Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Summer 1984
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 4, No. 3, Summer 1984, pp. 152-65.
Abstract
By royal charter, Charles II in 1670 granted to a small coterie of London entrepreneurs, united in a joint stock company, exclusive trading privileges in a vast territory of then unknown dimensions. The group was the "Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson's Bay," the Hudson's Bay Company. The territory was Rupert's Land, named for Prince Rupert, cousin of the monarch, who graciously consented to act as the first governor of the company. By charter, Rupert's Land included "all the Landes Countryes and Territoryes upon the Coastes and Confynes of the Seas" lying within Hudson Strait, that is, the area drained by waters flowing into Hudson and James bays and Hudson Strait.
The new enterprise erected trading factories at the mouths of several of the large rivers, Rupert, Moose, Albany, and Nelson-Hayes, and established a trading system based on the annual journeying of Indian customers to these export posts. The executive committee of Hudson's Bay Company urged employees to accompany Indian groups inland from the factories at the bay shore to winter among the tribes and to encourage them at river break-up time to return to the factories with their furs and other trade items. Not only would this policy allow the company winterers to recruit customers, but it would also develop a cadre of experienced travelers. For many years, no one accepted this challenge, except for Henry Kelsey-a young scamp to some, a young hero to others-who undertook a lone journey onto the Saskatchewan plains between 1690 and 1692.
Kelsey, who eventually became a senior trader in the company, operating mainly out of the York and Churchill factories, was certainly the company's first winterer and the first European to journey onto the northern plains of North America. Regrettably, he did not draw a map depicting his route or the extent of his penetration of the plains. Therefore, there is no cartographic memorial to the commencement of the Hudson's Bay Company's long involvement with the Canadian western interior. After Kelsey's voyage, the vast region was not intruded upon again by British traders for over sixty years. For some thirty years, the company was deeply embroiled in defending the Hudson and James Bay littoral against incursion by the French, whose forces occupied several of the chief Hudson's Bay Company factories during Anglo-French wars. The company's explorers struggled to extend their knowledge of the northwest shore of Hudson Bay, investigating inlets for a possible opening to a Northwest Passage. Success in this venture could give the company great advantage in the extension of trade. Forays onto the plains by wintering company employees were not resumed until 1754, when Anthony Henday reached nearly to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Perennial occupation of the Great Plains, with the erection of trading houses and the posting of complements of officers and servants, was not initiated until 1774.
Comments
Copyright 1984 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln