 17, these journals track his growth from homesick boy to weathered and experienced trader. The volume also tells of his daily work as a fur clerk, and the goings-on of the world around him; and it provides details concerning the lives of the other fur workers and the neighboring Objiwa peoples. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the North West and Hudson�s Bay companies extended their operations beyond the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. There they encountered a mild and forgiving climate and abundant natural resources and, with the aid of Native traders, branched out into farming, fishing, logging, and mining. Following its merger with the North West Company in 1821, the Hudson�s Bay Company set up its headquarters at Fort Vancouver on the lower Columbia River. From there, the company dominated much of the non-Native economy, sending out goods to markets in Hawaii, Sitka, and San Francisco. Trading Beyond the Mountains looks at the years of exploration between 1793 and 1843 leading to the commercial development of the Pacific coast and the Cordilleran interior of western North America. Mackie examines the first stages of economic diversification in this fur trade region and its transformation into a dynamic and distinctive regional economy. He also documents the Hudson�s Bay Company�s employment of Native slaves and labourers in the North West coast region.

Sometime in the 1800s, three very different women (with twenty-first century affinities) sit in a fort sharing their views on life, love, and the hot nerd Louis Riel. This historical comedy shifts perspectives from the male gaze to women's power in the past and present through the lens of the Canadian Fur Trade.