Special History:
The Environment and the Fur Trade Experience in
Voyageurs National Park, 1730-1870
Chapter Three
Material Culture (continued)
Products of the Trade
Products of the fur trade included canoes and sleds for transportation, various manufactures (which the Indians soon distinguished as French, British, or American), tobacco, liquor, furs, and hides. In addition, many food items were exchanged in both directions. Although the ultimate aim of the traders was to ship products back to Montreal or London or New York, much of the trade involved goods that were used or consumed on the frontier. These latter products belonged to the so-called provisioning trade.
Canoes
The fur trade required great numbers of birchbark canoes. The North West Company developed a system of transportation involving two transfer points on the route from Montreal to the interior. The first, located on the north shore of Lake Superior, involved the transfer of cargoes from the large "Montreal canoe" or canot du maître, built for travel on the Great Lakes, to the smaller "north canoe" or canot du nord, designed to negotiate the swamps and rapids of the inland waterways. The second, at Rainy Lake, involved another transfer of cargoes from the canoes manned by Montreal-based crews to canoes manned by voyageurs of the Athabaska Department. In some cases, Montreal canoes were used between these two transfer points, with their loads suitably reduced for the many portages between Lake Superior and Rainy Lake.
The Rainy Lake Region, with its forests of birch, was a center for construction of the north canoes. In the early years of the fur trade, Europeans traded goods for canoes of Indian manufacture. By 1830, the fort at Rainy Lake employed a French-Canadian craftsman who was an expert canoe maker and could turn out several canoes in a season. Canoes, together with wild rice, became one of the most important products of the region.
The north canoe took a crew of four to six men, depending on the distance that the men would travel and the amount of provisions that they needed to carry. The canoe carried a lading of about 35 packages, with roughly a third consisting of provisions for the journey. The crew consisted of a foreman, a steersman, and two to four middlemen. The foreman, who sat in the bow and was in command of the vessel, had to be adept at reading the rapids, while the steersman had to be accomplished in attending the helm. Both of these skilled men made half again the wage of the middlemen, who sat two abreast in the middle of the canoe. For each four to six canoes there was a conductor or pilot in command of the whole brigade.
Canoes were made entirely from the products of the forest: pine or cedar for the frame, birch bark for the walls, fibrous strands of tree roots for stitching material, and pine pitch for sealant. A single birch tree generally yielded enough bark to cover a north canoe. Pieces of bark were sewn together with pieces of tree roots, called wattape, usually from the white spruce. The birchbark covering was then placed over a framework of thin boards, usually made from white cedar. The cover was lashed to the gunwales with wattape, and held firm with four to nine narrow thwarts or bars placed across the top at intervals. The latter were made of pine or cedar. Boards about four inches in width were then installed to provide bench seats for the crew. Finally, the canoe was readied for use by daubing or "gumming" it with the pitch of pine trees. Canoes had to be gummed frequently to keep them watertight.
Montreal canoes were built with the same materials and according to the same technique but on a larger scale. William M'Gillivray provided a good description:
These canoes were exceedingly strong and capacious, they were about thirty-six feet in length, by six feet wide, near the middle; and although the birch bark which formed a thin external coating over their ribs of white cedar, and their longtitudinal laths of the same wood, appeared to compose but a flimsy vessel, yet they usually carried a weight of five tons. It may be as well to state that this cargo was very carefully stored, in order to remove any unequal pressure, which would have been fatal to such a vessel. Four poles, three or four inches at their thickest ends, denominated by the Canadians, grand-perch, were laid side by side in the middle of the bottom of the canoe. On these poles, the cargo was carefully arranged so that all the weight rested on them, and none allowed to press against the bare and unprotected sides of the canoe. Every package was made up of the weight of ninety pounds and none heavier.
Both Montreal and north canoes plied the waters of what is now Voyageurs National Park. From about 1788 to about 1821, the big Montreal canoes regularly appeared at the North West Company's fort at Rainy Lake to take the loads of furs brought down by north canoe from the Athabaska Department. Historian Gregg A. Young has made a close study of this traffic and estimates that about 30 Montreal canoes made the difficult trip between Lake Superior and Rainy Lake each summer, leaving Grand Portage or Fort William about July 1 and arriving at Rainy Lake about mid-July. Even long after the North West Company merged with the Hudson's Bay Company, the large canoes still occasionally made an appearance at Fort Frances. In September 1837, for example, three Montreal canoes arrived with a large number of passengers, mostly families.
The Montreal canoe carried a mast and lug-sail. In addition, each crew member had his own paddle and a ten-foot setting pole, made of ash and shod with an iron ferrule at each end, which, attached to a strong line, was used to tow the canoe upstream through rapids. There were three sizes of paddles: the common paddle, about two feet long and three inches wide, which was used by the middlemen; a longer paddle, about five inches wide, which was used by the steersman; and a still longer paddle used by the foreman when running rapids. Paddles were made of red spruce or maple. The blades were usually painted red and decorated with markings of green and black.
Sleds
In winter, canoe travel became progressively more dangerous as lakes began to freeze and cold temperatures made the birch bark brittle. Nonetheless, Indians and traders traveled by canoe as long as there was open water, sometimes making perilous trips through broken pan ice. When lakes and rivers froze over, Indians and traders traveled on foot. Interestingly, despite the presence of horses at the Rainy Lake House no mention was found of men riding horses. Instead, they rode on horse-drawn sledges or dog-sleds.
Unfortunately, post journals and reminiscences provide only rare glimpses of this type of transport. Post trader John McKay reported the arrival of Indians in February, 1794, hauling a sledge loaded with venison. The North West Company's post trader and one of his clerks made a trip by horse sledge on February 1, 1818, as noted by Donald MacPherson in the Hudson's Bay Company's post journal. The men used this mode of transportation to travel a few miles east to visit a camp on the shore of Rainy Lake. The Hudson's Bay Company's Charles S. Crowe, assigned to Fort Frances in 1873, traveled by dog teams from Fort Garry on Lake Winnipeg to his new post with three men and his family, a journey of nine and a half days. Crowe's daughter wrote many years later, "Remember in those days there were no stopping places anywhere on the trail, just had to make camp wherever night overtook us, and there the men would make a shelter out of pine boughs and build a large fire in front of the shelter to keep the wolves away."
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The Meurons depart Fort William in winter After the people celebrated Christmas in their own way, I succeeded in getting underway on Dec. 31, 1816. At 10 o'clock we departed, accompanied by Lord Selkirk and almost all the inhabitants of the Fort. For the first day our gear was carried on 4 horse drawn sleds. For myself I had a sled pulled by 3 dogs. They pulled my gear and their own nourishment of salted frozen fish. At night we camped. After the horses were sent back, I divided the people into 3 sections. There were 18 soldiers and 3 Canadians, of whom 2 had been sent ahead and 1 a 65 year old, who knew the land and stayed with us and served as leader. I had a hard time getting the people settled down, because as a result of the numerous farewell toasts they were more or less drunk. Around midnight I woke up and saw that they were all asleep. I will never forget the scene that presented itself. By the light of the flickering from 3 fires and in their strange clothing and manifold positions they resembled a band of brigands. The artistic picture was completed by the sleds set around for protection, the guns leaning against trees and the distant howling of wolves. I got up to smoke a pipe and it came to me that in this hour in my homeland new years would be celebrated. A year ago I was in Montreal, where we serenaded friends and then joined a party of 15 lantern bedecked sleds. Everyone was carried off and happy. Today I find myself in a northern forest looking ahead to hardships and dangers, which are not without a certain attractiveness for me. When I finished my pipe, I laid myself on top of my bison pelt and slipped into my blanket, that I had made into a sack which proved itself to be very practical. —Friedrich Von Graffenreid, Sechs Jahre in Canada, 1813-1819, p. 102. |
An entry in the Hudson's Bay Company's post journal for February 18, 1820 suggests that dogs and dog sleds may have been the personal property of the men. Roderick McKenzie requested Bazile Plante and two other men to travel from the post to an Indian camp. Plante informed McKenzie that his dogs were not strong enough to go, but he was willing to drag a sled himself. Instead, McKenzie assigned Plante a different job at the post. "This surprised him a good deal & I believe [he] regreted having Said any thing about his Dogs," McKenzie wrote. Evidently Bazile Plante owned and cared for his own dogs while the sled was the property of the post.
French Goods
From the limited primary sources pertaining to trade between the French and the Indians in the Rainy Lake Region in the period prior to 1763, nothing was gleaned specifically relating to the kinds of goods traded. The secondary literature asserts that French traders generally found themselves at a disadvantage in their competition with the English owing to the Indians' preference for English manufactures. French kettles, for example, were not as sturdy or light as English kettles, and French cloth was of inferior quality and came in duller hues than English cloth. To hold the Indians' allegiance, the French government invested in the manufacture of silver and enamel medals for gifts to chiefs. In the early 1700s, as much as 20,000 livres a year was spent on Indian presents, and the manufacture of medals for this purpose was eventually exported from France to Montreal. Unfortunately, the journals of La Vérendrye and Saint-Pierre do not provide any details on the kinds of goods that French traders brought into the Rainy Lake Region in the 1730s, 1740s, and 1750s.
British Goods
Sir Alexander Mackenzie described the variety of British goods used in the Indian trade in the 1790s. These included coarse woolen cloths, milled blankets, guns, ammunition, "twist" and "carrot tobacco," linens, coarse sheetings, "Manchester goods" (cotton), thread, lines, twine, common hardware, cutlery, brass and copper and sheet-iron kettles, silk and cotton handkerchiefs, hats, shoes, hose, calicoes, printed cottons, and other items. An anonymous author provided another list of principal trade items in 1811. These included blankets from Witney, Oxfordshire; woolen goods from Yorkshire (comprising strouds, coatings, meltons, serges, flannels, and common blue and scarlet cloth); Manchester cotton goods (comprising striped cottons, dimities, janes, fustians, printed British cottons, shawls, handkerchiefs, gartering, and ferreting); large quantities of hardware; Irish linens; Scotch sheetings; osnaburgs; large quantities of nets, twine, birdlime, thread, and worsted yarn; brass, copper, and tin kettles; pistols, powder, ball, shot, and flints; paints; stationery; and beads.
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Portion of an invoice found in the papers of Sir Alexander Mackenzie Invoice of Goods forwarded from Montreal by Sir Alexander Mackenzie & Intended for Lac Lapluie, marked as in Margin—
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Liquor is conspicuously absent from both lists and tobacco is omitted from the second. Traders tried to keep quantities of both liquor and tobacco on hand at all times because these items were essential to good trade relations. In times of keen competition between the North West Company and the Hudson's Bay Company, or between the British and the Americans, traders of the Rainy Lake Region assumed that the Ojibwe would take their furs to whichever post offered the best price in liquor. Thus, they could ill afford to run out of liquor (or tobacco), even though they recognized that liquor had a deleterious effect on many of the natives. It is possible that liquor was omitted from the lists because the trading companies did not want to draw attention to the importance of these items in the fur traders' relations with the Indians. It is also possible that company officials considered liquor as distinct from other trade goods because it was primarily used in the provisioning trade. The Hudson's Bay Company's post journals are filled with references to trading liquor and tobacco for fish, wild rice, and other provisions. Soon after establishing his post in 1793, for example, John McKay reported: "I am Obligd to buy Every once [ounce] of Country Provisions that We Eat as we canot Procure any ourselves which Will be very hard on the Brandy."
Historian Bruce M. White has argued that liquor occupied a central place in Ojibwe fur trade protocol, and was often dispensed as part of the social ritual attending trade rather than as a specific commodity of exchange. White found evidence that between 1794 and 1796, McKay purchased moose meat, fish, and wild rice to the value of 400 made beaver, and that 88 percent of this was exchanged for brandy and the rest for ammunition and a little cloth. Similarly, North West Company trader François Malhiot purchased food to the value of 288 made beaver, of which 60 percent was bought with liquor alone and another 30 percent with liquor and tobacco together. If the trader ran out of alcohol, he had difficulty obtaining any provisions.
The Hudson's Bay Company maintained yearly account books, some of which survive in the Hudson's Bay Company Archives. These give a clearer picture of the variety of British goods that were imported into the Rainy Lake Region. The earliest extant account book is an inventory of the goods on hand in the North West Company's Fort Lac La Pluie, seized by Lord Selkirk's soldiers in 1816. It lists the number of each trade item and their total value. The inventory also includes farming equipment, tools, furnishings, food, and furs. The list includes many small items that could potentially survive a long time: scissors, tin tobacco boxes, ivory combs, steel trap springs, scythes, hoes, sickles, hinges, among others.
The account book for the Hudson's Bay Company's Rainy Lake House in 1819 listed many similar items to those that the North West Company had on hand in 1816, but in addition it listed several items of adornment. These included silver arm bands, tinsel epaulets, silver ear bobs, buttons (common and plated), brooches, and ostrich feathers. Not all items in the account books were traded to Indians; many were purchased by the employees of the company for their own use or for family members. This is evident from the individual accounts kept for each employee. For example, Vincent Roy, Jr., an interpreter at Rainy Lake, was charged for the following items in 1822: one brown cloth, one fine scarlet vest, four yards black cloth, two rolls of satin ribbon, one yard of fine "Cambric," a half pound of colored thread, three yards of cotton, and 25 needles.
The Hudson's Bay Company trader John McKay closed his journal for each year with an accounting of provisions and brandy served to the employees, furs acquired, goods on hand, goods traded to Indians on the trip from Osnaburgh to Rainy Lake, and sundry other lists. These journals disclose the variety of goods brought into the Rainy Lake Region in the mid-1790s: beads, blankets, boxes, bells, ice chisels, woolen and duffel cloth, files, flints, guns, powder, handkerchiefs, hatchets, brass kettles, copper camp kettles, clasp knives, yew-handled knives, needles, sashes, shot and ball, calico shirts, jackets, hats, tobacco, thread, twine, ivory combs, scissors, shoes, soap, and razors.
The fur companies also prepared "bills of lading" (descriptions of cargo) for each canoe. A volume labeled "L.L.P. Bills Lading" survives in the collection of the Thunder Bay Historical Society. This volume contains 97 pages of itemized lists of goods that were shipped from the North West Company's Lac La Pluie fort to more remote locations between July 30, 1806, and July 31, 1809. The company assigned each canoe in a brigade a number, and made a list of all goods and the total number of "pieces" put in that canoe. As historian Joseph D. Winterburn explains,
A piece was a package, weighing about 90 pounds, that was designed for portaging and proper storage in the canoe. Great care had to be taken to balance the size of each piece by distributing heavier goods among the lighter. This prevented the pieces in the form of bales, kegs, bags, or cassettes from becoming too bulky....The pieces made up the "outfit", that is, all the supplies needed to outfit a post for an entire season. This included trade goods as well as supplies needed to maintain the post.
The bills of lading also reveal the kinds of equipment with which each canoe was outfitted. This kit was called an agres. In 1806, the contents of the outfit were itemized; later these were standardized and entered in the record as simply the agres. They consisted of a kettle, an oil cloth used to protect the cargo from water damage, a sponge to soak up water that leaked into the canoe, a codline used to track the canoe up rapids, an ax, a sail, six pounds of refined spruce gum, a bunch of wattap (spruce root used to sew the seams in canoes) and one fathom of birch bark for canoe repairs.
American Goods
The Treaty of Ghent of 1814 was supposed to give the Americans possession of the south bank of the Rainy River and the south shore of the border lakes country, together with the exclusive right to trade with the Indians on American territory. Inasmuch as the Ojibwe moved freely back and forth across the border, the idea of "American" and "British" Indians was highly problematic. Moreover, U.S. Customs officials were too far away to constitute much of a threat to Hudson's Bay Company traders at least until the mid-1820s. Nevertheless, American traders entered the Rainy Lake Region by 1821 with the expectation of supplanting their British competitors on American territory.
The advent of American traders in the Rainy Lake Region probably had little effect on the range of goods involved in the fur trade. British traders obtained tobacco from the American South and rum from the West Indies, and imported nearly everything else from the British Isles. The range of goods had already expanded greatly since the mid-eighteenth century to include such items as spring-operated animal traps, augers, nails, handsaws, corn mills, burning glasses, clay pipes, and all variety of silver ornaments. Historian Rhoda R. Gilman has referred to the ornamental material as "pan-Indian," manufactured by Europeans solely for the North American Indian market and traded to the Indians without much distinction between tribes. American traders did not add appreciably to the variety of goods.
An account book exists for the Fond du Lac Department of the American Fur Company from 1824. The material listed in the book was divided between Rainy Lake, Sandy Lake, and Fond du Lac. The list extends for nine pages and contains the same kinds of items as were recorded in the Hudson's Bay Company's account books: cloth of various types, colors, and patterns; ornaments such as ear bobs and brooches, cookware such as kettles and knives; tools such as hooks, axes, and traps. The inventory includes various items of clothing, too: capotes, calico shirts, and cotton pantaloons.
Ojibwe Goods
The Ojibwe brought two main categories of goods to the exchange: furs and food. They worked on two levels, sustaining the traders with basic necessities such as wild rice and fish, while also furnishing the traders with those animal products that would ultimately find their way to European markets.
Traders' journals are filled with references to the provisioning trade. When traders were traveling between posts, they were generally more concerned with obtaining food than furs, and invariably their supplies for the trip included a stock of liquor and tobacco for purposes of trade. Jonathan Carver recalled that his party in 1767 procured "some rice and plenty of fish" from Ojibwe at Grand Portage. "Otherwise we must have starved to death, for hunting had been poor." Alexander Henry the Elder traded with Ojibwe at the Forks on Rainy River in 1775. The Ojibwe wanted presents, or tribute, in recognition of their ability to prevent trade with the interior. "I gave them rum," Henry wrote, "with which they became drunk and troublesome; and in the night I left them." On his first trip from Osnaburgh to Rainy Lake in September 1793, John McKay and his party relied on a combination of food traded from the Indians, "European provisions," and fish that they caught along the way. On one day, for example, he obtained "3 days fresh venison and twelve gallons of rice" from trade. Shortly after his arrival at Rainy Lake, McKay made a trip to Lake of the Woods for the purpose of obtaining rice for the fort's pantry. He reported in the post journal that one Ojibwe chief traded him 16 gallons of rice for two gallons of liquor and 2 pounds of tobacco. In all he procured only 30 gallons of rice from the Lake of the Woods Ojibwe, and concluded that the men of the North West Company had beat him to the trade.
Next to rice, the Ojibwe's most important contribution to the provisioning trade was dried fish. Traders soon learned from the Ojibwe where the best fishing places were located, but they were not as successful at fishing. The traders only employed nets to catch sturgeon, whereas the Ojibwe caught them with nets or spears. The Ojibwe cut the sturgeon into thin flakes, which they dried over a slow fire. They then pounded the dried flakes between stones until they became like a kind of sponge. When eaten, the absorbent pieces of dried fish were dipped in oil (animal fat), making them "a rich and substantial food of which they are fond." The most productive sturgeon fisheries were located along the Rainy River.
Ojibwe also supplied the traders with "grease" or animal fat, venison, fowl, and berries. A list of provisions served to the men over a six-month period at the Hudson's Bay Company's Rainy Lake fort in 1796 gives some indication of the importance of the provisioning trade, as native foods easily overshadow imported foods. John McKay listed: 30 gallons brandy, 234 gallons rice, 7 gallons bear oil, 151 pounds bacon, 40 pounds beef, 3439 pounds fish, 324 pounds pork, 418 pounds venison, 21 geese, and 97 ducks.
The Ojibwe supplied the vast majority of furs and hides that were shipped out of the Rainy Lake Region. They hunted animals for their furs and hides at all times of year, although they hunted most often in the winter when the animals' fur coats were at their "prime" and would fetch a better price. Beaver pelts were the most common product in the early years, while muskrat skins became the most common product (though not the most valuable) in the later years of the fur trade. Other kinds of furs harvested by the Ojibwe of the Rainy Lake Region included bear, "cat" (lynx), fisher, marten, mink, moose, and otter. Rare but present in the Rainy Lake trade were caribou, porcupine, fox, and weasel. Seemingly no fur-bearing animal was too small to be harvested: ground squirrels and skunks were traded as well.
Table of Contents | Introduction | Rainy Lake Region | Fur Trade Experience | Material Culture | Natural Environment | Bibliography
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Last Updated: 12-Apr-2005