Really tough times
The HBC Brigades: Culture, conflict and perilous journeys of the fur trade
by Nancy Marguerite Anderson
Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2024
$24.95 / 9781553807018
Reviewed by Howard Macdonald Stewart
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Nancy Marguerite Anderson has assembled a remarkable collection of primary material from, and commentary about, the Hudson Bay Company’s strenuous efforts to establish a viable route from the interior to the south coast of the territory then known as New Caledonia. These were ‘expeditions’ and ‘explorations,’ and especially ‘brigades’ responsible for moving trade goods between Fort Kamloops and the lower Fraser River, usually Fort Langley. Anderson’s first couple of chapters talk of the time earlier in the 19th century too, the period when the company still had its headquarters at Fort Vancouver on the lower Columbia River. But 16 of 19 chapters are devoted to those years from 1846 – when the international boundary was fixed at 49 degrees North latitude – to the outbreak of the gold rush that changed everything a dozen years later. These chapters richly document Company people’s numerous crossings of the treacherous mountains and rivers that separated the southern interior of New Caledonia from its new outlets to the Pacific, now located north of the new border.
Anderson’s book does a very good job of letting her people speak for themselves. Almost every page contains lengthy passages extracted directly from her mostly HBC primary sources. These include extensive excerpts from the journals of her own Métis great, great, great grandfather, Alexander Caulfield Anderson.
These sources are from years when the fur trade was still the overwhelming preoccupation of a tiny collection of non-Indigenous people living and working in the space that would become mainland British Columbia. Like Richard Mackie’s Trading West of the Rockies (which also made good and extensive use of HBC archives), Anderson’s book reminds us of the seminal role this trade played in establishing the foundations of the future province. Yet in the years when the author explores this space, this ‘New Caledonia’ feels (to me at least) more like the ‘pays d’en haut [upper country]’ depicted in Richard White’s The Middle Ground. The imperial projects of non-Indigenous forces are already powerful external influences in both spaces. But (in New Caledonia north of the 49th at least) they do not yet dominate that space. Instead, it is a land where the different interests, Indigenous and non-Indigenous (white and mixed race), interact on a more equal footing. They collaborate and compete, threaten and cajole, but ultimately they work together. We are particularly reminded, once again, of how totally dependent the fur trade was upon the expertise, support, and labour of the Indigenous majority on all sides of them.
Yet Anderson’s book also captures the changes, starting with the American erasure of the HBC’s claims south of the 49th parallel, that will change things forever. With the wisdom of hindsight, we know that the actions of the HBC were also a prelude to the erasure of Indigenous dominance that would take place north of the 49th in the second half of the century.
For me though, the most fascinating dimension of this book is the feeling it conveys of the immense hardship faced by those men (and their long-suffering horses) tasked with getting out of the various interior valleys and plateaux and down to the big green valley at the mouth of the Fraser, and back again. We read, in their words, of the daunting challenges they faced when attempting to get themselves and their burdens over the high, wild mountains and by the virtually impassable canyons and rivers roaring through these mountains.
This book not only helps readers better understand our pre-colonial past and neo-colonial present, it also reminds us that people were tougher back then. It is likely to be an especially good read for people – Indigenous, Métis, and settler – living along the routes travelled by the HBC brigades.
Sources:
- Mackie, Richard. 1997. Trading West of the Rockies: The British Fur Trade on the Pacific, 1793-1843. Vancouver: UBC Press.
- White, Richard. 1991. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Howard Macdonald Stewart is an historical geographer and semi-retired international consultant whose work has taken him to more than seventy countries since the 1970s. His memoir of a youthful bicycle trip down the Danube with war hero and debonair cyclist Cornelius Burke, Bumbling down the Danube,was published in The British Columbia Review in 2016, and his memoir, The Year of the Bicycle: 1973, followed in 2020. He is also the author of the award-winning Views of the Salish Sea: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Change around the Strait of Georgia (Harbour, 2017), as well as a popular Remembrance Day reflection, Why the red poppies matter. He has lived on Denman Island, off and on, for more than thirty years. He is now writing an insider’s view of his four decades on the road that followed his perambulations of 1973, notionally titled Around the World on Someone Else’s Dime: Confessions of an International Worker. [Editor’s note: Howard Stewart has recently reviewed books by Gina Leola Woolsey, Dave Steen, Amanda Swinimer, Jim Kerr, John Boyko, and Andrew Scott for The British Columbia Review.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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