Author Description

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the North West and Hudson’s Bay companies extended their operations west beyond the Rocky Mountains, constructing forts and farms throughout the western Cordillera and on the Pacific Coast. There they encountered a mild and forgiving climate, abundant natural resources, year-round ocean-going transport, and Indigenous societies that provided local sources of knowledge, trade, and labour. Trading Beyond the Mountains charts what fur traders called the "extension of the trade" to these new western regions between 1793 and the establishment of Fort Victoria in 1843. On the lower Columbia and lower Fraser rivers, and on Puget Sound, conditions were ideal for fur trade companies to move "beyond the mere trade in peltries": relying on Indigenous trade and labour they branched out into farming, fishing, and logging, bringing economic diversification to this westernmost fur trade district and transforming it into a dynamic and distinctive regional economy. By 1843, the Hudson’s Bay Company had opened agencies in Oahu (Hawaii), Sitka (Russian America), and Yerba Buena (California) to sell Pacific coast products including salmon, lumber, and flour. Most such exports depended on Indigenous work or trade. Richard Somerset Mackie shows how economic relations between fur traders and Indigenous people consisted of countless small, physical, and mundane acts of trade – for provisions, for pelts, and for commodities destined for export to new Pacific markets. These small acts of trade came to dominate relations between Indigenous people and resident employees of the Northwest and Hudson’s Bay companies.