Transportation And Transformation The Hudson's Bay Company, 1857-1885

• Main Author: den Otter, A. A.
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln 1983
• Subjects: Other International and Area Studies; Hudson Bay; Canada; Hudson
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/1720; https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/greatplainsquarterly/article/2719/viewcontent/Otter.pdf

Transportation was a prime consideration in the business policies of the Hudson's Bay Company from its inception. Although the company legally enjoyed the position of monopoly by virtue of the Royal Charter of 1670, which granted to the Hudson's Bay Company the Canadian territory called Rupert's Land, this privilege had to be defended from commercial intruders. From the earliest days the company developed its own transportation network in order to maintain a competitive edge over its opponents. During its first century, when business ventured hardly beyond the shores of the Hudson Bay, the company perfected its transatlantic shipping. Later, when competitors from Montreal moved into the western interior, the Hudson's Bay Company countered by opening several inland rivers, developing a unique wooden craft, the Yorkboat, and constructing rollered passage ways around several rapids. The efficiency of its transportation system enabled the company to defeat all challengers, including the Montreal traders, who were absorbed in 1821. Starving the competition by slashing prices, trading liquor, and deploying its best servants to critical areas were other tactics the company employed to preserve its fur empire. The principal means by which the Hudson's Bay Company defended its trade monopoly, nevertheless, was to maintain an efficient transportation system into Rupert's Land. By the 1850s the company's policy of controlling access to its fur preserve faced an entirely new and potentially fatal challenge. Settlement, with technology based on an expanding agricultural-industrial economy, was rapidly approaching the undeveloped plains. The economic activities of this encroaching civilization foretold death for the fur trade. Several fur empires in other parts of North America had already yielded to the relentless advance of settlement; company officials knew that theirs would also eventually succumb. As early as 1849 Peter Skene Ogden, the chief factor in Oregon, wrote George Simpson, the resident governor of the Hudson's ...