30-05-2025
The Hudson's Bay Company lost its heart and soul decades ago
Lee Harding is a wildlife biologist formerly specializing in fur-bearer ecology in the North.
On April Fool's Day in 1972, I stepped off the floats of a bush plane onto the dock at Fort Good Hope, NWT, and walked up the street looking for the band office.
A wildlife biologist, I was working for a consortium of oil companies hoping to build a natural gas pipeline from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, up the Mackenzie River to Alberta. Having been sent to study beaver ecology in Sahtu Dene territory, I explained to the Chief the purpose of our study and asked to be introduced to the trapper whose trapline covered our proposed study area. This was our modus operandi: meet the Chief, meet the trapper, and make accommodation with the trapper for our intrusion into his or her trapline.
In this case, the trapper and his friend, who had another trapline nearby, invited me on their spring beaver hunt. They would get the furs, and I would get the beaver teeth (to determine aging by counting growth rings) and uteruses (to count placental scars, an indication of fecundity). In return, I would pay for gasoline for his river boat, groceries, and a little .22 rifle ammunition.
For this, we walked down to the Hudson's Bay Company trading post. I had previously performed this ritual in several upriver communities near my study areas and would later perform it in Dene villages in the Mackenzie Delta and Old Crow, Yukon, and in Inuit villages along the Beaufort Sea coast. Every town had an HBC post.
Little had changed since 1804 when the Northwest Company (NWC), fiercely challenging the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) for supremacy in the fur trade, began pushing posts down the Mackenzie. In 1821, after amalgamation, Fort Good Hope became an HBC trading post. In 1972, it still sold traps, rifles, ammunition, clothes, camping gear and groceries to trappers and bought their furs when they came in from the bush.
We Canadians are proud of our history, and HBC's mystique – trappers and traders speaking Cree, Dene, and other Indigenous languages bringing furs into distant outposts; voyageurs braving rapids and wilderness to forward the furs to Montreal and Hudson's Bay; the intrigues between NWC and HBC rivals – resonated with all of us. But all that ended in 1987 when the once-proud Company of Adventurers closed or sold all its northern trading posts. The posts were the heart and soul of the company.
Hunting beavers in 24-hour daylight, I learned to change my diurnal rhythms to crepuscular – active morning and evening – as Dene and Inuit hunters do, following the rhythms of the wildlife: We set off each day at about 3 a.m., as the sun was rising over the spruce trees in the northern sky, and hunted until mid-morning, before finding a sunny river bank for lunch and a long siesta. In the afternoon, we hunted until dusk, when we would roast bannock and beaver meat and sleep for a few hours.
My colleagues had an interesting way of going upriver when the stream got small enough for beavers to build their dams from bank to bank: The guy in the stern would aim straight at the dam, gun the motor to raise the bow, and just as the bow hit the dam, he would tilt the motor up, raising the propeller, and the boat would just jump over the dam. Meanwhile, the guy in the bow kept watch for beavers with the rifle and showed me the meaning of the word 'marksman.' When ducks would flush, he would shoot them down with the .22.
To understand what districts produced which species of fur, I spent the winter of 1972-1973 in the basement of the Yellowknife game management office compiling government trapline records and HBC fur sales receipts. Prices were up and down, but let no one tell you that trapping was in decline. Every kid in every village could snare a hare, weasel or squirrel, sales of which made up most, numerically, of the fur receipts. The real money was in wolf and wolverine pelts, although few of the latter made it to market because the trappers kept them to line their parka hoods (wolverine fur does not frost up like other furs). But the bulk of trapping income was from marten, fox, mink, lynx and beaver – and in the Mackenzie Delta and Old Crow Flats, muskrat – which were abundant and fetched decent prices.
The fur industry grew from $51-million in wholesale shipments in 1970 – the HBC's 300th anniversary – to $320-million in 1992. In 1986, 200 factories tanned pelts and 3,700 furriers made fur garments in Canada. But the advent of commercial fur farms and the increasing distaste of consumers about wearing the skins of dead animals evidently frightened the HBC owners. Selling off the fur business in 1987 was the end of the HBC of our collective consciousness. Their fear was short-sighted, however, because prices stayed high, and in 1997, the HBC reopened its fur salons to meet consumer demand. In any case, after 1987, the HBC was just another department store.
