Toward Confederation Images Collection

#1 Illustrations of various styles of the beaver hat.   

#2 A trapper on his rounds in the Canadian north-west.   

#3 Trader weighing furs outside his fort.   

#4 Interior of Hudson's Bay Company Fort at Edmonton, Alberta.   

#5 David Lambert Mudiman's trading post, Stand Off, Alberta.   

#6 Hudson's Bay Company train of Red River carts, Calgary, Alberta.   

#7 Voyageur or "courier du bois" with rifle and axe.   

#8 Setting Fire to the Grass to Drive the Mosquitoes away from the Cattle near Touchwood Hills   

#9 Interior of a Cree First Nations tent, March 25, 1820.   

#10 Maple Sugar Making Near London, Canada.   

#11 Iroquois Chiefs from the Six Nations Reserve reading Wampum belts.   

#12 "Kingston", watercolour by James Pattison Cockburn.

For the Aboriginal people the lakes and rivers were water highways, linked together by overland portages. At first many of the settler's roads followed the old First Nations portages. One of the major routes in Upper Canada paralleled the lake shore. This painting illustrates a typical portion of the highway linking Kingston and Toronto in the period before the coming of the railway.   

#13 York Factory.

This lithograph shows York Factory in 1853 during the time when it was in its heyday as the main depot of the Hudson's Bay Company. Its strategic location at the mouth of the Hayes River enabled the Hudson's Bay traders to tap directly the rich fur resources of the western hinterland. During the summer season, the fort was a hive of activity as the annual ships arrived from England with trade goods while the boat brigades arrived from the interior with the annual fur returns. York Factory was originally built in 1684, making it the oldest permanent settlement in what is today Manitoba. The buildings shown here date from the nineteenth century. Note the long wooden sidewalks which were necessary because the fort was built on swampy ground. Although the climate was severe, life at York Factory could be quite bearable. Such was the opinion of a young Scotsman stationed there in the 1820s: "Our yearly communication with England permits us many European luxuries & refinements which Inland winterers cannot obtain. Our lodgings are commodious, elegant, and impenetrable to the howling blast which rages around us during most of the year."   

#14 Fort William.

Fort William was the inland headquarters of the North West Company, the traders of which utilized the St. Lawrence-Great Lakes route to the West. Originally their depot had been at Grand Portage, but when this became American territory the Company had to move its operations. Completed about 1804, the fort was situated on the north shore of Lake Superior at the mouth of the Kaministikwia River. This water-colour by William Armstrong was painted in 1865. During the summer rendezvous, the fort was transformed into a teeming town of over 3,000 persons. Nor'Wester Ross Cox left this description of Fort William: "The buildings ... consist of a large house, in which the dining-hall is situated, and in which the gentleman in charge resides; the council-house; a range of snug buildings for the accommodation of the people from the interior; a large counting-house; the doctor's residence; extensive stores for the merchandise, and furs; a forge; various workshops, with apartments for the mechanics, a number of whom are always stationed here. There is also a prison for refractory voyageurs. The whole is surrounded by wooden fortifications, flanked by bastions.... Outside the fort is a ship-yard, in which the Company's vessels on the lake are built and repaired."   

#15 Shooting the Rapids.

The excitement and skill of canoe travel is captured in this painting by the nineteenth-century artist Frances Hopkins. The Nor'Westers adapted the Aboriginal birchbark canoe to develop a highly sophisticated transport system. Pictured here is the large freight canoe or canot du maître which plied the waters between Montreal and Fort William. Note that both the bowsman (avant) and steersman (gouvernail) are standing, the bowsman taut and alert as he pilots the canoe through the dangerous rocks. The passengers (usually company officers who never lifted a paddle) sit snugly in the middle. So skilled were the voyageurs, that they much preferred to shoot a rapid than undertake an arduous portage.   

#16 European Exploration.

Aboriginal peoples with distinct trading and political systems inhabited every region of Canada before its existence was known to Europeans. The Norse, who crossed from settlements in Greenland in the eleventh century, were the first Europeans to visit America but had little impact on the indigenous peoples or the subsequent history of the continent. Two factors, exploitation of the Atlantic cod fishery and the search for alternative trade routes to the Orient, led to increased contact between Western Europe and North America. John Cabot in 1497 was the first of a series of explorers to visit eastern Canadian coastal waters. In 1534 Jacques Cartier sailed beyond Newfoundland on the first of three voyages, claiming the area for France and making contact with Aboriginal peoples. No visual record of the earliest contact survives. This later painting presents a romanticized, and highly inaccurate, impression of Cartier's discovery the following year of the Rivière de Canada, the St. Lawrence River. He eventually followed the river inland as far as present day Québec and Montréal, but was disappointed with much that he found. The winter climate was severe; his "gold" and "diamond" discoveries proved fraudulent; and a later settlement failed. On each of his voyages relations were established with the Aboriginal people and furs were traded. The St. Lawrence River, Cartier's main discovery, became the centre of the French empire in America and the focus of one of two trading systems that would mark the history of the Canadian fur trade.   

#17 Seventeenth-Century Trading Post.

Following Cartier's voyages, the sixteenth century witnessed much European activity in America, including coastal exploration and increased exploitation of the fishery. There were, however, no successful trading settlements. The emphasis was on a search for precious metals and a passage to the Far East. Furs were usually obtained in connection with temporary establishments on shore for drying fish. Gradually they became the primary motive for some ships to cross the Atlantic. Merchants became more willing to finance these increasingly profitable expeditions, while governments became less involved. In 1603 the Sieur de Monts was granted a trading monopoly in the St. Lawrence and Atlantic coast regions. Among his associates was Samuel de Champlain and together the two men established a small colony at Port Royal on the Bay of Fundy. The drawing, by the illustrator Charles William Jefferys (1869-1951), depicts Champlain overseeing the construction of Port Royal. Later de Monts moved his headquarters to the St. Lawrence where in 1608 Champlain established a trading post of similar design at Québec, the place Cartier had wintered in 1535. The establishment consisted of a fur warehouse and habitation, surrounded by a moat and a stockade of logs. From this inland base, trading relations were established with Aboriginal groups upriver.   

#18 Montréal Fur Fair.

The fur trade in New France focussed on Montréal which was established in 1642 as a religious community. Its strategic position near the junction of the Ottawa and St. Lawrence rivers meant that it developed rapidly in the late seventeenth century as a major supply point for the interior trade. Montréal traders, despite opposition from the Governor, sent hundreds of men westward each spring to trade. These expeditions were reprovisioned at Michilimackinac before pushing farther into the interior. In this way, despite the attempt of the French Crown to restrict trading activity through a system of licenses, the French empire expanded over a significant part of North America.

Officials attempted to stop the loss of manpower to the colony by ordering that markets or fairs be held in Montréal where all merchants would have an equal opportunity to trade with First Nations from the Upper Great Lakes. The illustration imagines one such fair with hundreds of First Nations encamped on the river's edge, visiting the stalls of merchants offering goods to trade. Habitants, priests, military officers and government officials mingled with the First Nations in a riot of sound and colour. The fairs lasted only a few years. The policy was abandoned because the trip east proved too long and too dangerous for First Nations who had to circumvent Iroquois ambushes. At the same time, coureurs de bois were willing to carry goods directly to the Aboriginal peoples.   

#19 Coureurs de Bois.

The work of the French fur trade involved Aboriginal people who hunted fur-bearing animals and prepared skins for trade and French coureurs de bois who traveled throughout the interior of America to encourage the Aboriginal people to trade. Little is known about most of the coureurs de bois beyond names which appear in surviving trade records. The literacy rate among them was low and a life of constant struggle and hardship left little time to record impressions. Being a small minority among the Aboriginal people with whom they lived and worked, coureurs de bois tended to adopt many Aboriginal habits, much to the dismay of church officials and government administrators. Long periods of absence from the settlements of New France weakened ties to the authority of church and government. And yet it was primarily the existence of these men, who never numbered more than a few hundred at any time, that maintained Aboriginal loyalties and French territorial claims in the interior. These same coureurs de bois were often the first casualties in the frequent wars with the Iroquois in the late seventeenth century. Efforts to exercise government control over the fur trade by licensing parties of coureurs de bois were never completely successful.   

#20 Adoptions of European Material Culture.

This scene shows the extent to which Aboriginal people retained tools and goods predating the fur trade. Examples are the cradle-board, the canoe, leather garments and decorative styles in clothing and tools. At the same time the painting shows a number of items which commonly were obtained in trade. Firearms in the form of flintlock muskets were prized trade items used in hunting and in war. The metal kettle permitted a tremendous improvement in cooking techniques for the Aboriginal person, allowing preparation of a greater variety of foods than had been possible formerly when skin or wooden cooking containers were used. The pipes shown in the illustration are trade items although the production of Aboriginal pipes continued. The various silver items shown (more common in the late eighteenth than in the seventeenth century) were luxury items similar to beads, brandy and certain items of clothing. The scene was painted by James Heriot (1766--1844), a colonial administrator who lived in Quebec from 1791 until his return to Great Britain in 1816.