North West Company
The North West Company (French Compagnie du Nord-Ouest ) was a trading company for fur in Canada . It was founded in Montreal in 1783 and competed with the Hudson's Bay Company . The tension between the two companies became so great that there were various mutual raids on trading posts. To prevent the conflict from spreading, the British government forced a merger with the Hudson's Bay Company in 1821 . Three company employees - Alexander MacKenzie , Simon Fraser, and David Thompson - explored vast areas of western Canada.
The beginning
.jpg)
There is evidence that the North West Company may have existed as early as 1770. At this time, various groups of fur traders and hunters fought each other, and the Indians were also involved. The increased risks also reduced profit margins so that the business threatened to become unattractive. Therefore, attempts were made to reduce risks and costs through short-term agreements.
The first written record was the formation of a stock corporation in 1779, but initially it was nothing more than a loose association of some traders from Montreal who debated how to break the Hudson's Bay Company's monopoly in the North American fur trade. The official founding of North West finally took place in 1784, but it was initially only planned for five years. Headquartered on Rue Vaudreuil in Montreal, the company was led by businessmen Benjamin Frobisher , Joseph Frobisher and Simon McTavish . The successful agreement was extended after just three years, again in 1790.
In 1787 the North West Company merged with Gregory, McLeod and Co. New partners were Roderick MacKenzie and his cousin Alexander MacKenzie , who were responsible for exploring the western territories and actually dealing with the local trappers . During this time the company changed its structure. One increasingly separated hunting and trade on the one hand and bringing them into world trade on the other. More and more buyers stayed in the fur regions all year round, while the large fur market was concentrated in Montreal. So in the west sat the “wintering partners”, or bourgeois , who were responsible for the trading posts and safe transport, such as Fort Espérance in Saskatchewan. In the east there was a group of wholesalers who negotiated terms, prices and general conditions. The furs reached Montreal over several stages. Grand Portage on the US side of Lake Superior was the first main trading post to which the supply canoes from Montreal went and where they received the skins. This happened once a year and the successes and problems that had arisen were discussed on the occasion. In 1803 this post was relocated to Fort William on the British side of the lake after the old trading post was suddenly on American territory as a result of the border agreement between the United States and Great Britain.
The North West Company expanded its activities to the area around Lake Athabasca . But the costs of overland transport quickly eroded the profits. Therefore, the company tried, which the Hudson's Bay Company was able to do without further ado, to find suitable waterways to speed up and cheaper the fur transport. Several exploratory trips started from Lake Athabasca under the leadership of Alexander MacKenzie (1789, 1792–1793), Simon Fraser (1806–1808) and David Thompson (especially 1792, 1807 and 1811). They advanced into the unexplored areas of the Rocky Mountains , to the polar regions in the north and to the Strait of Georgia on the Pacific Ocean . But in the end it was found that there was no suitable river over which the goods could be shipped to the Pacific at low cost.
expansion
After Benjamin Frobisher's death in 1787, Simon McTavish took over the North West Company, reaching an agreement with Benjamin's brother Joseph. McTavish, Frobisher and Company , founded in November 1787, controlled eleven of twenty shares in the North West Company. In addition to McTavish, the Americans Peter Pond and Alexander Henry belonged to this company . Further reorganizations of the partnership took place in 1795 and 1802, when the shares were further broken down to accommodate more partners. In 1792 the subsidiary McTavish, Fraser and Company was opened in London in Upper Canada to trade in goods and sell the skins. The company then had 23 partners, more than 2,000 guides, interpreters and voyageurs . McTavish and other Scottish partners ( 'shareholders' ) often married French-Canadian women and French-Canadians held key roles within the North West Company, building and managing the trading posts, employing most of the employees and having direct contact with the various First Nations in the northwest (a vast area north and west of Lake Superior ). After the French Canadians, the British , Métis and members of the First Nations formed the largest ethnic groups within the company. This made it culturally very different from the more conservative and cautious Hudson's Bay Company. The North West Company, on the other hand, was known for its bold and aggressive trade and business policies.
The company expanded its operations north to Great Bear Lake and west beyond the Rocky Mountains. It also expanded into the American Northwest Territory and opened a trading post in Milwaukee in 1795 , with branch offices in Kewaunee , Manitowoc and Sheboygan . Compared to the Hudson's Bay Company, the company was at a disadvantage, because the competition had a monopoly of the British Crown on the fur trade in the entire water catchment area of the Hudson Bay ( Ruperts Land ) - in about the middle third of today's Canada - and thus on all more easily accessible Hunting areas. The North West Company made efforts to get the British Parliament to grant it more rights, particularly the unhindered transport of trade and supplies through the Hudson's Bay Company monopoly to the west. Simon McTavish even wrote a petition to Prime Minister William Pitt , but all requests were rejected.
When a few years later there was still no solution to this question, McTavish and the other shareholders dared to undertake a risky venture. They organized two expeditions from Montreal to James Bay on the southern border of what is now Nunavut , one over land, the other over the sea. In September 1803 the land expedition met the company's ships on Charlton Island . The North West Company claimed the territory. The Hudson's Bay Company took this bold move by surprise. McTavish had hoped the competition would be willing to compromise, but they responded with open violence a few years later.
Other events
Simon McTavish died in 1804 and his nephew William McGillivray took over the majority of the shares in the trading company. Three years earlier, a number of shareholders had broken away from it and founded a competing company, the XY Company . The disputes between the former partners, which had been further stoked by McTavish, culminated in the shooting of the trading post manager at Great Bear Lake by an employee of the XY Company. McGillivray managed to reach an agreement with the renegades in November 1804. The original shareholders now held 75 percent of the shares, the former partners of the XY Company 25 percent.
Under McGillivray, society was able to expand its sphere of influence. But the competition with the Hudson's Bay Company was tough and the profit margins were getting smaller. In order to position itself better in the increasingly global fur market, the North West Company ran an agency in New York . There have been various efforts to sell fur directly to China ; ships under the American flag were used to circumvent the monopoly of the British East India Company . For this purpose, the company entered into a cooperation with John Jacob Astor .
The economic conditions in the Canadian fur trade changed fundamentally in 1806 after Napoleon Bonaparte imposed the continental ban on Great Britain. In addition, political tensions between the UK and the US steadily increased. In 1809 the American government passed a law that practically brought trade between the two countries to a standstill. Great Britain was now dependent on raw materials from Canada and wood replaced fur as the main export.
Forced merger
Another crisis hit the fur trade around 1810. There were fewer fur animals, especially beavers , because they had been hunted too intensively. In 1812 the British-American War broke out and American troops destroyed the North West Company trading post in Sault Ste. Marie . These events intensified the competition. Thomas Douglas , the main shareholder of the Hudson's Bay Company, had been awarded the Selkirk concession in 1811 and founded the Red River Colony (the nucleus of the province of Manitoba ), which considerably restricted the North West Company's range of operations. The governor of the new colony, Miles Macdonell , imposed an export ban on supplies of all kinds in 1814 due to food shortages, the so-called Pemmican Proclamation , which made it almost impossible for the North West Company to supply their fur trade expeditions.
The trade conflict culminated in the Battle of Seven Oaks in June 1816 , in which 22 Hudson's Bay Company officials, including the colony's governor, were killed. Douglas had William McGillivray and other members of the North West Company arrested. Although the dispute could be settled in court in Montreal, the wealthiest and most capable shareholders gradually left the company because they no longer believed in its future. War and Colonial Minister Henry Bathurst forced the remaining shareholders to merge with the hated competitor in July 1821. The North West Company ceased to exist after over forty years. At the time of the merger, the Hudson's Bay Company owned 97 trading posts.
literature
- Marjorie Campbell: North West Company. University of Toronto Press, Toronto 1983, ISBN 0-88894-376-8 .
- W. Kaye Lamb (Ed.): The Letters and Journals of Simon Fraser. 1806-1808. Dundurn Press, Toronto 2007, ISBN 978-1-55002-713-6 ( Voyageur Classics ).
Web links
- North West Company ( English, French ) In: The Canadian Encyclopedia .