Fur Trade Footsteps: Photo Gallery

I covered my ears against the roar of the float plane that flew low over the swampy ground of the Hudson Bay Lowlands, still reeling from a day and a half of touring some of the most significant sites of Canada’s fur trade history.

Little did I know that I was about to have another amazing adventure that was definitely not on our travel itinerary. It was late August, and I was on my way to visit one of the most remote National Historic Sites in Canada — York Factory. The August 2013 visit was to be the climax of the Manitoba Historical Fur Trade Tour, organized by Winnipeg-based Heartland International Travel Tours.

The whirlwind journey first brought us to Norway House, a large Cree reserve on the north shore of Lake Winnipeg. During the nineteenth century it was the crossroads of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s inland fur transportation network.

There to greet us at the tiny airport was David Williamson, a local educator who doubles as an enthusiastic tour guide. He took us to the old HBC jail and regaled us with a story about its first prisoner, a man named John Frog who was locked up for bigamy.

“He was held for a while, but in the spring he had to be released because he was the only one who knew the portage route back to Moose Lake,” Williamson said, chuckling at the casual attitude of fur trade-era justice.

Norway House still carries vestiges of its past through an annual York boat race that takes place there every August. York boats served as the backbone of a transport system that stretched from Upper Fort Garry in present-day Winnipeg to York Factory, a distance of 1,200 kilometres.

To get a sense of what the work of a York boat man was like, our travel party of ten was put to work on the oars of a modern York boat. Traditionally, the sturdy craft were made of spruce and from a design inspired by Viking long ships. They are incredibly heavy to row — never mind to carry over portages.

Luckily for us, today’s boats are made of aluminum. Still, the wooden oars — imagine pulling seven-metre-long two-by-fours through the waves — took some getting used to. Having worked up our appetites, we soon found ourselves in the backyard of local resident Gertrude Meikle’s palatial log home, enjoying bannock and pan-fried pickerel cooked over an open fire.

Our next stop was the Hudson Bay coastal community of Churchill, where Parks Canada interpreter Duane Collins met us for an evening presentation while costumed as explorer and fur trader Samuel Hearne. Collins describes Hearne as “probably one of the greatest explorers of the Hudson’s Bay Company of the eighteenth century.”

Thanks to Collins’ presentation, when we went up to to Sloop Cove near Fort Prince of Wales the next day and saw Hearne’s signature carved into the rocks, as well as the date, “July 1, 1767” — etched there exactly one hundred years before Confederation — I felt like we were looking at the beautiful calligraphy of a man we know well.

Like the traders and explorers who came before us, we saw pods of beluga whales playing in the estuary of the Churchill River, plus a few polar bears lounging on the pebbly beach.

It is starkly beautiful, yet it’s hard to imagine how the Hudson’s Bay Company could have set up shop in this unforgiving terrain, where ice chokes the harbour most of the year, extreme cold roars in from the Arctic, and swarms of biting insects descend like a plague during the short summer. “York Fort [Factory] is bad but this is ten times worse,” said the first HBC Governor, James Knight, who established Fort Prince of Wales in 1717.

York Factory was next on our agenda. At its height, York Factory was the Hudson’s Bay Company’s busiest post — a thriving nineteenth century town with about fifty buildings, 1,400 residents, and various livestock, such as cows, chickens, and horses. Self-sufficient enough to have its own blacksmiths, coopers, tailors, and shipwrights, it was also civilized enough to have shops selling ladies hats and fine perfumes.

Its tastefully appointed houses were painted pale yellow, a pleasing effect that caused one chief factor’s wife to describe York Factory as “beautiful.”

It was hard to picture all that as our plane — a single-engine Beaver — approached the ghostly site on the banks of the Hayes River, a few kilometres from where the river flows into Hudson Bay. All that remains today of the original complex is the depot — a large white wooden building that stands out dramatically from the flat expanse of muskeg that surrounds it.

The site’s only residents, two Parks Canada maintenance staff who are there for a few months in the summer, were ready to greet us as we disembarked. Both were armed with shotguns — standard issue for parks staff in the North — as protection against polar bears. Walking past an old overturned York boat, we were shown a depression made in the grass — evidence of where a bear had taken a nap.

Expecting to be at the site for only a few hours, we made a quick tour. First on the agenda was the cemetery. One grave marker had a profound significance to four members of our travel party. Nelson and Sharon Hogg of Medicine Hat, Alberta, and sisters Sally Evans and Janis Freer of the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia all trace their ancestry back to William Sinclair, a former chief factor at York Factory.

Described in 1797 as “a good trader, a steady man, and beloved by the Natives” — Sinclair married a Cree woman named Nahoway, and they together raised a family.

“It’s a little girl’s dream come true,” said Evans as she gazed in wonder at Sinclair’s memorial stone. She explained that she and her sisters had grown up hearing stories about their great-great-great-grandparents.

Next we toured the depot, room after room filled with artifacts that have been uncovered by archaeologists over the years. Even more entrancing was the graffiti burned into the wooden walls — names written in beautiful script, dates going back to the 1700s, and pictures of farm animals. My travelling companions were visibly moved at being able to walk in the footsteps of their ancestors.

And, I suspect, they would have been happy to stay just a little bit longer.

If that was their wish, it came true. During our visit, a thick fog descended on the site, reducing visibility by such an extent that our float plane could not bring us back that day. Suddenly, we all appreciated just how remote our location was and how tricky it was to get in and out of.

Float planes can only land in daylight, in good weather, with clear visibility, and then only in the few hours of the day when the tide is high. Even though all our travel plans were thrown into disarray, we cheerfully resigned ourselves to staying the night.

We were kindly billeted in the Parks Canada staff house, where maintenance employees Mike Hawkins and Darrell Popowich made us dinner. Popowich entertained us with photos of a polar bear that had woken him up in the middle of the night, snorting through his bedroom window.

It became even more of a party when our only neighbours — five people from an exploration group who were camped in a nearby trailer — popped in for a visit and shared with us their stories of looking for shipwrecks.

Later, as I dropped off to sleep on a mattress on the floor, I reflected on how, even with the comforts of an electrical generator and an Internet connection, there was still a strong sense of being a very small group of people surrounded by a vast expanse of wilderness.

The busy trading centre that was once here was now reduced to one silent building filled with ghosts. In several decades it too is likely to be swallowed up by nature as the wide river relentlessly eats away at its banks. It was humbling to think that something so big and so significant in the scheme of human endeavour could be so erased by the advance of time.