The Company of Adventurers

A comprehensive, ancient and modern history of the Hudson’s Bay Company has yet to be written. It will probably be the work of many minds, each dealing with different aspects of its vast and varied operations, and tinged with the personality and prejudices of each writer. In the Dominion of the Fur Trade, extending far beyond the far-flung frontiers of the present Dominion of Canada, the fur traders were the pioneers of the British Empire, and, if that Empire to-day does not include all the regions they explored and exploited in the grand old days of yore, the glory of their deeds of daring should not be forgotten, nor should it be diminished, because the British Government and the Company’s directors from time to time suffered the North-Western States, Oregon and California and the interior of Alaska, to fall into the hands of American rivals.In a vast territory where history was made at every important fur-trading post, by men who seldom attempted to leave written records which have been allowed to see the light of day in print, it is to-day a task of as great difficulty to exhume the buried remains of the human and personal history of individual pioneers as it is to find in the buried cities of the ancient Orient the material by which men of science of the present day try to interpret the past and depict it. True, many, in fact a surprisingly great number of books have been written by eminent explorers of the highest merits, as well as many by very able authors as the result of their studies of books and documents to which they had access—often denied the public; but these latter writers are all more or less special pleaders for views, more or less distorted by race and religion, and other circumstances over which they had as little control.