By Jamal Dillman-Hasso.
Buried within a small, leather-bound memorandum book in a half-foot but historiographically rich box of Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) materials at the William L. Clements Library lies a two-page map, charted circa 1779 by John Thomas of London.
In some ways, the map itself is relatively unremarkable. Dozens like it exist, many of which are contained within the HBC Archives, housed in Winnipeg and managed by the Manitoba Archives. Having spent its first century precariously holding on to four or five trading posts at a time on the coast of Hudson’s Bay’s icy waters, the HBC sent several servants – including Thomas – inland. Thomas was based out of New Brunswick House, on the Missinaibi River (which Thomas called the “Elks”), one of the early HBC inland posts established as the Company struggled to find its commercial foothold in the ruthless trading network of the American interior. The map, emerging from this commercial drive, is as much an expression of political hope as it is a faithful cartographic entry, for it depicts a consequential but nonexistent waterway connecting Lake Superior with Hudson’s Bay.
Manuscript map of Hudson Bay within the Hudson’s Bay Company Memorandum Book.
The HBC had been founded in large part to find such a waterway. In the days before widespread land transportation, water was vital in the creation and sustenance of trading routes, particularly in the North American interior. Europeans often imagined this interior to consist largely of vast wilderness. However, traders sent from Montreal or Boston westwards were struck by the intricate political structures they encountered that governed not only the fur trade but also other aspects of daily life of the indigenous people, from diplomacy and taxation to medicine and marriage. Some traders reacted more readily to this reality than others. When two French-Canadian traders wintering near what is today the Apostle Islands area of Wisconsin heard stories from Ojibweg about a fur-rich water route that connected majestic Lake Superior to calm and chilly Hudson’s Bay, they grew extremely excited, made enough enemies in Montreal to flee to Boston, and then attempted to sell the English on the idea of cutting the French fur trade off at the source. The traders argued that this waterway – which was itself likely generated from a misunderstanding – was vitally important to the French trade. Indeed, the seasonal nature of the Great Lakes fur trade did rely on expeditions inland from the Great Lakes coast. It was reasonable to assume that one such inland waterway could connect with the vaguely-known Hudson’s Bay.
By 1779, though, the hydrology of the region was slowly becoming clearer to both European and Indian traders. What we now call the Pigeon River, on the Minnesota-Ontario border, was known by then to not connect with any northwards-flowing rivers. It was also known that the vast majority of trips from the Great Lakes to Hudson’s Bay required a portage (carrying a canoe and walking across the borders of drainage basins or around an obstacle – a strenuous task, particularly when encumbered by heavy pelts and trading goods). By then, the most secure and easiest portage was widely assumed to run from Lake Nipigon to the Ogoki River, which at that time connected with the Albany River running towards Hudson’s Bay. Thomas, though, noted in the memorandum book that this portage was “bad on account of Falls & Strong Tides . . & 7 carr[ying] places [i.e. portages].” The Nipigon-Ogoki route was a particularly bad option in Thomas’s mind for another reason, though.
From Arthur J. Ray, “Bayside Trade, 1720-1780,” in Historical Atlas of Canada, vol. 1, R. Cole Harris, ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), plate 60; ctd. in Ann M. Carlos and Frank D. Lewis, Commerce by a Frozen Sea: Native Americans and the European Fur Trade (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
The HBC was deliberately designed to encourage competition between coastal trading posts. These trading posts, usually named after the Europeanized river name whose mouths they guarded (Rupert, Moose, Albany, Severn, York, etc.), were subdivided into three larger zones of control: Fort Albany, York Factory, and Fort Churchill. Each zone had its own mechanisms for controlling prices and maintaining discipline among the HBC employees stationed therein. Fort Albany was the southernmost of the three, and it was, in the eighteenth century, the most active of them by far. It was this region that had the closest coordination with and competition from various Indian nations (whose doodeman, or kinship structures, were mistaken in the HBC memorandum book with nation names), as well as the tightest competition from the Great Lakes and Ottawa River. It was not always the most profitable region for the HBC (more competition meant lower prices), but its commercial viability and geography made it ideally placed to expand towards the Great Lakes.
Portaging from Nipigon to Ogoki, though, also put one in the path of the Albany River. Moose and Albany were in the same semi-official zone (Fort Albany), and were therefore affiliated, but it troubled tradesmen and factors on the Moose that the easiest Great Lakes portage sent pelts downstream to Albany, possibly to the detriment of Moose Factory. Such a route, if widely used, would cement Albany’s hold on the trading area by ensuring that Lake Superior and Upper Mississippi pelts would not reach Moose Factory.
With this in mind, Thomas – and others at Moose Factory and its upstream posts – doggedly attempted to chart a possible water route from the “Elks” (Missinaibi) to Lake Superior. To this end, in part relying on Nicolas Bellin’s 1744 Carte des Lacs du Canada sur le journal de R. P. de Charlevoix, Thomas drew a straight and entirely fictitious Perray River, connecting Nipigon to the Elks, and from there to the Moose. (The Perray River, named for the early-century coureur de bois Jean Peré, had a slightly longer life before Bellin, having appeared in a similar place in a map by Jean-Baptiste-Louis Franquelin, but Thomas was likely relying on Bellin’s cartography more directly than on Franquelin’s.) Thomas did seem to understand, though, that the Perray crossed the height of land from Lake Superior to Hudson’s Bay. This drew into question the status of the height of land, a question which British and French cartographers had largely considered resolved by 1779. Thomas’s attempt to integrate his own experience with the flawed knowledge of past European cartographers resulted in a map that is at once illustrative and completely inaccurate. Meanwhile, the Michipicoten River, which had already been flagged by Moose Factory officials as an easier portage than Ogoki in 1779 and which witnessed aggressive HBC expansion in the late 1780s and 1790s, receives scarcely any mention in this memorandum book.
Carte des lacs du Canada dressée sur les manuscrits du Depost des Cartes, Plans et Journaux de la Marine et sur le journal du RP. de Charlevoix / par N. Bellin ingénieur et hydrographe de la Marine 1744.
Later cartographers, such as William Faden, would continue to locate a river called the Perray (or Peré, more orthographically faithful to its namesake), although by then it was considered smaller, did not connect to Nipigon, and fed directly into the Moose River rather than the Missinaibi. This river, too, was not real, but it was also less consequential than earlier visions of the Perray. By the time Fort Albany and Moose Factory leaders established that the Moose-Missinaibi-Michipicoten and Albany-Ogoki-Nipigon portages were indeed the easiest way to access Lake Superior from Hudson’s Bay, the HBC’s Great Lakes competition was already beginning to weaken. After 1820, with beaver hats leaving fashion in Europe, the Pacific fur trade strengthening, and the spread of large-scale white settlement disrupting the Euro-Indian trading networks on which the Great Lakes fur trade relied, Fort Albany and Moose Factory began their long decline. Sault Ste. Marie’s fur-trade operation followed soon after, as the town transitioned from a fur-trade fort and portage site to a metals and lumber shipping centre; Albany and Moose, lacking such opportunities for diversification, were selected as sites for Indian treaty-established reserves but lost their commercial viability. The HBC memorandum book at the Clements thus shows us a snapshot of the brief decades in which global commerce was heavily influenced by the constellation of Native nations and bumbling Europeans traipsing through the boreal forests and marshy muskegs of the American interior.
Jamal Dillman-Hasso is a PhD candidate in the University of Michigan’s Department of History, and formerly an intern at the William L. Clements Library. He owes gratitude to Ann Carlos, Helen Harding, and Angela Oonk for their assistance in this piece.