XY Company
The XY Company , also known as the New North West Company , was a fur trading company that existed from 1795 to 1804. It split off from the North West Company . With this, some of the so-called winterers , who lived permanently outside the trading centers, separated from the society, which was autocratically led by Simon McTavish . They were joined by fur hunters without a contract.
Simon McTavish, derisively referred to as "Le Premier" or "Le Marquis", brought several family members into senior positions in the North West Company, such as his brother-in-law Charles Chaboillez , who ran the trading post on the Lower Red River . His nephews William and Duncan McGillivray soon assumed a leading role, with the former taking over from Peter Pond in 1788 . He soon outperformed his uncle at the annual meeting at Grand Portage . William McGillivray succeeded him in office after his death on July 6, 1804.
Simon McTavish made opponents within the North West Company through nepotism and ruthlessness, especially Alexander Mackenzie . Some of them left the company in the 1790s and in 1795 formed their own company, the "XY Company". It got its name from the brand she used to mark her bales of fur. In 1797 she founded a trading post at Grand Portage, barely a kilometer from the competition, on the other side of a stream. When the North West established a trading post at Kaministiquia , an XY post was established nearby. The Northwester called the competitors the "Little Society" or the "Little Company". In the Athabasca area they were called “potties”, probably a corruption of the French name of the “Petite Compagnie”.
However, they soon expanded their trading area from Lake Superior towards the Red River and Assiniboine . A post was established at the Souris estuary in 1796. Mackenzie went to England in 1799 and returned ennobled. When he joined the XY Company in 1801, it strengthened the company immensely. There were violent arguments, and at the Great Bear Lake the head of the post there was shot and killed by a man from the XY Company.
All trading companies are now increasingly using alcohol as a means of attracting and duping in order to win the Indians to trade with their own forts. However, this resulted in disputes with some of their leaders. The North West Company began in 1802 to develop new areas in the extreme northwest, but also on the Bow River (near today's Calgary ) and on the Missouri . At the same time, the company attacked the Hudson's Bay Company directly on the Hudson Bay . There the two trading posts were built at Charlton Island and at the mouth of the Moose River .
McTavish and Mackenzie were in irreconcilable enmity. It was only after the death of his uncle in 1804 that McGillivray reached an agreement according to which the North West Company would receive three quarters of the 100 shares, the partners of the XY Company the remaining quarter. Alexander Mackenzie was banned from the new partnership that ended the XY Company.
literature
- George Bryce: The Remarkable History of the Hudson's Bay Company , Sampson Low & Co., London 1900, pp. 147–153: Chapter VII: The XY Company (Reprinted by Adamant Media Corporation, Chestnut Hill MA 2005, ISBN 1-4212- 6989-9 ( Elibron Classics Series )).
Remarks
- ^ EE Rich: Montreal and the Fur Trade , Montreal: McGill University Press; 1966.