Freshwater Passages: The Trade and Travels of Peter Pond

6. Partners and Rivals

116 CHAPTER SIX Partners and Rivals The Company of Adventurers and the Peddlers from Quebec In late August 1772 Andrew Graham, the acting chief factor at York Factory , the Hudson’s Bay Company post at the mouth of the Hayes River, sat at his desk composing a letter to his employers in London. At that time of year, along the flat western shore of Hudson Bay, the short summer was coming to an end, and flocks of geese, cranes, swans, and other migrating birds were heading south. Similarly, the annual vessel bound for England was preparing to depart, not to return again for another ten months. Graham wrote a letter to send on the departing vessel, informing his employers of the conditions affecting the trade at his post. Most importantly, he told them of the “Canadian pedlars” who were coming up from the Great Lakes into inland territories claimed by the Hudson’s Bay Company. The company men always referred to traders who came from Montreal and the Great Lakes as peddlers (or“pedlars, ”as it was then spelled), a term used to denote their lower status compared to their own London-based company with its royal charter. These interlopers, wrote Graham, were “yearly Gaining fresh Influence over them [the Natives] by supplying them with Goods Inland.”¹ Cree and other Native hunters had formerly paddled their canoes down to York Factory every summer to trade, but now the peddlers were siphoning off much of that business. It was time the company did something to combat this growing threat. partners and rivals ∙ 117 Graham’s greatest immediate concern was the activity of a peddler named Thomas Corry. Corry was an experienced trader, supplied from Montreal and Michilimackinac, who had wintered for several seasons beyond Lake Superior.During the winter of 1771–72 he penetrated further north and west than he had before, establishing a trading post at Cedar Lake on the Saskatchewan River.There he was ideally positioned to cut off Cree and Assiniboine canoe parties as they traveled down the main route to York Factory.In setting up a post on Cedar Lake Corry was interfering with a trade that Graham and his employers believed to be granted exclusively to the Hudson’s Bay Company by right of a royal charter granted by King Charles II in 1670. That century-old document asserted that the “Governor and Company of Adventurers Trading into Hudson’s Bay” had an exclusive right to the “Indian trade”of all lands where the waters drained down to the bay.They called this region Rupert’s Land after their patron Prince Rupert,the king’s cousin and first director of the company. The Saskatchewan/Nelson River system, including Lake Winnipeg and rivers such as the Assiniboine and the Red, was the biggest watershed in Rupert’s Land, so by invading this area Corry and the other peddlers were seen as usurpers trespassing in the heart of the company’s business. Of course the Hudson’s Bay Company did not really control the vast expanse of Rupert’s Land. In fact, the company’s people rarely ventured inland. Except for the handful of trading posts—called forts or factories —along the coast, such as York Factory, the Native people of this region remained firmly in possession of their own land. Occasionally the managers, or“factors,”at the forts sent men inland to explore and to encourage Natives to visit the coast, but there were no inland Hudson’s Bay Company posts anywhere along the Saskatchewan/Nelson watershed before 1774. As long as hunters came to York Factory to trade, or sent their furs via Cree middlemen, there was no need. Peddlers like Corry were changing that. To them the region that included Lake Winnipeg and the Saskatchewan/Nelson River watershed was not Rupert’s Land. Rather, it was the Northwest, as it lay to the northwest of Lake Superior. As we have seen, French traders from Montreal and the Great Lakes, such as the La Vérendryes, had begun 118 ∙ partners and rivals to travel to the Northwest before the Seven Years’ War, but the war had forced them to withdraw. Now British traders were following the same paths. In the late 1760s a trickle of English-speaking traders began to appear in Rupert’s Land, guided by many of the same French-speaking voyageurs who had come before. The trickle increased, and now...