The HBC Brigades
Culture, Conflict and Perilous Journeys of the Fur Trade
A lively recounting of the tough men and heroic but overworked packhorses who broke open BC to the big business of the 19th century fur trade. Facing a grueling thousand-mile trail, the brigades of the Hudson Bay Company (HBC) pushed onward over mountains and through ferocious river crossings to reach the isolated fur-trading posts. But it wasn’ t just the landscape the brigades faced, as First Nations people struggled with the desire to resist, or assist, the fur company’ s attempts to build their brigade trails over the Aboriginal trails that led between Indigenous communities, which surrounded the trading posts. Nancy Marguerite Anderson recounts how the devastating Cayuse War of 1847, forced the HBC men over a newly-explored overland trail to Fort Langley. The journey was a disaster-in-waiting.
Nancy Marguerite Anderson is an Indigenous writer descended from three generations of fur traders who worked on the west side of the Rocky Mountains before 1858. Because of her Scottish ancestors’ involvement with the York Factory Express and the HBC Brigades on the Pacific Slopes, she has (to her surprise) become a transportation historian of sorts, writing about the journeys that the Hudson's Bay Company men made both east and west of the Rocky Mountains. nancymargueriteanderson.com ,
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