| Summary: | with the Indians and to collect debts in the form of furs. Still others, if literate, might rise from clerks to be "bourgeois." The bourgeois was the trader who had invested his skill, his courage, and (if he had any) his money. He was responsible for the returns from his assigned district. Because of their new power with guns and trade goods, and also perhaps because they felt pressure from the French and English, some of the Ojibwa pushed west beyond the lakes and willingly changed from a fishing and woodland hunting people into horsemen and trappers, wide-ranging buffalo hunters, migrating with the endless herds across the vast prairie lands. From eastern Canada down the rivers to the west and south into land now part of the United States, the European fur companies sent the coureurs de bois, famous Indian and French canoemen who carried trade goods deep into the most remote Indian territories and returned to Montreal and Quebec loaded with their treasures of fur. The Ojibwa were an important part of this early fur brigade, hiring themselves out to the fur companies. They often intermarried with both the French and English and worked independently as trappers, paddlers, guides, interpreters, peddlers and traders, as did their sons. Indian culture supplied tools and techniques to the trade, but most important of all was manpower. The Indian was the first hunter and trapper, the first canoeman and snowshoer, and the white trapper and voyageur were his pupils. The work of the Indian trapper and hunter was enhanced by that of the Indian woman, preparer of food, carrier of burdens, curer of furs, and maker of shirts, leggings and moccasins. At that time it was practically impossible to live off the country and carry on the fur trade without the assistance of Indian women. They were also the mothers of the new manpower, the Metis, pronounced "Mechi", who became the next generation of canoemen, guides, interpreters, hunters, trappers, traders. Women also played a part in diplomacy between the Indian and the trader. As traders early realized, marriage to a Chief's daughter was good for business and the kinship that marriage conferred made it less difficult to persuade Indians to remain loyal to those who financed their hunt. Children born of these unions to traders came to be significant and useful group in the fur trade. Each hunting band had its own hunting ground, a territory on the wildlife of which it could live by hunting, aided with such other food as could be grown or gathered. Hunting grounds were changed by war, epidemic disease such as smallpox, or by deliberate migration such as that of the Ojibwa from north of Lake Huron westward to the Lake of the Woods and the Red River country. After the trading posts of the Montreal-based North West Company had been in business at Red River for 30 years the company merged with the Hudson's Bay Company which was based in London, England, and had been operating through Hudson's Bay since 1670. The bitter rivalry bet ween the two companies had left its mark on most of the French and Metis. Some were rehired by the Hudson's Bay Company, but most of them elected to become independent hunters, trappers and traders. A large number of Metis families with their parents settled in the newly formed Red River Colony under Hudson's Bay rule. The colony had been planned as an agricultural settlement, but there was disaster and failure from floods, grasshopper plagues, etc., and to keep from starving the whole colony was forced to rely on the buffalo hunters, many of whom had remained at Pembina after the mission and trading post were abandoned in 1823. The first mission and school had been established at Pembina in 1818 under Hudson's Bay control, with missionaries being secured from Quebec for the Catholic population. But no sooner was the mission and school built it was found by a United States ordered survey to be one mile south of the Canadian boundary, so the mission was ordered moved north also to the various settlements along the Red and Assiniboine rivers: Grant Town, White Horse Plains, Portage LaPrairie, St. Boniface, the main Red River Settlement (now Winnipeg), and to the Saulteau Village and the Swampy Cree Village. Father Belcourt came to these settlements as a missionary in 1831 from Quebec, building a church, starting a mission school, and trying to promote an agricultural colony among the Indians. During a period of 17 years he also compiled a dictionary and grammar and became proficient in the Ojibwa language. Most of the first ancestors of the Turtle Mountain Metis were baptised and married during the 1820s and 1830s. A listing of the men who were married by the Red River missionaries during this period has been published; only a half dozen of the men returned East. Most lived and died with their families at Red River and in the Northwest. Many of the settlers in the colony continued to engage in the fur trade which was dominated by the Hudson's Bay Company. They could not buy supplies from the Company store unless they traded their furs to the Company. The Company controlled the shipment of furs and the supply of food and trade goods. Many wished to sell to American traders for a better price but were refused supplies if they did so. By the 1840s the problem of free trade had become acute. Fur traders Henry Hastings Sibley and Norman W. Kittson were building up a growing trade between the Red River settlements and the Mendota-St. Paul community. Kittson traded with the Chippewas and Metis free traders north and south of the boundary. The Red River cart trains took the furs to St. Paul and returned with supplies needed by the settlers. Other trading posts opened south of the border, thus permitting resettlement of the people who had moved north. Kittson made a determined effort to take the trade of the region away from the Hudson's Bay Company. He placed outposts along the boundary: to the west in the Turtle Mountians and on the 530 Scanned with a Zeutschel Zeta book scanner at 300 dpi. Edited with Multi-Page TIFF Editor.
|
|---|