After a buffalo run, carcasses scatter the plains. By 1884, five years after this photograph was taken, Congress had noticed that buffalo were were diminishing, but no laws were made to protect the herds until 1905. (Montana Historical Society, photo by L. A. Huffman)
15. Buffalo and the Canadian Fur Traders
North of the Canadian border buffalo ranged from the Red River Valley in the east to the front range of the Rocky Mountains in the west, and northward until stopped by the dense coniferous forests. Canadian fur traders could approach this buffalo range from two directions, either by a series of portages from Lake Superior across to Red River, or up the small Hayes River from Hudson Bay. Geographically the best route was up the Missouri, but that led through American territory.
Late in the seventeenth century French traders had mapped out the Grand Portage, actually a series of portages, from Lake Superior to the Red River Valley, which was a broad, flat bed of an ancient lake overgrown with grass and filled with buffalo. From the western end of the Grand Portage the French could go down the Red River into Lake Winnipeg, then west up the Saskatchewan to the Rockies. The valley of the Saskatchewan marked the approximate northern limit of the large buffalo herds, although some woods buffalo ranged farther north in the foothills. North of the Saskatchewan the forests were dense and filled with swamps and lakes. Here was excellent trapping, and this district produced furs of the finest quality. The furs from the entire SaskatchewanRed River drainage could be transported by water to the western end of the Grand Portage.
About the time the French began to collect furs around Lake Winnipeg, English traders formed the Hudson's Bay Company to exploit all the Hudson Bay region, including the rivers and streams emptying into the bay. They could have gone by boat and canoe up the broad, swift Nelson River to Lake Winnipeg and had all the upper country open to them if it had not been for the hostile French. For about a century the Hudson's Bay Company was content to build posts on the shores of the bay and let Indian tribes from the back country bring in the furs.
During this hundred years the French traders fought the English as their mother countries warred in Europe. When the series of European conflicts was finally resolved by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, Great Britain had secured all of Canada and the French were no longer a menace, but there was still strong rivalry between the French traders, now British subjects, working west out of Montreal, and the Hudson's Bay Company men.
About 1790 a number of Scots moved into Montreal and took over the management of much of the fur trade centered in that city. They were an intelligent, ambitious group, and when they began to divert the Saskatchewan trade to their posts, the Hudson's Bay men responded with countermeasures that in time led to open conflict. The resulting scandals reached the ears of Parliament and threatened to bring drastic action from that august body. To avoid such a catastrophe the two groups hastily compromised their differences and joined forces in 1821. The Scots gave up their Northwest Company name in return for good jobs and a share in the profits under the broad charter of the Hudson's Bay Company.
Largely as a matter of geography, the fur trade along the Saskatchewan differed in some important respects from that on the Missouri. On the Canadian side of the border the Indian tribes had no substantial crops, and consequently no permanent farming villages where trading posts could be located to advantage. In addition, the Canadian traders lacked cheap water transportation to the world markets, although they did have adequate river travel from one post to another. While the Americans could float their furs downstream all the way to St. Louis in mackinaw boats, keelboats, and steamboats, the Canadians had to take their cargoes of furs to market in small boats and canoes, whether they went down the Hayes River to tidewater or across the Grand Portage to Lake Superior, and each route involved portages, over which the bales of fur had to be carried on the backs of men, a slow, expensive operation.
This lack of cheap transportation prevented the Canadian traders from buying the bulky buffalo robes, which were worth so little per pound. This is underscored by reports of fur shipments from the Red River district in the heart of the buffalo country. For the year 1803-04, with 105 packs of furs, 90 pounds to a pack, or a total weight of 9,450 pounds, only 18 buffalo robes were included. These were probably of some special kind, such as the rare ''silk" robes. The following year, with 144 packs of furs and a weight of 12,960 pounds, there were 40 robes. This is marked contrast with the thousands shipped along the Missouri.
The Canadian Indians were forced to do a great deal of trapping of small fur bearers to pay for all the trade goods they wanted to buy at the posts. This activity in turn kept them widely scattered in small groups in the woods during the winter, and prevented several of the tribes from becoming nomads following the buffalo on the plains the year around, although they did follow the herds in the summer and fall, putting up thousands of bags of pemmican and thousands of kegs of tallow each year for the fur posts.
The fur posts were scattered all over the area so to be accessible to the many Indian bands. A few of the posts were along the Red River and its principal tributary, the Assiniboin, while the rest were along the Saskatchewan all the way west to the Rockies. Boats and canoes brought the bales of trade goods up the rivers each spring to the posts, and returned with the packs of furs for market. These boats and canoes required a great many more men to transport goods than was required for an equal tonnage of freight on the Missouri.
Posts were located in or near the buffalo range, on a bank some thirty feet above stream level, and near a grove of timber that would supply both building logs and firewood. The people at the post had to live off the country, and also had to secure provisions for the boatmen on the river. At times too they had to feed some of the Indian bands coming in to trade. The amount of game and fish required to meet these needs reached imposing totals. Here is a list of the provisions consumed at Alexander Henry's Pembina River post from September 1, 1807, to June 1, 1808, by 17 men, 10 women, 14 children, and 45 dogs: buffalo, 112 cows killed between September 1 and February 1, 45,000 lbs.; 35 bulls (probably killed in the spring), 18,000 lbs. (This was all usable meat, no bones, weighed at the post.) In addition there were 3 red deer, 5 bears, 4 beavers, 3 swans, 12 geese, 36 ducks, 1,150 fish, taken in nets, 775 sturgeon weighing from 50 to 150 pounds each, 410 pounds of buffalo tallow, 140 pounds of dried meat, and 325 bushels of potatoes and vegetables, the last two items from the post garden.
While the sturgeon totaled in weight about as much as the buffalo, most of the fish were given to visiting Indians. The people at the post, men, women, and children, each averaged about five pounds of buffalo meat a day for 270 days, plus some other foods, and the forty-five sled dogs ate mostly fish, but were given some of the meatpossibly a total of 20,000 pounds of food for the period.
No pemmican was mentioned in the list of food eaten at the post. This concentrated food was reserved for the boat crews or for real emergencies, and was never eaten when other food was available.
While the Indian hunters usually made a good deal of pemmican each year for their own use, some of the fur traders preferred to buy dried meat and buffalo grease separately and mix their own. At Pembina this was done early in April to have it ready for the boat brigades in the summer. Alexander Henry learned that if the pemmican was well made and carefully packed in good containers of rawhide it would keep indefinitely, even under adverse conditions: "We are now obliged to eat pemmican. I had a few bags remaining from last spring which had been lying all summer in a heap covered with a leathern tent, and had never been stirred or turned, in a damp warehouse. I was apprehensive it was spoiled… but was surprised to find every bag excellent…. I am confident that my method of mixing and preparing it is good." Henry mentioned that he used fifty pounds of dried meat to forty pounds of grease. Some of the men at his post made soap from buffalo grease.