April 19, 2020
I hired on with the Hudson's Bay Company Northern Stores Department in
Edmonton in July, 1986. Two plane rides later, I was in Fort Simpson, Northwest
Territories, 1 200 km to the north. One relative I left behind called it
"Fort Nowhere."
I began 13 months of raw fur buying, running in-store post offices and banks, and
selling a range of items that included food, clothes, housewares, televisions, snowmobiles,
motors for boats, and guns and bullets. I literally sold guns to Indians. The
four communities I spent that year in were from 60-95% Indigenous, with
300-1100 people in each one.
Every account ledger page I used in 1986 had the preface "316." The 1987 ones
had the preface "317." That stood for the number of years since the first ship
of supplies came from England to Rupert's Land. King Charles II gave that Indigenous
land, not his to give, to the new Hudson's Bay Company on May 2, 1670.
That date is inscribed on more than one Hudson's Bay Company
department store building in Western Canada, including Winnipeg (national
headquarters), Edmonton, Vancouver, and Victoria.
I worked in Forts Simpson, Providence, Resolution, and Liard. I read newspapers
under the midnight summer sun. I swam in the Mackenzie River. I cross-country
skied in the wilderness beside the Mackenzie and Slave Rivers. I haggled
for the fresh pelts of beavers, muskrats, mink, martens, foxes, wolves,
weasels, squirrels, lynxes, and one otter, which somehow got hundreds of kilometres
up the Mackenzie River from the river's Arctic Ocean delta. I still have a lynx
foot that I found in my fur bin, a wooden box about the size of a coffin, when
I emptied the bin's furs into burlap bags, a weekly duty, for shipping south to the
Edmonton fur auction. A leg-hold trap, standard then and illegal now, loosened the
lynx's foot enough for it to fall off in my bin.
The greasy pile of a couple hundred muskrat pelts I found upstairs when I ran the Fort
Resolution Bay, during its manager's week long trip to Edmonton meetings, had a
heavy, oily stink that made me feel as if I was inside a muskrat in the nearby
Slave River Delta at Great Slave Lake. "Send those on the next truck to Edmonton,
would ya?" Kevin asked before he left. With relief I did. I don't think there are
many fur auctions nowadays, although I met a trapper at a Christmas, 2019 market
in Williams Lake. I can't find the photos I took of him or his furs, but below is a link to his trapping school and a book I bought from him.
The 1920s-era Fort Providence staff house I spent the 1986-87 winter in had an oil
barrel for a heater stove, lit by turning on the spigot from the adjacent oil tank and
throwing a burning piece of paper into the stove. Every couple months, the Fort
Providence village authorities sent a truck to fill that tank. Every week they
sent a truck to fill the fibreglass tank inside the house for water.
I filled my wringer washer by bucket from the kitchen sink, and drained it into a
metal garbage can I dragged outside to dump in the years of tangled grass that
surrounded the house, 100 metres from the Mackenzie River. I strung a clothesline
from one corner of the outside of the house to the adjacent, protruding corner of the
glassed-in porch. This house had been the store from the 1920s-60s. When I
visited Fort Providence in August, 2005, another "Bay Boy" lived in that house,
by then renovated, including its heating and plumbing. I have a CBC Radio Yellowknife
cassette of interviews with Bay oldtimers, many from Scotland. My Edmonton boss
was from Scotland.
The Bay deducted about $130/month from my $800-$1 200 salary for housing and
food. I could eat what I liked from the store, whose wholesale prices I entered in
a store journal kept for staff; there was no monetary limit to staff food, but even
though I stocked the store, it was too small to have much diversity of food. I
had to stock the "Core List" of Bay items, including Pilot Biscuits, which I like to
this day. I have a package in my cupboard now. They're made in St. John's,
Newfoundland, for the seafaring crowd. See the pilot biscuit photo below.
The above introduces the following news from the Canadian National Historical
Society, whose emails I get a couple times per month. The theme of this news
is the 350th anniversary of The Bay, one of the world's oldest firms.
The website for this is canadahistory.ca. April 6, 2020 is the date of the stories
that came in my email. I couldn't attach that story of others to this email.
