The Fur Trade in Canada by Harold Innis

Author:Harold Innis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2017-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

employing 6 partners, 25 canoes valued at £500 each (annual outfit), 27 clerks and interpreters, and 130 to 150 men. Other boundaries were proposed in 181553 but again without success. These attempts to gain admission to the Northwest by the shorter Hudson Bay route were finally crowned with success in the amalgamation of 1821.

As a result of the period of intense competition conditions became intolerable and amalgamation was the inevitable result. After amalgamation with the XY Company, fresh and violent efforts were made by the Northwest Company to check the Hudson’s Bay Company. Haldane54 of the Northwest Company in 1806 attempted to block the Albany route by attacks on the posts at Bad Lake, Red Lake in Minnesota, and Big Falls near Lake Winnipeg. J. D. Campbell was appointed to block the Saskatchewan route and in 1808 attacked the Company at Reindeer Lake. The approach of the Hudson’s Bay Company to the Northwest territory and the threatened serious interference of Selkirk’s colony with the increasingly important supply of the Northwest Company’s provisions55 precipitated difficulties which led to bloodshed at Seven Oaks. The encroachment of the Hudson’s Bay Company on Athabasca was an important factor in the precipitation of a struggle56 from which there was no relief other than by amalgamation.

On March 26, 1821, the amalgamation agreement was signed.57 The Northwest Company was given the charter privileges for twenty-one years. Of the total interest the winterers received forty shares; the Hudson’s Bay Company, thirty shares; and McTavish & Company, thirty shares. The geographic advantages of the Hudson’s Bay Company were merged with the advantages of the type of organization which had developed in the French régime and which had been elaborated with such effectiveness in the Northwest Company. Another partnership agreement was added to the long list which had characterized the history of the Northwest Company. The principle of the partnership was to persist as the dominant type of organization of the fur trade practically until the end of the nineteenth century. It was the device with which the trade could be prosecuted with greatest effectiveness over great distances in which the central authority could exercise no direct control over the individual trader.58 On the other hand amalgamation marked in a definite way the beginning of control exercised by capital interests with headquarters in London. Heavy outlay of capital and large overhead costs were responsible for the intolerable conditions which followed competition and which led to monopoly throughout the history of the trade.

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