The HBC Brigades
Culture, Conflict and Perilous Journeys of the Fur Trade
A lively recounting of the men who faced a gruelling thousand-mile journey and First Nations people who struggled with the desire to resist, or assist, the fur company’ s attempts to build their brigade trails.
The brigades of the Hudson Bay Company pushed onward over mountains and through ferocious river crossings with their heavily laden packhorse trains to reach the isolated fur-trading posts. This book explores history west of the Rockies and tells the stories of the cultures, conflicts, and cooperation that existed between the many different peoples throughout what eventually became British Columbia and the American Pacific Northwest in the years before the invasion of the American gold miners broke everything wide open in summer 1858.
From the author of The York Factory Express: Fort Vancouver to Hudson Bay, 1826-1849
Nancy Marguerite Anderson is Mé tis, and an accepted member of Mé tis Nation British Columbia. She is descended from a North West Company voyageur known to have lived and worked in Red River District for many years, who crossed the Rocky Mountains with explorer David Thompson, and whose daughter married a Scottish gentleman. Because of her Scottish ancestors’ involvement with the HBC Brigades on the Pacific Slopes, she has (to her surprise) become a transportation historian of sorts, writing about the journeys of the Hudson’ s Bay Company men east and west of the Rocky Mountains.
