The North West Company

Book excerpt: However, this is no romanticized saga. Town shows that the fur trade produced a peculiar cocktail of corporate manipulation, family ties, personal willfulness, political ineptitude, and frontier violence that led to one of the darkest periods of Canadian history. From 1811 when Lord Selkirk first brought his proposal to settle displaced Scots crofters in Rupert’s Land, to the merger of the North West and Hudson’s Bay companies in 1821, the fur trade was in the grip of turmoil. Although well-intentioned, Selkirk had already failed at several resettlement projects before he introduced the idea to the Hudson’s Bay Company ...