Reading Room · The fur-trade world

The Hudson's Bay Company and the World That Made a Man Like Enos

When The Renegade Enos opens, its title character is wearing a Hudson's Bay blanket coat with the Company's stripes running across it. It is a small detail carrying a whole history. The coat marks Enos as a man made by the fur trade, the multilingual and multiethnic economy that held the Pacific Northwest together before the United States arrived to hold it together a different way.

For most of the first half of the nineteenth century, the country that would later be cut into Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and the interior beyond them was not organized by any government that would have been recognized in Washington or London. It was organized by a fur company. Understanding the world that company built, and the class of mobile go-betweens it produced, is most of what it takes to understand where a figure like Enos came from, why the conquest had a use for him, and why it later had a rope.

The Company that governed by trade

The Hudson's Bay Company was old before it ever reached the Pacific slope. Chartered in London in 1670, it had spent a century and a half pushing its posts west from the shores of Hudson Bay. In 1821 it absorbed its chief rival, the Montreal-based North West Company, and inherited the routes and the men who had already reached the western ocean. From then on a single firm held a working monopoly over the fur trade of a vast and loosely bounded region the Company called the Columbia District.

Its capital in the West was Fort Vancouver, built on the north bank of the Columbia River in the mid-1820s under John McLoughlin, the Company's chief factor for the district. From Fort Vancouver the Company sent out its brigades, long overland and river expeditions that trapped, traded, and carried furs across enormous distances. The Snake Country brigades, led by men like Peter Skene Ogden and John Work, pushed south and east into what is now Idaho, Nevada, Utah, and northern California, deliberately trapping the streams bare to discourage American trappers from following. The York Factory Express ran the other way, a hard annual courier and supply route linking the Columbia back to the Company's posts on Hudson Bay. This was a governing structure in everything but name. It set prices, kept order among its own, made agreements in fact if not in law, and reached into Native villages across half a continent.

The people who ran the brigades

The Company was British and its ledgers were kept in English, but the men who did the actual work of the trade were not, for the most part, Englishmen. The backbone of the brigades was the French-Canadian voyageur, the canoe-man and packer whose dialect, songs, and Catholic feast days set the rhythm of the posts. Alongside them worked Iroquois trappers, many of them Mohawk (Kanien'kehá:ka) from Kahnawake, near Montreal, recruited generations earlier into the eastern trade and carried west with it. Iroquois freemen trapped the Snake Country in numbers, and some of them left the brigades to live among the Native nations of the interior, marrying in and leaving descendants whose names still sit on the land.

Delaware men, the Lenape who had been driven west from their own homelands, were prized across the whole western trade as hunters, trappers, and guides, and later as scouts for the American expeditions that came after. Native hunters from the local nations supplied much of the fur and most of the food. Native Hawaiians, whom the Company called Kanakas, worked the posts and the boats. Binding the whole population together were the Indigenous and mixed-descent women who married traders, ran households, dressed the furs, and served as the first interpreters between their husbands and their own peoples. Their children grew up between languages as a matter of course.

The go-betweens

A trade run by so many peoples at once could not function without translation, and so it produced, as a matter of necessity, a whole class of go-betweens. These were men, and sometimes women, who could move between languages and between peoples, who knew the trails and the protocols, who could carry a message into a village and bring back an answer that both sides could act on. Some were formal interpreters on the Company's books. Many more were simply useful, guides and hunters and packers who happened to speak three or four tongues and to be trusted, provisionally, on more than one side of a negotiation.

Enos belongs to that class. Whatever the exact facts of his birth, and the record leaves them deliberately blurred, he was a product of this world, a man whose value lay in his ability to cross the lines that other men could not. In the fur-trade order such a man had a clear place and a steady use. He was the hinge the whole machine turned on, and the machine had reason to keep him whole.

The coat and its stripes

Which brings the story back to the coat. The Hudson's Bay point blanket was one of the Company's staple trade goods, a thick wool blanket with short black lines, called points, woven along one edge to mark the blanket's size, and with it its price in beaver pelts. The Company also sold a striped version, bands of green, red, yellow, and indigo laid across a cream ground, and across the North the wool was cut and sewn into the capote, the hooded blanket coat that became the working garment of the trade.

To wear a Company blanket coat was to wear a passport of sorts. It said that a man belonged to the fur-trade world, that he moved under the Company's long reach, that he was a man of the trade, older and more mobile than the settlers and soldiers who were starting to arrive. When the novel dresses Enos in that coat with the stripes still showing, it is placing him precisely. He is a man of the brigades and the interpreters, of the posts and the trails, at the exact moment when the world that issued the coat is about to be taken apart.

When the border came down

The taking apart came quickly. Through the early 1840s American settlers rolled west over the Oregon Trail in growing numbers, and they came to farm and to stay, which the fur trade had never required of anyone. They set up a provisional government. In 1846 Britain and the United States settled their long argument over the country by drawing the boundary at the forty-ninth parallel, and at a stroke the heart of the old Columbia District fell on the American side of the line. The Hudson's Bay Company began pulling its operations north toward Fort Victoria on Vancouver Island, which it had already built as a hedge. Two years later the region south of the line became Oregon Territory, with American courts, American land law, and American soldiers.

The fur-trade order did not survive that change. An economy built on furs, mobility, and cross-cultural dependence was replaced by one built on land, settlement, and a hard line between white and Native. The go-betweens who had been the most valuable men in the old world became the most exposed men in the new one. Their usefulness had rested on belonging to several sides at once. The conquest recognized only two, and it wanted to know which one a man was on.

Enos, useful to everyone and trusted by no one

This is the ground the novel stands on. Enos is a man of the fur-trade world walking into the American one, still wearing its coat. The skills that had made him valuable, his languages, his knowledge of the country, his ability to pass between peoples, were exactly the skills the conquest needed from a guide and an interpreter. So it hired him. Frémont's expedition used him. The settlers and soldiers who followed used him. He was useful to everyone who needed to reach across the lines they themselves had drawn.

He was also trusted by no one. A man who belongs to several peoples belongs fully to none, and in a world that had reduced belonging to a single choice between conqueror and conquered, that made him a convenient thing to blame. When Enos was hanged at Port Orford, he was hanged as a figure the frontier had already decided it could do without, a leftover from an order it had displaced. The coat with the Company's stripes is the mark of everything he had been before the country changed the terms. The novel keeps him in it because the coat tells a truth the record works to bury, that Enos came out of a whole and functioning world, and that the conquest used what that world had made and then discarded the man who carried it.

The Renegade Enos: Witness to the American West is a novel by H.L. Delaney, forthcoming from Basalt Sea Press, the conquest of the West at the eye level of the man it used and discarded. More documented history sits behind the book at The History Behind the Novel, and the Native scouts who carried the fur-trade world into the American expeditions are covered in The Delaware Scouts Who Rode With Frémont. Get launch news →

Sources & further reading

• Richard Somerset Mackie, Trading Beyond the Mountains: The British Fur Trade on the Pacific, 1793–1843 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997). The fullest account of the Hudson's Bay Company on the Pacific slope, its brigade system, and the reach of Fort Vancouver.
• Jean Barman, French Canadians, Furs, and Indigenous Women in the Making of the Pacific Northwest (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014). On the voyageurs, their Indigenous wives, and the mixed-descent families who made up the working population of the trade.
• Trudy Nicks, "The Iroquois and the Fur Trade in Western Canada," in Old Trails and New Directions: Papers of the Third North American Fur Trade Conference, ed. Carol M. Judd and Arthur J. Ray (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980). On the Iroquois trappers who carried the trade west and settled in the mountains.
• John S. Galbraith, The Hudson's Bay Company as an Imperial Factor, 1821–1869 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957). On how the Company governed by trade before American sovereignty reached the Columbia.
• "Hudson's Bay point blanket," Wikipedia. On the striped trade blanket and the capote coat made from it.