known as the Father of New France and went on to explore the St. Lawrence Basin and the Great Lakes, the Ottawa River, and the country of the Hurons, often guided by members of the First Nations. He has left us an invaluable record in his journals of the plants, animals, soil, foods, beverages, and medicines that were important to both the First Nations and the newcomers.[12]
CHAPTER FIVE
A Chain of Men Stretched Across the Continent
25 being Christmas, wee made merry remembering our Friends in England having for Liquor Brandy and strong beer and for Food plenty of Partridges and Venson besides what ye shipps provisions afforded.
THE ABOVE DESCRIPTION OF A CHRISTMAS DINNER in Canada was fortunately recorded by a Hudson’s Bay Company fur trader, Thomas Gorst, in his journal in 1670. The guests seated at the table in the newly constructed Charles Fort (later called Rupert’s House and still later Fort Rupert) included Hudson’s Bay Company governor Charles Bayley, Médard Chouart, Sieur Des Groseilliers, his brother-in-law, Pierre-Ésprit Radisson, and Captain Zachariah Gillam. The ships Wivenhoe and Prince Rupert were anchored nearby in James Bay.
The two Frenchmen, Radisson and Groseilliers, had a great deal to celebrate that day. They had both come to New France as young men and had worked and travelled in the St. Lawrence region and beyond as explorers, coureurs de bois, and fur traders among the Huron, Cree, and Sioux nations. They realized the untold wealth in furs to be found in the forests surrounding the “Bay of the North” (Hudson Bay) and lobbied both in the New World and in the Old World for permission to trade in the region. Finally, a few months before, on May 2, 1670, King Charles II of England had granted his cousin, Prince Rupert, a royal charter that gave trading rights to the area known as Rupert’s Land to the “Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson’s Bay.” No one at that time knew the size of the land mass involved (it was actually 40 percent of present-day Canada, plus some territory that is now part of the United States of America), but the coveted “trading rights” were for furs, particularly beaver pelts.
At that time the demand for prime beaver pelts was at its height, with ready markets in Britain and the rest of Europe. The nobility was demanding fine furs for robes, jackets, capes, and muffs, and gentlemen who could afford a fine felt hat insisted that it be made of the soft downy undercoat of the beaver. As European beavers had been trapped out, it was imperative that a fresh source be found.
The fur merchants in Europe had learned from explorers such as Jacques Cartier that when he sailed into the Baie des Chaleurs in 1534 he was met by members of the Mi’kmaq nation waving furs on sticks to let him know they wanted to trade. In addition, the fishermen harvesting the Grand Banks confirmed that when they went ashore to dry their catch the First Nations continued to barter fine pelts with them. When the fishermen returned home, they often made more money from the pelts than from the fish. The pelts from Canadian beaver were particularly desirable because:
To be of good quality, thick and heavy, the beaver-pelt must come from an animal taken during the winter, and taken in as hard a climate as possible. Then the skin carries two kinds of fur; close to the skin is a thick mass of beaver-wool, down or duvet as the French called it; on top is a glossy fur of long guard hairs. It was the beaver wool above all which the felters wanted but it was difficult to get the beaver-wool out from a prime winter’s skin without also tearing out the guard hairs and thereby completely destroying the skin. English and French felters liked to get their beaver-wool from skins from which the guard hairs had already been removed and this made them dependent on coat beaver. These were skins which the Indians had worn for a season and in the process lost their guard hairs and become thoroughly greasy. The custom of wearing beaver, an art of doing so in such a way as to impart a maximum of grease, was particular to the northern Indians of Canada.[1]
This fascination with beaver pelts, to the exclusion of the rest of the animal, must have surprised the First Nations. They, too, coveted the beaver, because every part of it was important to them. The meat was tasty, with beaver tails a special treat. They skimmed off the fat as it cooked to be used as medicine. The teeth and claws were polished for ceremonial wear, and the Natives used the bitter orange-brown substance known as musk to reduce fevers and treat aching joints. Modern science has shown that Aspirin, which is used for the same purpose, contains some of the same ingredients.[2]
Alexander Henry, an experienced English trader, travelled up the Ottawa River in 1761 and observed the simple, compact rations of the voyageurs, and the way in which they were absolutely fundamental to the whole fur-trading system for, as he explains, regular food would have taken up too much space in the canoes:
The village of L’Arbre Croche [twenty miles west of Fort Michilimackinac] supplies, as I have said, the maize, or Indian corn, with which the canoes are victualled. This species of grain is prepared for use, by boiling it in a strong lie, after which the husk may be easily removed; and it is next mashed and dried. In this state, it is soft and friable, like rice. The allowance, for each man, on the voyage, is a quart a day; and a bushel, with two pounds of prepared fat, is reckoned to be a month’s subsistence. No other allowance is made, of any kind; not even salt; and bread is never thought of. The men, nevertheless, are healthy, and capable of performing their heavy labour. This mode of victualling is essential to the trade, which being pursued at great distances, and in vessels so small as canoes, will not admit of the use of other food. If the men were to be supplied with bread and pork, the canoe would not carry a sufficiency for six months; and the ordinary duration of the voyage is not less than fourteen. The difficulty which would belong to an attempt to reconcile any other man, than Canadians, to this fare, seems to secure to them, and their employers, the monopoly of the fur-trade…. I bought more than a hundred bushels, at forty livres per bushel…. I paid at the rate of a dollar per pound for the tallow, or prepared fat, to mix with it.[3]
Free traders (as the competitors of the Hudson’s Bay Company were called) became involved in this lucrative business, and many combined forces by forming partnerships and companies, but it was the North West Company that for many years challenged the powerful Hudson’s Bay Company and their decision to build their forts around the bay and let the First Nations come to them. The North West Company realized the importance of building their trading posts in the interior of the country, where the First Nations lived, trapped, and hunted. The rival company also recognized the importance of adequately provisioning the men involved in the trade, and not leaving their survival and the survival of the business to chance.
The North West Company partners dined in fine style every evening as they travelled by canoe between Montreal and the organization’s inland headquarters at Fort William in today’s Ontario. Fort William Historical Park, Thunder Bay, Ontario
To accomplish this, the company formed one of the most innovative partnerships ever seen in Canada, including an unlikely combination of Scottish and English merchants, French Canadian voyageurs, First Nation guides, canoe-makers, advisers, suppliers of survival foods, and Métis (offspring of a mixed white-Native marriage) labourers, trappers, traders, and voyageurs. This partnership solved the slow, complicated business of buying or bartering for furs from the First Nations in the northwestern regions of Canada and moving them to ships on the East Coast, by which they could then be shipped to markets overseas. The North West Company developed, and maintained, a long supply route that stretched from today’s Montreal to the Pacific Ocean, with an inland headquarters between the two. This plan was unique, and just as complex as the operation of a modern airline. A modern airline depends on gasoline, while the North West Company relied on specific provisions for each of the groups involved in the trade — all of which expected and enjoyed quite different fare. Their success also depended on the goodwill and cooperation of everyone involved to provide the fare in a timely manner.
The first inland headquarters
