History
The untold story of the Hudson’s Bay Company
A look back at the early years of the 350-year-old institution that once claimed a vast portion of the globe
- 4473 words
- 18 minutes
History
In a 1938 radio recording, Charles Camsell, the founding president of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, details what it was like growing up at an HBC fur trading post
What was it like to live in a remote Hudson’s Bay trading post in the 1880s in Canada’s north?
In this bonus episode of the Explore series marking the 350th anniversary of the Hudson’s Bay Company, we hear a rare, first-person audio account of life at Fort Simpson in the Northwest Territories. The storyteller is Charles Camsell, founding president of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, talking about his childhood as the son of an HBC fur trader, in an old Canadian radio recording taped in 1938. Camsell recalls working trap lines, paddling with voyageurs, watching the local bishop amputate a man’s leg with a knife and saw, and the general ebb and flow of life at one of the remotest HBC posts.
Camsell was born in 1876 in the Northwest Territories, at the HBC trading post at Fort Liard. He grew up some 300 kilometres away, at Fort Simpson, where his father Julian Camsell was the HBC Chief Factor for the MacKenzie district, administering an area about the size of western Europe. Charles went on to become one of Canada’s leading northern explorers, mapping hundreds of thousands of square kilometres for the Geological Survey of Canada in the early 1900s, most of it done by canoe.
In 2018, Camsell’s great-grandson, David McGuffin — also the host of our Explore podcast — retraced his journey through the Peel watershed of the Yukon on an RCGS-funded expedition.
History
A look back at the early years of the 350-year-old institution that once claimed a vast portion of the globe
History
In this special bonus episode of Explore, canoe expert James Raffan introduces listeners to HBC Governor George Simpson and his unique style of “management by canoe”
History
As a way of illustrating the importance of company fur traders to the 100-year-old HBC collection, curator Amelia Fay pulls out three items donated by Julian Camsell, HBC Chief Factor for the MacKenzie District in Canada’s Arctic
Exploration
We came to retrace an ancestor’s 1905 map-making expedition of the Peel River watershed. We left with a new-found appreciation of what this ancient land means to the people who live there.