Fort Garry and the Fur Trade

In 1810, Scottish philanthropist Thomas Douglas, the 5th Earl of Selkirk received a 116,000-square mile land grant from the Hudson's Bay Company, a British fur trading company. With this grant, Lord Selkirk founded the Red River Settlement in 1811. This colony was located in the Red and Assiniboine river valleys, in modern-day Manitoba. In return for the land grant, Selkirk promised to employ settlers for the Hudson's Bay Company in order to establish agriculture within the settlement.[1] The Native peoples who inhabited the area near the Red River Colony included the Ojibwe and the Métis, who were of Indigenous and French ancestry. Like other settlements in Canada and in the United States, the Red River colonists traded with the Indigenous communities. These communities interacted with European traders and intermarriage between European men and Native women were becoming more common. Kinship relied on marriage in order to form alliances and gain more status. Since many Indigenous tribes at the time were matrilineal, women had some authority over how and when furs were traded. They had connections to other kin groups and so their husbands were reliant on them for trading furs.[2]

Within the settlement, the children of fur trade families were either Indigenous, European (primarily English and French), or a mixture of both. The children were to grow up and inherit their parents’ connections to the Hudson’s Bay Company and the fur trade overall. Children of mixed descent were considered an “integral part of the community”. This was probably due to their parents having kinship connections to other tribes and therefore having some influence over the trade. Originally, the Indigenous peoples who moved to Red River were buffalo hunters from the plains. The Hudson’s Bay company noticed this and began to use this knowledge to its advantage. In addition to the furs the Hudson’s Bay Company was already trading, they began to trade buffalo hides obtained from the Métis.[3] 

The Hudson's Bay Company was in a trade rivalry with the North West Company, causing many desertions by Scottish and Irish colonists. The Seven Oaks Massacre of 1816 was the climax of the rivalry between the two fur trading companies and destroyed the Red River Settlement, forcing the surviving settlers to flee. In 1817, Selkirk reestablished the colony.[4]

The North West Company disbanded after it merged with the Hudson's Bay Company in 1821. In 1822, Fort Garry was built and served as a fur trade fort within the colony. After a flood destroyed the fort in 1826, it was rebuilt in the 1830s.

In the 1860s, a group of Métis led by Louis Riel took over Fort Garry during the Red River Rebellion. Representatives from the colony, called the Legislative Assembly of Assiniboine, decided to join the Canadian Confederation and on July 15, 1870, the Red River Colony joined the province of Manitoba.

In the 1880s, Fort Garry was slowly demolished leaving only the northern gate which still stands today. In the 1890s, the gate was given a parcel of land and declared a public park where guests can visit and learn about the fort and the settlement it once guarded.[5]

Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Red River Settlement." Encyclopedia Britannica, April 7, 2014. https://www.britannica.com/place/Red-River-Settlement

Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. "North West Company." Encyclopedia Britannica, January 16, 2018. https://www.britannica.com/topic/North-West-Company 

Chetlain, Augustuse Louis. The Red River Colony. Chicago, IL: Press of Rogerson & Stockton, 1893. 

Matheson Henderson, Anne. “The Lord Selkirk Settlement at Red River, Part 1.” Manitoba Pageant: The Lord Selkirk Settlement at Red River, Part 1. Manitoba Historical Society, n.d. http://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/pageant/13/selkirksettlement1.shtml

Footnotes:

1. Carter, George E. "Lord Selkirk and the Red River Colony." Montana: The Magazine of Western History 18, no. 1 (1968): 60-69. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4517222.
2. Sleeper-Smith, Susan. Presidential Address: Eighteenth-Century Indian Trading Villages in the Wabash River Valley. Ethnohistory 1 July 2018; 65 (3): 349–371. https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-4451338
3. Ross, Alexander. The Red River Settlement: Its Rise, Progress, and Present State: With Some Account of the Native Races and Its General History, to the Present Day. United Kingdom: Smith, Elder and Company, 1856.
4. Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Seven Oaks Massacre." Encyclopedia Britannica, December 5, 2017. https://www.britannica.com/event/Seven-Oaks-Massacre
5. “Upper Fort Garry.” n.d. Upperfortgarry.com. http://www.upperfortgarry.com/.