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January 1991
- In January 1991, the Hudson's Bay Company announced it was exiting the fur business. It was big news when the Hudson's Bay Company decided to leave the fur business behind 30 years ago. After all, the historic company had been formed as a fur-trading business three centuries earlier.
www.cbc.ca/archives/when-the-hudson-s-bay-company-said-farewell-to-furs-in-1991-1.4998671
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HBC is no longer involved in the fur trade and while fur is still trapped – this is known as wild fur – the majority of fur is now ranched. The fur trade directly employs over 70,000 Canadians as well as adding over $750 million to the Canadian economy. There are more pelts sold today than in the early days of the HBC.
Mar 23, 2023 · Hudson’s Bay, a retailer with deep roots in fur, has stopped selling animal fur products. The Toronto-based Hudson’s Bay Company’s entire portfolio is now fur-free.
- Fishing, Furs and Christianity: Early Euro-Indigenous Relations
- French Control and French Profits
- War and Rivalry: France, England and Indigenous Peoples
- Voyageurs
- Westward Expansion
- Hudson's Bay Company and Other English Traders
- Rise of The North West Company
- Hudson’s Bay Company Triumphs
- Simpson Consolidates The HBC’s Fur Trade Empire
- Challenge of Settlement
The fur trade began as an adjunct to the fishing industry. Early in the 16th century, fishermen from northwest Europe were taking rich catches of cod on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland and in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Drying their fish onshore took several weeks. During that time, good relations had to be maintained with Indigenous people, who wer...
The main staple of the trade was still beaver pelts for the hat industry. The Ministry of Marine, responsible for colonial affairs, leased three overseas enterprises — the West Indies plantation trade, the African slave trade, and the marketing of Canadian beaver and moose hides — to the newly formed Compagnie des Indes occidentales. In reality, it...
The order to abandon the Western trading posts (to slow the migration of men into the beaver trade, and to reduce the glut of pelts) was given while England and France were at war. The Canadians were engaged in a desperate struggle with the English colonies and their Haudenosaunee allies. (See also: Beaver Wars.) The governor and intendant (French ...
In 1715, it was discovered that rodents and insects had consumed the glut of beaver fur in French warehouses. The market immediately revived. As an item on the balance sheet of French external trade, furs were minuscule. Their share was also shrinking proportionately as trade in tropical produce and manufactured goods increased. However, the fur tr...
Between 1715 and the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), the fur trade expanded greatly and served a variety of purposes — economic, political and scientific. Educated Frenchmen were keenly interested in scientific inquiry. Government members, eager to discover the extent of North America, wished a Frenchman to be the first to find an overland route to the...
Throughout this period, there was keen competition between the French Canadian traders and the HBC. The Canadians took the lion’s share of the trade. They had many advantages: they controlled the main waterways throughout the West; they had a sure supply of the birch bark needed for canoes (something the Anglo-Americans and the HBC men both lacked)...
At the time of the conquest of New France, over the period 1759–60, two systems dominated the commercial fur trade of the northern half of the continent: the St. Lawrence- Great Lakes system, based in Montreal and extending to the upper reaches of the Mississippi River and its major northern tributaries, as well as to the prairies and the southern ...
It was the revitalization of the HBC beginning in 1810 that ultimately defeated the NWC. That year, the Earl of Selkirkdecided to establish a settlement in HBC territory. He purchased sufficient stock to place four friends on the HBC’s seven-man governing committee. These men, new to the company, emphasized efficiency in the trading process to redu...
Commercial agreements between the two separate companies and the support given by government legislation and proclamation could not hide the NWC’s defeat. The victorious HBC once again sought to increase its efficiency. Under the direction of Governor George Simpson, known as the “Little Emperor,” the HBC achieved undreamed-of profits. But such pro...
West of the Rocky Mountains, American settlers succeeded where their predecessors, the mountain men and the ships’ captains, had failed. As a result of the Oregon Treaty of 1846, the HBC retreated north of the 49th parallel of latitude. To the east, at the Red River colony, the HBC met the challenge of free traders by charging Pierre-Guillaume Saye...
Apr 2, 2009 · The Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), chartered 2 May 1670, is the oldest incorporated joint-stock merchandising company in the English -speaking world. HBC was a fur trading business for most of its history, a past that is entwined with the colonization of British North America and the development of Canada.
Jan 31, 2017 · One of the oldest continuous companies in the world is the Hudson’s Bay Company, and its oldest tradition is the fur trade. That tradition ended on January 30, 1991. Founded in 1670, it...
Jan 15, 2020 · The British wanted to make money from the fur trade, too. They created the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) in 1670. The HBC received control of Rupert’s Land. This was a vast area in the heart of the continent. Like the French, the HBC and other British fur traders gave goods to Indigenous people in exchange for beaver pelts.
